When I first proposed a plan for what we’re now calling the Community Tools & Platforms initiative, there were a lot of issues that we needed to solve in the Mozilla community. Contributors couldn’t easily find ways to get involved in our community. The organization and community didn’t know who or how many Mozillians were in our community and what they did within it. Though, as we got deeper into analyzing the situation, it was worse than that. We simply couldn’t get bootstrapped into determining how to set strategy. The priorities were fuzzy. A few times the priority was contributor-focused to allow social networks to be created; other times an all-in-one Community CRM solution. Yet, none of these were ever finalized; our Community Managers were left with little help build their programs. In my opinion, the biggest problem to solve for a an initial Phonebook release was to simply just get bootstrapped.
A product goal like getting to a “.1″ or prototype stage is generally an odd one; especially for those with such an extensive history. You can’t really call it a product because it’s in such an infant stage of what it will become. Time and communication are far from perfect. Very useful features need to be ruthlessly cut and the “product” ends up not as useful as users expect it to be.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubt in my mind that the community phonebook helped Mozilla, as an organization, get a lot of necessary data about our community (specifically our core and active contributors). On the other hand, we ended up delivering a webapp that was rather confusing to a large set out of userbase (e.g. non-vouched users), lacked features and was rather buggy. We’re getting past the haze now and look to fix a lot of these issues very soon and I’m freaking excited about its prospects of what we have planned. Mozillians are going to start seeing the application get a whole lot better in a hurry.
So, how? To do this, we’ve stripped our understanding of the Phonebook’s current strategy (i.e. one focused more internally and towards active/core contributors). It’s being re-jigged towards one that is more new/potential contributor focused and about growing our community from where it is now. This will mean a lot of changes on the app front. Namely:
- Completely Overhauling the User Experience on the Phonebook: We’re starting from scratch for the user experience of the site and building from new/potential contributor focused and up. The biggest change will include a easier flow for new/potential contributors connecting Mozilla Stewards and Reps with new/potential contributors signing up to the site and in a non-vouched state. The other big change will be moving to connect.mozilla.org and away from Mozillians.org.
- Contributor Web Services: We’re planning to build web services that help mozilla.org properties and contributors alike. We’ll allow for simpler authentication/authorization of contributors (with the help of BrowserId). Further, we want to make it simple to auto-populate Mozillian Phonebook profile data onto any mozilla.org site account. The ultimate goal is to be insanely easy to get around the community with as little work as possible.
- Recognition for your Contributions and Involvement: The one cool we’re looking to do by the end of 2012 is to show the amount of contributions you’ve performed around the Mozilla project (and find partners such as LinkedIn to plug-in to with that data). Display recommendations made by other Mozillians! Link to your Linkedin profile.
- Public Profiles: Phonebook users are going to get a whole lot of control over the publicity of their profile. Our end goal is going to be allowing folks to show their profiles publicly and show off their contributions to Mozilla.
- More Ways to Find and Contact Mozillians: Expect additions to profiles such as Location & timezones, Multiple e-mail addresses on profiles and many other things!
I seriously can’t wait for these changes to land during the course of the year. There’s going to rainbows, unicorns and nyan cats and everyone should be ecstatic for those possibilities on what this means. We’re going to kill it in 2012.
Am quite looking forward to seeing the changes. I have a profile but had no idea what to do with it, how to go about interacting with people or any of that stuff.
Aakash,
Mozilla continues to be in dire need of a space somewhere between “public” and “employees of MoCo”. There are loads of discussions which happen among employees because it’s the only non-public group available, and this is a community-corrosive effect.
In order to have such a forum, we need to know who to admit – and the phonebook is the obvious basis for this. All vouched users” is too wide a net for such a forum. Therefore, the phonebook needs to support “blessed tags” (or whatever we call it) – a way of particular special tags being only conferred by a subset of users. Then we can give a tag to the users who should have access to the forum.
Is that feature on the roadmap? If so, when might we see it?
Gerv