Upcoming Community Efforts Around Nightly

I have been speaking with several community members about Activate Mozilla, a new campaign that the Participation team has launched.

I believe there are some potential tasks around Nightly that might fit well into Activate Mozilla. To this end, several of us met back in November and hashed out some possible ideas – you can see the notes from that meeting here.

The idea is that we create an Activate Mozilla campaign around something community can work on at a meetup or hackathon, for example. During the last meeting I suggested that bug triage might be one good task. On a daily basis there are new bugs being filed in Nightly that need to be moved into the correct component, or need additional information in order to move along and be fixed. This is a area where community can really have an impact on the Firefox project.

Another area that would be interesting to explore would be to have a campaign around a new feature in Nightly. Each cycle there is feature work being done, and I think our first “proof of concept” for Activate Mozilla may be around an upcoming feature. The work on our end will be create a clear document which explains how the feature is supposed to work, and how
you would go about testing it.

Some of the challenges we may have will be training community to be able to do these tasks – and the solution to that may be a combination of some training events as well as good online documentation. When we first started the Triage Bot project it seems some of the first individuals who triaged did not read the documentation. The end result is that they started triaging bugs and not doing it correctly, which can actually be detrimental to the project. So we do need participants to do some preparation by reading documentation prior to the event, so that they are ready to go when the event happens. This is a technique I employed when I was working on the BuddyUp project, and it worked well from a preparation standpoint.

There are some additional challenges around working with contributors who are at different levels. My approach in this situation is to make sure you have enough mentors and facilitators available with the specific subject area knowledge available to answer questions at the event.

Finally, I have given some thought to ways that we might promote Nightly tasks now that we don’t have One and Done. Someone suggested we try using github. I am definitely open to other suggestions if you have them.

If you are interested in helping with this effort, please feel free to contact me at marcia at mozilla dot com. I am hoping to be able to host several small Nightly themed events (in conjunction with the l10n team) next year, so stay tuned for more information regarding these.