	What Makes A Pathway?
	Owner: Pathways Working Group	Updated: 2014-04-18
	Pathways at Mozilla

What Makes a Pathway at Mozilla?

	THIS PAGE IS A WORKING DRAFT
	The page may be difficult to navigate, and some information on its subject might be incomplete and/or evolving rapidly. If you have any questions or ideas, please add them as a new topic on the discussion page.

Community Building Contribute Main Page.

What is a pathway?

A pathway is defined as a way of getting involved at any level, from beginning contribution to superstar contributor. A pathway is a healthy way for people to get involved and stay involved cross-functionally and at all levels. The pathways working group is committed to defined and innovative pathways to support our inter-organizational goal of 10x Mozillians by the end of this year and 1,000,000 Mozillians at the end of ten years.

Pathways invite and delight, and pathways can be broken down into 3 types:

Functional area pathways
Regional pathways
Product specific "lenses"

This page tracks the successful pathways at Mozilla. This is a draft, and please add as necessary.

Healthy Pathways Have

Automated Response/Tracking

- Automated responding, systems for initial reponse to incoming potential community members

Dedicated filtering of incoming folks

- Team of people who respond, triage, and help people get started

Support Structure

- Assigned supports for new contributors
- Can be simple or complex, in order from least to most complex

BootCamp

Curriculum of initial things people need to understand and do

- For example: http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/

Mentoring

Mentored bugs

Below are some examples of successful mentoring across the organization

Buddy system
- eg: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/help-new-contributors-buddy-program
- Team of mentoring enthusiasts is currently building resources)
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SOPs/Mentoring
- https://webmaker.org/en-US/mentor

Documentation

- How to get started/a "clear ask"
- Get Involved Page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/get-involved
- Developer Getting Started Page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Getting_started
  - Proposed/recommended wiki structure for contributor pages
    - Levels/achievements/next steps
    - Keep this simple

Tutorials

- Embedded, like new SUMO Knowledge Base tutorial
- Video, like Code Firefox
- Webby, like Josh's training missions
- Webmaker makes can be used well here

Conversion Points

Track number of things done, over an amount of time, and whether the work is getting used to move the Mozilla project forward

- Ready To Contribute (Qualifying)
- Casual Contribution (1-6? contributions)
- Milestones between badges
- Active Contribution (GOAL!)

Examples of active contribution:

- 30 hours logged, two L10N firefox contribution credits over two releases, xx number of support responses, etc
Work broken down into:
- Minimum viable first contribution followed by increasing size/complexity of contributions and increasing responsibility in the project.
- This maps to conversion points and recognition.

Recognition

- Work out ways your pathway can recognize
- Recognize consistently in a structured way
- pay attention to how people like to be recognized
- Badge at conversion points and beyond

Steps to building a healthy pathway

1. Starting point, minimum viable contribution

Clear conversion points
- Ready to contribute
- First contribution
- "Casual contributor"needs better name?
- "Active contributor"
- "Superstar"

2. Mentor or buddy support program 3. Localized resources 4. Breaking down work 5. Begin with the end in mind

- What are your project's goals?
- How will scaling volunteers support these goals
- Turn that into deliverables
- Turn deliverables into tasks
- Plan iteratively (utilize agile)
- Check in with community and stakeholders frequently and on a schedule
- Document everything

6. Recognition program (best practices for badges are coming soon)

Utilizing the recognition guide from the recognition working group including but not limited to
- Building levels of recognition
- Increasing levels of privilege and responsibility over time
- Increasing access to resources and events

Mozilla unified badge system

1. Get Ready: badge folks for going through the Webmaker curriculum, setting themselves up with whatever account access they need (like Bugzilla)

2. Minimum viable contribution: a very small first step they can take, specific things, one task.

3. Casual contributor: this seems to mean two small contributions or one larger one - a few hours spent

4. Active contributor - this of course is also people who would count toward our organizational goal - substantive contribution, maybe when they host a successful event or finish a small set of bugs/makes?

5. Super star - some series of further badges for outstanding contributors :)

Types of pathways:

Functional area pathways
Regional pathways
Product specific "lenses"

Examples of Best Practices/Pathway Success Stories

Functional

SUMO

Questions and answers for SUMO:

How do you recruit new contributors? Where do they come from?
- Get involved page
- SUMO get involved page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/get-involved
- Word of mouth through local Reps and events
- Users who get support through our forums
How do you support new volunteers as they onboard?
- Mentorship through the Buddy program
- Documentation
What technical tools do you use?
What documentation do you use, if any (share urls)
- Documentation on how to contribute in different SUMO areas
- Support forum: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/answering-questions-support-forum
- Knowledge base: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/improve-knowledge-base
- Localization: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/localize-firefox-help
How do you break down tasks and know what a good "entry level" task is for a volunteer?
What person to person tools do you use to support volunteers?
What are the most common questions you get from volunteers?
How much "work" do you see from new volunteers and "how soon"?
How do you track work from volunteers?
- Some projects use no tools
- Some volunteers don't want to feel tracked as this is their volunteer time
- Mentors or stewards can document progress
How do cross cultural communication differences come into play here?
What are your conversion points?
How do you recognize people's work and accomplishments?
- Recognition guide
- Badges
- Community calls every week
- Well defined functional areas
- Localized resources
- IRC meetings
- Multiple entry levels although the main focus is on one (Army of Awesome)
- Social media presence
- Mentorship programs
- Dedicated staff for community building
- Onboarding process and documentation (Get Involved page:https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/get-involved)

Mozilla Reps (aka ReMo)

How do you recruit new contributors? where do they come from?
- Anyone can apply to join the program. We usually get about a dozen applications every week. Most applicants are university students from South Asia. To apply, you need to fill out a form and then, if you pass the first screening, you are connected with a mentor who will guide you through the next steps of the process
  - Stats as of today:
  - Rejected: 971 (61.6%)
  - Accepted - Onboarding: 578 (36.7%)
  - Screening: 27 (1.7%)
  - Here is a link to our screening process: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SOPs/Mentoring/Screening
How do you support new volunteers as they onboard?
- Fresh applicants go through a hand-holding period with their mentor (see next question)
Do you have a mentoring or buddy program? documentation?
- See: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SOPs/Mentoring
What technical tools do you use?
- Reps Mentors have a dashboard that they use on the Mozilla Reps portal
How do you break down tasks and know what a good "entry level" task is for a volunteer?
What person to person tools do you use to support volunteers?
What are the most common questions you get from volunteers?
How much "work" do you see from new volunteers and "how soon"?
What are your conversion points?
How do you recognize people's work and accomplishments?
- Recognition guide
- Badges

WebMaker

- Dedicated staff for community building
- Community calls every week (maybe they dont need to be every week)
- People are always on IRC
- Social media presence
- Localized resources
- Get involved page entry, automated email responder, back end process (need details from michelle on this)
- Entry level is not hard -- attending a webmaker event seems to be the common entry point
- Process for supporting new people (need details on webmaker mentor program)
- Well documented wiki https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/Teach
- How to get started
- How to share
- Best practices repository
- Clear alignment with MoFo goals
- WebMaker itself is a tool for community builders to share how they work (like Regnard's piece on how to work with volunteers: http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/uxr)

QA

Talk to Marcia

L10N

Talk to Jeff

Best Practices

Issues and Challenges:
- Onboarding
- Measurement
- Sustainability

Firefox Mentored Bugs

Talk to Josh Matthews

MDN

Talk to Janet Swisher

What do we need to know from successful pathway builders?

How do you recruit new contributors? where do they come from?
How do you support new volunteers as they onboard?
What technical tools do you use?
What documentation do you use, if any (share urls)
How do you break down tasks and know what a good "entry level" task is for a volunteer?
What person to person tools do you use to support volunteers
What are the most common questions you get from volunteers?
How much "work" do you see from new volunteers and "how soon"
What are your conversion points?
How do you recognize people's work and accomplishments?
- Recognition guide
- Badges
  - Regional
  - Product
- Email to all Mozillians with an interest in mentoring
- Sub wiki page
- Problem Statement
- Straw Proposal
- Point people at a path where they can comment easily and give feedback
- Place where we can collect mentors that's like a spreadsheet or something

Questions to ask each pathway builder

Links to documentation are great

How do you recruit new contributors? where do they come from?
How do you support new volunteers as they onboard?
Do you have a mentoring or buddy program? documentation?
What technical tools do you use?
How do you break down tasks and know what a good "entry level" task is for a volunteer?
What person to person tools do you use to support volunteers?
What are the most common questions you get from volunteers?
How much "work" do you see from new volunteers and "how soon"
What are your conversion points
How do you recognize people's work and accomplishments
Recognition guide
Badges

Anything else to add?

Contribute/What Makes a Pathway