MCS/Planning

Hierarchy

MCS has been so far grown organically, holding hands of a few caring community members, and it is yet completely unknown to the greater part of the community of its very existence. The reason behind this is when MCS came out as a project, Mozilla used to be much smaller & easier to explore. As it grew further, the less immediately necessary projects lacked the care & inevitably gotten their roots dry. Now, that we're again on the verge of having many new communities showing up every couple of days - we are again at the need of a community management system. MCS can already serve a great deal of it, and has to grow itself a little to serve the rest of the requirements.

As this project is primarily focused to spread Mozilla across he globe, this will be appropriate to make it a part of the project Grow.

Limitations

When we are talking about community management, it seems like we're about to cover up some areas redundantly. Some/many of the aspects are already served by parts of many other projects (some by Reps, some by IT, some by WebDev & others), but yet there is no one single system to handle all the community requirements.

As an example, when a new community is forming:

• The members are expected to plan about it without any distinct suggestion-body. May it be IRC or mailing list, or any other medium, if asked for a new community creation guideline/helps - people points fingers at different directions (none of them are explicitly dealing with particularly this topic - so it's either of-no-interest to them, or a redirection-loop).
• When the initial planning is done - the budget request for domain, hosting etc. are to be done separately. (Community IT is a good effort to ease this - we will come to this).
• After this formalities, again there is absolutely no distinctive SoPs to assign mentors for the communities when they develop, get them on feet along with the other peers, socialize the communities (at this point, we need you to consider local-communities as entities - not the members of them).

N.B: This list can be longer.

Potential

MCS can be the umbrella, under which all Mozilla Communities unify. Now, that we have quite a few local communities, they are diverse - diversity is good in some aspects, but when it's such that they are out or reach & sync of one another - it indicates that they aren't coupled closely enough, which they should be.

Presently, for the inter-community (or unified) statistics, we need to reach out individually to the community heads (or make a spreadsheet and ask members to put data). Even in most efficient scenarios, that take time & it's barely organized.

It's similarly unorganized as local contributors were, before ReMo came in. As Mozilla Reps project helped solve the problem of individual contributors in our Mozilla Communities, we need something very similar to that for the local-communities.

And when we're at it, let's not look at this as a separate project with separate people in it. The people are very same, in general. As the Mozillians (phone-book) project served profiling the individual contributors, Reps organized the contributors regionally, likewise this project will look at the Mozilla world from a view-point when the entire Mozilla is a sub-divided ensemble of local-communities.

Scope

• Manage & co-ordinate among local communities
• Cultivate & produce stats/logistics for the communities
• Help build new communities (and make it easier to do so)
• Help build community tools (not only themes, rather more and more tools/utilities)
• Have a WebDev group, that helps develop community sites

Next Steps

MCS did appear to be a appropriate name, but given the project re-modelling, that name might not be sufficient - so, feel free to suggest names. Primarily, here are a few suggestions:

• Mozilla Spawns
• Spread Mozilla
• Mozilla Presence
• add more

New branding will also be required, to go with the Mozilla Grow (and its children-projects') branding.

We will have to promote it more. Starting from the MozCamp EU, we can organize a special event/workshop around this to spread the existence of this project among the Mozillians from all parts of the world.