Community Email Initiative

Community at Mozilla is one of the pillars of how we get things done. In the latest release of Firefox we saw roughly 1/3 of people supplying patches being a volunteer. See Are We Everyone Yet for data. A lot of people come in through initiatives like What Can I do for Mozilla and from Bugsahoy. A lot of people work on their first bug and hopefully the mentor can keep them engaged.

Unfortunately due to projects that paid contributors need to do, especially with in specific timeframes, keeping community members engaged can be difficult. When people have high priority issues community tends to be the first item that is dropped.

With this in mind I would like to propose that we try a different tact to keep community members engaged using tried and tested digital marketing methods. By using these techniques we can hopefully gather metrics on how we are doing with community.

Email

Email is a medium that a lot of people use regularly and know how to triage quite quickly if they are not interested in it. This means that we can put ourselves in front of them on a regular basis and, with a bit of wordsmithing, get them re-engaged with the team and/or mentor they had previously.

Structure of the email

Email will have a list of Good first bugs and potentially Good first projects that people can help with. We will also have a look at including a list of active contributors (if they opt-in) to do this.

Frequency of emails

Currently we are thinking that this will be best sent as 2 emails with differing content.

Weekly/Fortnightly Email

This will have a list of Good First Bugs that people can work on that will be pulled from Bugzilla. We may decide to seen a separate email for mentored bugs based on how many bugs the person has fixed.

Monthly/Quarterly Email

This email will show a list of the top contributors. The idea is to create a little competition between contributors to get onto that list and show that we value their contribution.

Data needed

Unfortunately to make this personalised we will need to collect some data. Below is a sample of the data we need at least at the beginning and will probably be expanded depending on how initial sends go.

Data for segmentation

• Name (this might just be a IRC nick or we might need to collect that separately.)
• Programming language(s)
• Team(s) they are engaging
• Bugmail address (This is more to help with joining metrics between bugzilla and ESP)
• Opt-in for being added to emails if they do the top fixes in a specific time period

Data collected from email

• Opens
• Clicks (this is done on each link)
• Forwards

How will people sign up

Hopefully we can patch Bugsahoy asking people if they want to sign up for the mailing list. If not we can have a snippet that we add (maybe part of the bug closure when landing) asking them to sign up for other bugs that they can work on.

Mentors are also crucial in getting people to sign up for the email to receive a regular update of bugs they can be working on.