feedback handling, community wrangling, panhandlin’
TRANSCRIPT
Feedback handling, community wrangling,
panhandlin’
Chris Mills Mozilla
Who am I?
Tech writer at Mozilla
Writes about Web APIs on MDN
Heads up the MDN Learning Area
HTML.CSS.JS tinkerer
Accessibility whinge bag
Heavy metal drummer
Get the slides
http://www.slideshare.net/chrisdavidmills/
Comments to
What are we talking about here?
This...
Feedback mechanisms
Which ones are effective, when?
How does MDN do it?
Feedback ⇛ contributions
Feedback mechanisms
Email pros
It’s the old school
It’s ubiquitous
You can share a lot
Easy to funnel and separate
Community involvement
Email cons
It’s not sexy
often slip into 1:1
It can bring you away from the docs
IRC/Live chat
IRC/Live chat pros
Sync comms useful for immediate help
Leads to rapid fixes
Nice to talk to real people
Strike up a relationship
Community involvement
IRC/Live chat cons
Can’t share things as easily
not persistent
IRC seen as archaic, or geeky
harder to filter or scale
Forum pros
Also see talk pages, discussion pages
closer to the docs
GOOD FOR SHARING LOTS OF INFO
Lower effort than sync
easily see history
Forum cons
requires constant curation to avoid rot
can turn into the docs
can be harder to search conversations
Social media
Social media
Social media pros
Low effort and pressure
High coverage and engagement
great for marketing and promotion
can be great for quickfire asks
Social media cons
Not so good for conversation or contributions
harder to focus
can be low signal to noise
Can become toxic
Issue trackers
Issue tracker pros
great for sharing detail
conversations
community involvement
searching and history
information rot not as problematic
Issue tracker cons
can pull you away from the docs
can require engineering overhead or be overkill
can be intimidating to non techies
Community events
Comm. event pros
Great for making relationships
great for deep understanding
High quality feedback
high signal to noise
Comm. event cons
Costly
Time consuming
digesting all the things...
Automated feedback
Automated pros
Unintrusive, especially AB testing
Very low to no ongoing effort
Great for collecting some specific data
Automated cons
Not useful for other types of data
initial Engineering overhead
Lack of contribution or relationships
Enter MDN
MDN
We document the web platform
And Mozilla internals
Writing team of 6
Global volunteer community of 1000 monthly contributors
It’s big
Over 4.5 million readers per month
Lots of pages
English 20,000 Japanese 6,000
French 5,000 Chinese 3,500
Polish 2,500 Spanish 2,500
russian 1,700 german 1,500
Some stuff works
Mailing lists
IRC
Bugzilla
AB tests, and quick fire questions
Social media
Some stuff doesn’t
Comments on pages
Talk pages
Separate forums
Other separate channels, e.g. Reddit
Acting on feedback
The Firehose
SO. MUCH. WORK.
Drowning in it
Prioritisation is important
Collect feedback
dev-doc-needed keyword and doc requests on bugzilla
Other sources of feedback
Arranging things
Roadmap of prioritised major tasks
Papercuts and isolated fixes,
Arranged by browser release
Working on things
Major tasks and browser release fixes
Assigned to writers
Worked on during sprints
Spare time left for random stuff that comes up
A lot of stuff in the backlog
Turning feedback into contributions
It’s tricky
20,000 total contributors
Almost half only do one edit
630 have made more than 30 edits, or 3.5 percent
36 have made more than 500 edits, 0.2 percent
Still significant
75 percent of en-US pages created by MDN staff
Most non-en-US pages created by volunteers
Community work 3 x the amount of work by MDN staff
How do we improve contributions
It’s a Wiki - edit it yourself, dumbass
Need to be kinder
How do we improve contributions
Can’t be too pushy
Too big tasks generally don’t work
Keep tasks granular
And make them findable, e.g. Trello boards, bugsahoy
Harness passions
Some people are really into contributing to certain things
Certain tech, learning, l10n
Harness that passion
“I need to contribute to an OS project for my CS degree” is ok
And “I want a cool t-shirt”...
Mentor people
Take it slowly
Keep it realistic
Teach them the system
Don’t scare the crap out of them
Keep people engaged
through comms channels
regular meetings
make them know they’re appreciated
rewards or gaming systems
Look for other contributions
Some people just do reviews
Some just fix bugs in the platform
Some mostly just fight spam
or update structures
or spread the word
