Re: Beta criteria for Community Development

I think it is all about how you word it. We obviously don't want to say "What do we give you in return? As a volunteer you get limitless power and free snacks …. etc."

But we could say

"As a volunteer, you will get a chance to create better documentation for open standards, to help thousands of others learn. You will be able to help others with their documentation efforts, and administrate pages …. etc."

Give them a hint as to what they will get, but say it in a positive, non-assuming way…?

Chris Mills
Opera Software, dev.opera.com
W3C Fellow, web education and webplatform.org
Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://goo.gl/AKf9M)

On 9 May 2013, at 02:32, "David R. Herz" <WPD@theherzes.com> wrote:

> I disagree about the whole telling people what they will get thing.  People are here either because they have an interest or it’s their job to be.  There is nothing to sell.  There is just letting people know it’s here so that they can come play in our sandbox.
>  
> David R. Herz
> wpd@theherzes.com
>  
> From: Janet Swisher [mailto:jswisher@mozilla.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2013 1:24 AM
> To: public-webplatform@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Beta criteria for Community Development
>  
> I added this item:
> 
> * Benefits of contributing to WPD are articulated and are communicated to new members.
> 
> But can you give me an idea of what kinds of benefits and perks you're thinking of?
> 
> Is it intangibles like:
> * Learn about web standards technologies as you help document them
> * Feel satisfaction from knowing you're contributing to improving the state of web standards documentation for all web developers
> * Build relationships with an international open team of webdev and techcom professionals
> 
> Or things like:
> * Earn nifty badges
> * Score cool swag
> ?
> 
> --Janet
> 
> 
> On 5/8/13 4:18 AM, Chris Mills wrote:
> Looks good Janet. The only thing I thought you might want to explicitly state is something about clearly stating the perks/benefits of contributing to the community - community members will want to be clear on what the incentives are.
>  
> So perhaps something like
>  
> "Work out and implement mechanisms for giving community members perks/benefits when they contribute to WPD. Make it clear what those benefits are to prospective new members."
>  
> ?
>  
> Chris Mills
> Opera Software, dev.opera.com
> W3C Fellow, web education and webplatform.org
> Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://goo.gl/AKf9M)
>  
> On 8 May 2013, at 00:08, Janet Swisher <jswisher@mozilla.com> wrote:
>  
> I've taken a stab at setting criteria for declaring "Beta" for Community Development [1]. It seems a little weird to use a label like "Beta" for a community, but I'm taking it mean that the community is moving from the "inception" stage to the "establishment" stage of the community life cycle. A big part of that is implementing capture and tracking of metrics so we can tell which stage we're in.
>  
> If these criteria look good, I'll submit issues in Bug Genie for implementing them. (I'm not even sure that what I want can be done with mailman and MediaWiki; we can discuss that in the BG issues.)
>  
> [1] http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Project_Status#Goals_for_Community
> -- 
> Janet Swisher
> Mozilla Developer Network
> Developer Engagement Community Organizer
>  
>  
>  
> 
> --
> Janet Swisher
> Mozilla Developer Network
> Developer Engagement Community Organizer

Received on Thursday, 9 May 2013 05:27:36 UTC