One of the many different things we are trying this year with Quality at Mozilla is exposing opportunities for people to get involved in our projects in more significant, meaningful ways. We’ve always had these kinds of opportunities available, but we’ve historically been terrible at making them known. To remedy this, we are hosting a Community Call every two weeks. The next one is tomorrow.
This is an excellent forum for:
- Us to talk about what projects we have that are available for involvement
- You to ask questions about how to get involved, and what working with these projects would entail
- You to tell us about the great things you’re doing in open source – if you have a side project you think might be useful, let us know. Maybe there will be interest in folks helping your project as well.
These projects allow you to gain experience, put your skills to use, and to give you a fun way to contribute that is big enough to be challenging but small enough to not be daunting. Even when I started as a volunteer, back when Mozilla was a much smaller project, I started with one of these small projects. My project was “build a calendar-quality team for the calendar add-on to thunderbird.”
Working on small projects with a core of other interested individuals enables you to make fast friendships, easily build your skills, and have a great time making an impact. It also enables you (yes, you) to help steer the project in the direction you feel it ought to go. You can be as involved as your desire and time allow.
I look forward to chatting with you all tomorrow at the Quality and Automation Community call. The details of how to get on the call, and the list of projects that we’ll be discussing is here: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Quality-Automation-Call-2015-01-13
Here’s to a great 2015! Cheers!