Communities Are AwesomeΒΆ
| Authors: | Ali Spivak |
|---|---|
| Time: | 10:00 - 10:20 |
| Session: | http://docs.writethedocs.org/2014/na/talks/#ali-spivak-communities-are-awesome |
| Link: |
Works for Mozilla, which some people may not be aware is a non-profit, mission-driven company. Here today to talk about community. As a non-profit, Mozilla relies on their “huge” network of volunteers – their community – to actually make things happen. Ali is responsible for the Mozilla Developer Network, the MDN. MDN is a wiki that the community uses to document “everything that matters to web developers”, as well as information about Mozilla products. That’s a lot of of information to document, and MDN is really big. MDN has about 2MM users per month, 35 languages, and 11K articles. Things don’t stay the same for long, so there’s a lot of change to manage. MDN has 5 paid writers, althogh they do a lot more than writing: every one of them works with and for the community.
The community is critical to MDN’s success. The community writes, edits, fixes typos, and translates content (user experience for the site, as well as articles). MDN also holds doc sprints where they get a group of writers together for a day or more, and everyone writes.
But more important than all this work, the community provides MDN with an amazing amount of diversity and perspectives. People in San Francisco may not think of low bandwidth as a topic to document, but the community of writers, programmers, and users around the world help push that forward as a topic that’s important.
It’s also interesting that MDN, for being so open, gets a very small amount of spam and malicious edits. Part of that may be a result of the fact that it’s somewhat of a niche site. But it also seems like people treat the site with an amount of respect and responsibility to the site and their peers.
So you have this community; how do you get them to do what you want? You don’t. Their not minions. They’re a special herd of awesome cats. They’re partners.
“The idea of commnunity may simple come down to supporting and interacting positively with other individuals who share a vested interest.”
So why do people spend their time doing something they’re not compensated for, that’s not their “job”? It turns out that intrinsic motivation is really important to lots of people: autonomy, gaining mastery, and [something else I didn’t write down in time] provide people with a lot of satisfaction, and volunteering on MDN helps them achieve that.
You also see this in things like Burning Man, huge events that are volunteer run. One of their principles is Participation. Everyone is expected to participate to help make the event successful. Mozilla has principles, as well, and they also emphasize transparency, community, and engagement.
It turns out it matters less what the principles are, you just need to have them, so that your community understands there’s something bigger, that they’re not just minions.