Participation and Collaboration on Discourse
#mozsprint 2017 Interview Series
Shreyas (@dun3buggi3) is a community manager and longtime Mozillian with a background in computer science. Shreyas was selected to join the most recent cohort of Mozilla Open Leaders with his work on Discourse where he’s combining his technical skills and passion for understanding and encouraging communities.
I interviewed Shreyas to learn more about his work on Participation & Collaboration on Discourse and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.
What is “Participation & Collaboration on Discourse”?
Mozilla community members participate on the Mozilla Club Discourse channel to share updates, get information and to stay connected with the larger Mozilla community. The aim of this project is to improve collaboration between the members and increase overall participation on the Mozilla Discourse channel
Why did you start looking into participation metrics on the Mozilla Discourse?
Mozilla, as an organization, has been investing heavily into improving participation. I started this project to improve collaboration between members and encourage them to work openly on projects. The potential in this is immense and we’ve seen several instances of this collaboration happening on the discourse channel. Thinking about improving collaboration got us diving deeper into this, to realize that we had to take a step back and think about improving participation.
How will participation in Discourse help the broader Mozilla community?
Discourse is a great community platform. We chose to invest in Discourse because unlike other platforms, we have more ownership and the content is easily discoverable. Due to its very nature, on chat platforms like Telegram or Slack, discussions tend to get lost due to the sheer volume of content. This is something Discourse can solve. The broader Mozilla community can help understand how to improve participation and collaboration while running their communities on Discourse. It will also help them evaluate if Discourse, as a platform, is a fit for their community.
What problems have you run into while working on this project?
One of the main challenges is that right now is that the community is spread out on different platforms. We have the Discourse channel, a Facebook group, a Telegram group and a couple of Whatsapp group. I don’t see this as a ‘problem’ because one of the key things of running a community is that you go where your people are. Clearly, our people are all across these channels. We would like to use these channels as the top of the funnel to get people to come to Discourse and participate in discussions there.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
We have something for everyone! From documenting stuff, to helping prepare the report, to filling a survey about participation in online communities- we’ve got a wide range of issues that you can pick and work on. Check out some of the issues on our Github repo. If you read about the project and think you can help us with something that’s not already mentioned in the list of issues, please go ahead and file a new issue. If you’re not sure or have questions, drop an email at dun3buggi3@gmail.com.
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?
For a start, we have a list of issues on our github repo. For example, if you’re a designer, you could help us out with designing the final report, if you’re an avid Discourse user, we’d love to have your suggestions on how we can improve or if you’re a UX guru, you can help us test the on-boarding process on our Discourse community. We’d really love to get help with any of the issues listed there. By #mozsprint, we will also have our Version 1 of the report which will be open for feedback from the larger community.
Apart from these, we’re also hosting a sprint site in Bangalore, India. If you’re around, do register here and drop by.
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on Participation & Collaboration on Discourse and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!
