It’s been a long time of hard work and discussions about how to full redesign the community site, since we wanted to do not just a restyle but also a brand redesign reflecting who we are and what we do.

(Versión en español de este artículo)

Goals

• Keep it simple.
• Align with the rest of mozilla sites design and brands.
• Feature the areas we felt they were more important.
• Give more visibility to social networks.
• Optimize the site to different devices.

The first thing we did was the brand redesign, refreshing the logo and brand images. We wanted to be consistent when communicating the community brand everywhere: From social networks to events, news in other sites…

Then we discussed for a long time how to deal with the site redesign asking the community at our mailing list, defining a working group and setting several audio meetings to get a final idea. We followed the new mozilla.org redesign very closely and we inspired the redesign on ideas that were going be applied there. Also the mozilla brand toolkit from creative team was extremely helpful to be on the same page.

Having in mind that we have different areas on the site, we also had to think how to restyle the support forums and the wiki to fit the mainpage design, having in mind the same principles.

Thanks to Fjaguero, stripTM for helping with the frontend and Willyaranda for the IT stuff (we also took the opportunity to migrate from our old server to a new awesome one thanks to Mozilla Community Hosting program).

What’s next?

Responsive design

We haven’t applied the responsive design for mobile and tablets yet, we are still finishing it and will be available in the next weeks.

Tabzilla l10n

Currently it’s not possible to localize the new mozilla univeral tab content, we have opened a bug for it. If you know js, please help sending a patch to speed up the process, tabzilla devs are really busy right now.

Puedes leer la versión en español de este artículo.

2011 was an amazing year for Mozilla Hispano and in 2012 is going to be more awesome than ever

Currently we are working in several projects that are very important for mozilla and the Spanish community.

“Delight-ment” project

The Mozilla Hispano engagement team is developing a project to gather all information about our brands in Spanish, mozilla, firefox thunderbird, firefox mobile… to understand how people is seeing us and then create campaigns to spread our message better and  improve communication with media and users.

The ultimate goals of this project are to increase and improve communication about Mozilla and its products and, as a consequence, to get a better brand image.

You can get a full description, slides and also a great video in English (script) about all this.

Mozbuzz

As part of “Delight-ment” project we are developing a web tool to gather all information from media, where contributors will be able to record reports about what’s being published about our brands and have a great overview about them, something similar to mozilla input but for media instead of users. You can take a peek view to the code at our repository. We’ll publish more information really soon

More information at project page (es):

Mozedu

This is a very interesting project inside Mozilla’s mission scope. We want to work together with educational institutions to teach people about important aspects about Internet. We want to educate next generations about privacy, security, choice and how the Internet should be open and accessible for everyone, something that is not currently being taught to students.

Main goals:

• Create a list of topics with educators, adapted for each age range.
• Offer offline and online lessons (using an e-learning platform)
• Teach about net privacy, security and user control.
• Explain what the Open Web is and why it’s important for the future of the Internet.

More information at project page (es).

Labs and user support

These two areas are going to be very important this year, we have new people in charge of them with a lot of ideas for the Spanish community. New projects, get more contributors and improve the users interaction with the support forums are key parts for this to happen.

100k campaign

We have recently reach 100k followers on our Facebook page (that’s way over 9000!) and we are creating a big campaign to celebrate this milestone. Our users are going to be a key part of this campaign on the social networks. More details soon

Brand and site redesign

Many voices, one Mozilla. As contributors to the mozilla project we want to improve our community brand and website design to reflect this and for that reason we have slightly improve our community brand images and how we communicate them. We are also working hard to completely redesign our site to get a more “mozilla style”. We are following closely the mozilla.org redesign to be on the same page.

More information at project page (es).

I plan to blog about all these projects during this year and keep you all updated.

Go Mozilla Hispano!

Organizing a Mozilla community can be easy when you are a small group or can be a headache if you have more contributors than you can handle.

In the past year, Mozilla Hispano community has grown both contributors and ongoing projects, so we have been to learn how to handle from a small group to nearly 40 people.

Everything is more less easy to handle when your community is 4 or 5 people, each one usually does a different task, you normally focus on localization/user support and you just use email or a mailing list to communicate each other. The problem starts when you grow and new people wants to do different things like engagement, marketing, PR, QA…

I’m going to explain how we’ve solved it in Mozilla Hispano and I hope that could be an example to other communities in the future.

Our infrastructure is based on:

• Meritocracy: Core and casual contributors.
• Open mailing list to announce new projects.
• A page where we explain where you can contribute and how.
• A mentorship program.
• A wiki to organize areas, projects, tasks, events, meetings and contributors.
• A mumble audio server to do audio conferencing.
• An irc channel at irc.mozilla.org.

Meritocracy

The community rules (es) are clear and accepted by everybody from the beginning. We are a meritocracy like the rest of Mozilla and we are divided on:

• Users: Anyone who visits the site.
• Casual contributors: Users that contribute to the community from time to time in different projects.
• Core contributors: A casual contributor that has been participating actively for at least 6 months could be proposed as a core contributor or member. He will have rights to vote in the internal decisions that could be made in the community. If you are going to be inactive or you stop contributing you will be again a casual contributor.
• Mentors: Special category for well know contributors that want to help newcomers to get into the community.

Mailing list

It’s hosted on google groups but in the future should be migrated to Mozilla’s mailman. Subscriptions are open, it’s the first way to introduce yourself to the community and keep updated about what’s going on. It’s also the place for discussion about new ideas or problems.

People are encouraged to send emails to the list using a tag for better organization:

• [News] Firefox 9
• [Engagement] DeMo project
• [Support] Check unsolved posts

Contribute page

The contribute page it’s the main page for newcomers. It’s designed to first point people to the mentorship program (es), ongoing-future projects listing page (es) and resources for contributors (es) and then list all areas we are working on.

Mentorship program

In the mentorship program page we briefly explain what Mozilla Hispano is and our Mozilla values (we don’t want people to misunderstand that we are a meritocracy and have problems in the future). Then we list by area, the names and emails of mentors and we encourage to mail them directly.

We’ve found that one to one contact with people is better to explain how we work and what they can do. We want mentors to be very active, assigning or creating projects to keep new people active from the beginning.

Projects page

From it you can get and overview about what’s going on now and in the future. More about this later.

Resources for contributors

This page lists every tool we use, how to sign up for the mailing list, how to create an account on our wordpress to post articles, our planet, social networks, irc, events, audio server or how to create content on the wiki.

A wiki to organize them all

Since the beginning of the project, we’ve been using the wiki as a tool to list how we work and list contributors, but the “static” approach we’ve been using was not enough once we get dozens of new contributors. Following Mozilla Reps wiki organization we improved our mediawiki installation using semantic data: Semantic Mediawiki and Semantic Mediawiki Forms. Using these tools we can have information shared between wiki pages.

Profile page

Once a new contributor creates an account on the wiki, he can fill his profile information such as name, photo, country, areas where he wants to contribute, email, website, twitter… Mozilla is about people and we want everyone to know this when they visit our page.

This is a very important page to track everyone working on the community because this page will automagically fetch all projects, events, meetings, and pending task this users has.

My profile page on the wiki

Areas

We try to mimic Mozilla’s division: News, User support, Labs, Engagement, QA and IT. This is what we like to call “A small Mozilla inside Mozilla”.

Each area has a core contributor in charge to organize it and guide people interested in contributing to the area.

Projects

Every initiative is a new project, from “Localizing AMO” to “Improve site design” or “Tips and tricks for beginners”. Anyone can create a new project from the listing page using a easy form.

Each project has a coordinator, an area where it belongs, status (inactive, active, finished), a list of people helping on it (anyone can add himself to the list), aim, subprojects (if needed), meetings (more about this later), pending tasks and free text to describe the status or any other links and information about it. Projects are listed on their area page to give them visibility.

Tasks

Any area or project can have tasks (es), a small work that has to be done assigned to a contributor. We don’t need a big infrastructure like bugzilla for these assignments.

Each task has a description, person in charge, due date and status. They are listed on their corresponding area/project page and also in the profile of the person in change of it. This last thing it’s very important because it’s a way to friendly remind people they have something to do

You can subscribe to all task, area tasks, project tasks and/or your personal tasks via RSS to keep updated.

Meetings

For organizing a project we have the possibility of creating a meeting (es). The workflow is usually this:

• The project coordinator post a message on the mailing list announcing the meeting and asking people interested and preferred dates (most times using tools like doodle.com)
• Once the date is set, a meeting page is created with all the information and attendees. It will be automatically listed on meetings page, project page and attendees profiles.
• We use a mumble server for conferencing. We’ve found that using audio instead of just text on IRC is quicker and improves the personal relationships between contributors. Every meeting is recorded, uploaded and linked on its page.
• Notes about the conference are added to the meeting page and the link is announced on the mailing list.
• We use irc as back channel for sharing links and text during the conference. Chat log is also attached to meeting page.

Events

Event tracking (es) is also done on the wiki. Every event a community contributor attends should be listed here, even if it’s not organized by a mozillian. Dates, address, organizer, number of attendees, website and mozillian attendees are filled here so it will be auto-listed in every contributor profile page.

This is a great way to know where the community contributors are going to be and have information about Mozilla presence in these events.

Final notes

This is the way that works for us, and we think it could work for other communities. Following these procedure we have:

• Improved personal relationships between contributors.
• Everyone knows what’s going on and who is doing what.
• The ideas are no longer lost in a limbo of emails.
• Newcomers know where to go and who to ask to start contributing.
• New contributors have things to do since day one and their work is visible and public for the rest of the community.

And remember, the key for community growing is to get contributors with different profiles and encourage them, let them see they and their work are part of the community! Don’t focus your community just in localization, most people want to help with engagement, creation (music, video, images) or other creative topics, most future contributors will find you in social networks, be there and keep them updated!

Our presentation at Mozcamp 2011 Europe was a 10 minutes summary of this

Question? Leave a comment, ping me on irc (Nukeador), Twitter or via email (nukeador at mozilla-hispano dot org).

As a bonus track, here you have the Mozilla Hispano talk about community organization at MozCamp Europe 2011: