Mozilla membership program – (part 2)
You can read part 1 here.
I will post my messages with Mark Surman. They shows everything I think about Mozilla’s new membership program:
Hello Mark,
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on the slides. Of course I would
love to hear your voice explaining all of them, but I think I don’t see
anything that can bother me. I perfectly understand your passion to
build a strong community and I am sure you will do that.Just a note for the slides: Maybe I need (as an ordinary user) more
explanation on what I will get for with this membership and it’s
important to mention that this is not just a membership, but a
responsibility to create the open web. For sure we don’t want only
people that are giving 5$ and not doing anything. I am sure you are
thinking for some ways to engage those new members and this will be the
challenge.It will be great if you can describe, in slides and voice what is the
difference between active community (so called Mozilla community) and
our passive community (“new” members, Firefox users) and how you can
touch them, if they are not visiting our pages and how you will work
with existing communities on that issue.I hope you can understand what I mean.
and few more thoughts:
The info is valuable indeed and this is a good point if users cares about the info. Anyone can get a lot of info just visiting the wiki.What about giving a @mozilla.org email redirect service, something like username@mozilla.org or username@somenicename.org this will give users the ability to represent the community to their friends or what about giving them an idea to print their own business card with smashing design Mozilla community member or whatever nice title we can imagine.This will be nice and will give some value to the “new” members.
My opinion is we don’t need “death souls” into the community, we need active members than go be contributors one day or at least (open web) advocates. This is not just a membership, but a responsibility to create the open web.
Thanks for this Bogo. Helpful. I agree of course that we want members who will become active advocates (soon) and active contributors (over time).
One thesis I have is that huge numbers of people are willing to sign up for the role of spreading the word about Mozilla and the web. It’s something that is fun and that people will be excited to do. Also, I think we can get people to this advocate role quite quickly if we are well organized.
The group of people who give time will always be a bit smaller, and it will take longer for them to be comfortable getting involved at this level. We need to get good at providing step by step pathways for them to get involved. And even better at managing and organzing across many small projects within Mozilla. That said, I think we can grow our contributor community massively over time as a second order effect from membership and advocacy work.
What do you think about this?
PS. I might throw this comment up as a quick blog post.