Developer Community project: help identifying developers

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi folks :)

As part of the Developer Community project (wonder what it is, have a look
here <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Marketing/Developer/Community> and there
<https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/developer-community>), I need
some help.

We are close to have a proper strategy defined
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10j7p3gCfW_Zt-LGmVzSlh9zZZ7lHXuBawTjLguHbRHQ/edit?usp=sharing>
and we need to get into some concrete discussion with actual "real world"
developers (and it could be you btw). As far as I know you are among those
at Mozilla who are in contact with such people on a regular basis, it would
be helpful if you could help identifying developers that could be
interested with such a project.

If you think you know someone that match, please use that form to provide
some contact information and context:

- https://goo.gl/forms/SalFzFuLrTd0V52i2

Thanks in advance for your help.
Let me know if you have any question, I'll gladly answer :)

Best,
--
Jeremie
.............................
(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org/>
Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>

[Jen Simmons]

I'd be happy to nominate folks, but there's not enough information here to
know what kind of people you are looking for, what kind of commitment /time
is required on their end, what their participation would look like. Without
that, I can't get a good sense of who to recommend.

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 1:23 PM, Jeremie Patonnier <jer...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

--
Jen Simmons
Designer Advocate on the DevRel team at Mozilla
Host of The Web Ahead, http://thewebahead.net

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi Jen,

Thanks for asking :) Let me elaborate a bit.

2017-02-22 0:08 GMT+01:00 Jen Simmons <jensi...@mozilla.com>:

> I'd be happy to nominate folks, but there's not enough information here
>

On the project itself: The Dev Marketing team want to build a community of
developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the open web in the
hope of amplifying their impact in exchange for more visibility for
Mozilla. As detailed in our strategy document, we need to check if that
idea match with developers' real life needs.

To that end:

> what kind of people you are looking for,
>

Developers who share a sens of value with Mozilla. They can be professional
or amateur, expert or novice, etc. I have a personal bias toward web
developers but all kind of developers are welcome. Extra bonus point if
they are involved with developers organization promoting Diversity &
Inclusion or if they are tech leader in their local area.

> what kind of commitment /time is required on their end,
>

At that stage, a couple of hours for a 1:1 interview to discuss this
project goals and assumptions in particular, and to gather expectation
around Mozilla in general.

> what their participation would look like.
>

Simply an open discussion with some questions to answer (the exact
interview framework is currently WIP)

> Without that, I can't get a good sense of who to recommend.
>

Does that clarified things? Do you need more detailed information on a
specific topic?

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi Belén

2017-02-22 12:05 GMT+01:00 Belén Albeza <be...@mozilla.com>:

> Hi Jeremie, I've taken a look at the links you've posted and your
> reply to Jen and I still don't understand what the project is exactly
> about.
>
> "[...] to build a community of developers who share the same values as

> Mozilla for the open web in the hope of amplifying their impact in
> exchange for more visibility for Mozilla."
>

> Don't we have already a Mozilla community around the world? What's
> exactly the difference between our current community and this one,
> beyond this one labelled as "developers"?
>

Ah, I see. This is a mistake of my own (I'm so much into it that I can
forget that some of the things that are obvious to me aren't for others,
sorry)

Maybe the word community is a bit misleading here, maybe network or
federation would have been more appropriate (but less catchy). That said
the difference between the existing Mozilla community and this new
community of developer we want to build can be stated as follow. People
part of the Mozilla community dedicated some time to *actively* move
Mozilla forward, whether it is by contributing to Mozilla products
(providing code, performing Q&A, etc.) or by supporting Mozilla agenda in
its name (political lobbying, event organization, community building, etc)

That new community (or network, or federation) intent to support people
that share the same values as Mozilla but do not wish or do not feel the
need to be actively involved with Mozilla to move Mozilla itself forward.
Even if they are not part of our active community members they are sympathizers
and we want to better support them. The ultimate goal is to better support
a community of *passive* Mozilla supporter that actively push forward the
same values as us. We've identified developers as our key target partner
for such a community because they easily promote strong belief and are
eager to share knowledge around them about how to build the web (rather
than just consuming it, which is something cover through other programs at
the MoFo level). By loosely supporting them (for example providing support
and infrastructure and only expect them to do what they are already doing
in promoting our values) we want to infuse and make more obvious the fact
that Mozilla is a strong supporter of those value (technical excellency,
open source, open web, diversity & inclusion, etc.).

Does that make more sens?

Best,
--
Jeremie
.............................
(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear

Mozilla Developer Marketing Team, MDN <https://developer.mozilla.org> lover
Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>

[Belén Albeza]

Hi Jeremie, I've taken a look at the links you've posted and your
reply to Jen and I still don't understand what the project is exactly
about.

"[...] to build a community of developers who share the same values as
Mozilla for the open web in the hope of amplifying their impact in
exchange for more visibility for Mozilla."

Don't we have already a Mozilla community around the world? What's
exactly the difference between our current community and this one,
beyond this one labelled as "developers"?

Thanks! :)
Belén

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jeremie Patonnier <jer...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hi Jen,
>
> Thanks for asking :) Let me elaborate a bit.
>
> 2017-02-22 0:08 GMT+01:00 Jen Simmons <jensi...@mozilla.com>:
>>
>> I'd be happy to nominate folks, but there's not enough information here
>
>

> On the project itself: The Dev Marketing team want to build a community of

> developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the open web in the hope

> of amplifying their impact in exchange for more visibility for Mozilla. As
> detailed in our strategy document, we need to check if that idea match with
> developers' real life needs.
>
> To that end:
>
>>
>> what kind of people you are looking for,
>
>
> Developers who share a sens of value with Mozilla. They can be professional
> or amateur, expert or novice, etc. I have a personal bias toward web
> developers but all kind of developers are welcome. Extra bonus point if they
> are involved with developers organization promoting Diversity & Inclusion or
> if they are tech leader in their local area.
>
>>
>> what kind of commitment /time is required on their end,
>
>
> At that stage, a couple of hours for a 1:1 interview to discuss this project
> goals and assumptions in particular, and to gather expectation around
> Mozilla in general.
>
>>
>> what their participation would look like.
>
>
> Simply an open discussion with some questions to answer (the exact interview
> framework is currently WIP)
>
>>
>> Without that, I can't get a good sense of who to recommend.
>
>
> Does that clarified things? Do you need more detailed information on a
> specific topic?
>

> Best,
> --
> Jeremie
> .............................
> (￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear

> Mozilla Developer Network
> Twitter : @JeremiePat

[Jen Simmons]

Are you trying to build a community of tens of thousands of people? Or are
you trying to gather a good cross-section of the kind of people who are in
our audience so that you can do user research and testing?

Why are you only targeting developers? Haven't we decided over and over
that the work of "Dev Relations" and "Dev Marketing" should be reaching a
wide audience of everyone who affects decisions when creating a project on
the web? Including user experience designers, graphic designers, content
strategists, stakeholders, etc. Or is this something I just keep saying,
while everyone else disagrees with the idea?

I have a personal bias toward web developers but all kind of developers
> are welcome.

We are targeting Java Engineers? iOS programmers? Now I'm really confused.
I thought MDN, Developer Marketing and Developer Relations efforts were
about the web, and people who make projects for the web or with web
technology. Not everyone who writes any kind of computer program.

a community of developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the open
> web in the hope of amplifying their impact in exchange for more visibility
> for Mozilla.

> Developers who share a sens of value with Mozilla.

This is so incredibly broad I honestly do not know what it means. Almost
everyone thinks they "share the values" that Mozilla talks about when
thinking in broad strokes. It would help if you could state what values you
mean — you are looking for designers and developers who understand and
value accessibility, because you are testing a project that's about a11y?
Are you doing a thing where you want people who understand the importance
of User Experience design to get involved? Or you need people who… — wait,
why do you want to get a group that agrees with Mozilla values as a
prerequisite? Which Mozilla values?

> Extra bonus point if they are involved with developers organization
> promoting Diversity & Inclusion or if they are tech leader in their local
> area.

Is "extra bonus points for being involved with an organization that is
involved with thinking about diversity and inclusion" a euphemism for
saying you are looking for women and people of color to get involved? I
hope so. And I hope that this goes without saying. If you gather a group of
young white men you are going to bias the results. I hope that's not "bonus
point" material. I hope that's a requirement for whatever you are doing.
The first step in decent research is to make sure your sample is
representative. Without a correct sample, all of the data is useless. I
know Mozilla struggles with this. I know most of the research I've seen is
very biased due to bad sampling. Everyone was passing around a link on
Twitter the other day to a study by Stack Overflow — a study that is
ridiculously useless because their research methods were horrendous, and
their sample was awful. Yet the whole industry was talking about the
"results" of the survey as if there were fact. It's infuriating. I hope
Mozilla can figure this out. Creating a proper sample before doing research
is imperative.

This said, I'm assuming you are working on a research project, and you are
looking for people to interview for that research. Maybe that's not what
you are doing at all.

On the project itself: The Dev Marketing team want to build a community of
> developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the open web in the
> hope of amplifying their impact in exchange for more visibility for
> Mozilla. As detailed in our strategy document, we need to check if that
> idea match with developers' real life needs.

"hope of amplifying their impact" — You want to find people doing great
work already to help them do what they are doing? Are you launching a new
program like the Tech Speakers program, but for something else besides
speaking?

I'm sorry to be a jerk. I don't mean to be. I just honesty have no idea
what you are after. The more I look at this, the more confused I get.


Jen



On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Jeremie Patonnier <jer...@mozilla.com>

> Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org/>
> Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>
>

[Salvador de la Puente]

Hi Jeremie

Like Belen, I'm also intrigued about the form of the artefacts this
research would turn into. I'm assuming you don't know yet but they will
have the form of new programmes (like Tech Speakers) or infrastructure
(like a developer community directory). Am I wrong?

Anyway, I think I can provide some people interested in what I learned from
this initiative so far.

Thank you.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 12:05 PM, Belén Albeza <be...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Hi Jeremie, I've taken a look at the links you've posted and your
> reply to Jen and I still don't understand what the project is exactly
> about.
>

> "[...] to build a community of developers who share the same values as

> Mozilla for the open web in the hope of amplifying their impact in
> exchange for more visibility for Mozilla."
>

> Don't we have already a Mozilla community around the world? What's
> exactly the difference between our current community and this one,
> beyond this one labelled as "developers"?
>
> Thanks! :)
> Belén
>

> On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jeremie Patonnier <jer...@mozilla.com>

> > Twitter : @JeremiePat
>
>
>


--
<salva />

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi Salvador

2017-02-22 13:06 GMT+01:00 Salvador de la Puente <sdela...@mozilla.com>:

> Hi Jeremie
>
> Like Belen, I'm also intrigued about the form of the artefacts this
> research would turn into. I'm assuming you don't know yet
>
but they will have the form of new programmes (like Tech Speakers) or
> infrastructure (like a developer community directory). Am I wrong?
>

Not at all, you are absolutely right, the resulting form it will take is
still to be define. At that stage we are validating the ideas and the
expectations around that project, hence the necessity to start opening the
discussion to our expected target audience (and getting internal feedback
as well, so thank you all for the feedback here :).

> Anyway, I think I can provide some people interested in what I learned
> from this initiative so far.
>

\o/ Let me know if you want more clarification.

Best,
--
Jeremie
.............................
(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear

[David Ross]

Nice one. Tiny couple of typos in the nomination form: 

"Is it okay to use you name to indicate that you are the one who
introduce the nominee to us?"

might be edited to say:

"Is it okay to use your name to indicate that you are the one who
introduced the nominee to us?"

[Belén Albeza]

Hi Jeremie,

More clarification (sorry!): is this something similar to the Google
Developer Expert initiative?

Thanks!
Belén

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Jeremie Patonnier <jer...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hi Belén
>
> 2017-02-22 12:05 GMT+01:00 Belén Albeza <be...@mozilla.com>:
>>

>> Hi Jeremie, I've taken a look at the links you've posted and your
>> reply to Jen and I still don't understand what the project is exactly
>> about.
>>
>> "[...] to build a community of developers who share the same values as
>> Mozilla for the open web in the hope of amplifying their impact in
>> exchange for more visibility for Mozilla."
>>
>> Don't we have already a Mozilla community around the world? What's
>> exactly the difference between our current community and this one,
>> beyond this one labelled as "developers"?
>
>

> Best,
> --
> Jeremie
> .............................
> (￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear

> Mozilla Developer Marketing Team, MDN lover
> Twitter : @JeremiePat

[Jeremie Patonnier]

2017-02-22 18:06 GMT+01:00 Belén Albeza <be...@mozilla.com>:

> Hi Jeremie,
>

> More clarification (sorry!): is this something similar to the Google
> Developer Expert initiative?
>

We clearly look at the tree main dev programs from google:

- Google Developer Groups (GDG)
- Google Developer Expert (GDE)
- Together with Google

Which are somewhat linked. They are source of inspiration and some sort of
thorn in our foot as it's pointless to try mimicking this.

As we are at the very beginning of our research work for that project, it
would be helpful to discuss with some developers to try figuring if it's
more valuable for Mozilla to invest in a structure closer from GDE than GDG
or something completely different.

Best,
--
Jeremie
.............................
(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ Lovely Wild Bear

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Thanks David, it's fixed :D

> _______________________________________________
> mdn mailing list
> m...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/mdn

[Jeremie Patonnier]

Hi Jen,

Quite an e-mail, thanks for taking the time to get into all those details :)

2017-02-22 13:15 GMT+01:00 Jen Simmons <jensi...@mozilla.com>:

> Are you trying to build a community of tens of thousands of people? Or are
> you trying to gather a good cross-section of the kind of people who are in
> our audience so that you can do user research and testing?
>

As of now, it's not possible to give a final answer to that. We have
identified a need from Mozilla
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10j7p3gCfW_Zt-LGmVzSlh9zZZ7lHXuBawTjLguHbRHQ/edit#slide=id.g1cb3df14f2_0_195>
and a target audience that can help us fulfilling that need. Would it be
done by providing a structure to build a large community of individuals and
organizations, or to build a club of super experts is not define yet. This
is why I'm trying to find good people to speak with in order to refine our
vision in a way that make it both actionable and sustainable.

> Why are you only targeting developers? Haven't we decided over and over
> that the work of "Dev Relations" and "Dev Marketing" should be reaching a
> wide audience of everyone who affects decisions when creating a project on
> the web? Including user experience designers, graphic designers, content
> strategists, stakeholders, etc. Or is this something I just keep saying,
> while everyone else disagrees with the idea?
>

Two point here: Developer seams to be a good first audience to us and I've
been told to focus on that crowd. That said, I agree with you that
"Developer" is in essence maybe too narrow. I myself carry a dual
background of designer and developer (I'm graduate in design and
communication and I learned Development all along my career) and I support
you're claim that we should address a wider audience. As this project is
brand new, it's quite easy to open up our target audience. I would just
like to hear from Ali and Jason on that topic to make sure we are all on
the same page here.

>
> I have a personal bias toward web developers but all kind of developers
>> are welcome.
>
>

> We are targeting Java Engineers? iOS programmers? Now I'm really confused.
> I thought MDN, Developer Marketing and Developer Relations efforts were
> about the web, and people who make projects for the web or with web
> technology. Not everyone who writes any kind of computer program.
>

Not sure I get you're point here. When I say "all kind of developers are
welcome" i want to make sure that we tend to not inadvertently close doors.
For example is a Java Engineer or an iOS programmer who is building native
apps for Android and iPhone part of our target? If such apps consume web
services I would say yes, they are potential target to us as their product
are linked to the web infrastructure. Another example: what about a C++
developer building a UI to create games that output WASM code? I would tend
to say that person is not a web developer but should be in our target
audience. And what about Rust developers?

Once could also argue that we could legitimately provide support to any
open source developer (btw we actually do through the MOSS program) which
open to quite a large audience.

I'm not familiar with goals from the DevRel team but the DevMarketing team
clearly have goals toward just the web (promoting Rust as very little to do
with the web)

>
> a community of developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the
>> open web in the hope of amplifying their impact in exchange for more
>> visibility for Mozilla.

>> Developers who share a sens of value with Mozilla.
>
>

> This is so incredibly broad I honestly do not know what it means. Almost
> everyone thinks they "share the values" that Mozilla talks about when
> thinking in broad strokes. It would help if you could state what values you
> mean — you are looking for designers and developers who understand and
> value accessibility, because you are testing a project that's about a11y?
> Are you doing a thing where you want people who understand the importance
> of User Experience design to get involved? Or you need people who… — wait,
> why do you want to get a group that agrees with Mozilla values as a
> prerequisite? Which Mozilla values?
>

This a very heavy loaded question, but I will risk an answer anyway. First,
Mozilla has clearly stated a set of values through the Mozilla manifesto (some
reading <https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/> rather than
repeating everything here). Second, Mozilla is: clearly advocating for
Privacy; providing an Internet Health report
<https://internethealthreport.org/v01/> that clearly highlight our concern
for the web (innovation, privacy, diversity, decentralization, web
literacy); Do political lobbying against legal attempt to the freedom of
the web (net neutrality, abusive copyright, censorship, etc.)

So when I state that I'm looking for "Developer who share a sens of value
with Mozilla", I mean: Developer that recognize themselves in all or part
of the values defended above and who are claiming they care about them. Is
it a broad audience? Hell yes, and I know it will be very difficult and
time consuming to narrow things down to something that is really realistic
and actionable. That said I prefer to make mistakes trying to find a common
way to gather such different people than turning back at the bottom of a
hill.

>
>
>> Extra bonus point if they are involved with developers organization
>> promoting Diversity & Inclusion or if they are tech leader in their local
>> area.
>
>

> Is "extra bonus points for being involved with an organization that is
> involved with thinking about diversity and inclusion" a euphemism for
> saying you are looking for women and people of color to get involved? I
> hope so. And I hope that this goes without saying. If you gather a group of
> young white men you are going to bias the results. I hope that's not "bonus
> point" material. I hope that's a requirement for whatever you are doing.
> The first step in decent research is to make sure your sample is
> representative. Without a correct sample, all of the data is useless. I
> know Mozilla struggles with this. I know most of the research I've seen is
> very biased due to bad sampling. Everyone was passing around a link on
> Twitter the other day to a study by Stack Overflow — a study that is
> ridiculously useless because their research methods were horrendous, and
> their sample was awful. Yet the whole industry was talking about the
> "results" of the survey as if there were fact. It's infuriating. I hope
> Mozilla can figure this out. Creating a proper sample before doing research
> is imperative.
>

For what is worth I agree with you, it appears I've expressed myself badly,
sorry.

>
> This said, I'm assuming you are working on a research project, and you are
> looking for people to interview for that research. Maybe that's not what
> you are doing at all.
>

That's what I'm doing. I've been asked to work on building a community of
developers which means everything and nothing. My first work has been to
ensure that such an idea fit with the goals of my team (in particular) and
Mozilla (in general). Now that it appears so it's necessary to discuss with
our target audience to assess if it as any relevance to move forward in
that direction and what are their real expectation to see if there is a
match with Mozilla objectives. If you look closely at what has been done so
far you'll see no tactics or actionable plan at that stage to build
anything. It's all about research and assessment.


>
> On the project itself: The Dev Marketing team want to build a community of

>> developers who share the same values as Mozilla for the open web in the
>> hope of amplifying their impact in exchange for more visibility for

>> Mozilla. As detailed in our strategy document, we need to check if that
>> idea match with developers' real life needs.
>
>

> "hope of amplifying their impact" — You want to find people doing great
> work already to help them do what they are doing?
>

We want to find people doing simply *nice* work and see if it's possible to
provide them support to do even better. If there is no support needed then
this project will end up here. Can you provide us with a definitive answer
in that matter?

> Are you launching a new program like the Tech Speakers program, but for
> something else besides speaking?
>

Undefined at that stage, research is needed to find out what is expected,
if any. Hence my kind request for contact in the wild :)

> I'm sorry to be a jerk. I don't mean to be. I just honesty have no idea
> what you are after. The more I look at this, the more confused I get.
>

That's okay, I can be quite a Jerk myself ;) I tend to said that your
confusion is understandable. Again, as it's the very beginning of a new
project, the research work is all about refining and providing clearer
definition of the perimeter of the project. If it's about why we are doing
this, I would say that it's a question that will be better to ask to Ali
and Jason as they have better understanding of this than I do. I would only
be able to provide a very partial answer to it as I do not necessarily
master the larger picture around that.

Best,