We had a great call this morning with some people working Mozilla’s Drumbeat project, including Matt Thompson and Mark Surman. We tried to share some insights from the Cambrian House community and hope they were helpful to the Drumbeat crew.
Not everyone contributes in the same way -The Cambrian House community had a pretty complex system to award points to community members, as not everyone contributes in the same way. For any project, you’ve got passionate founding members who are incented by potential reward, interested contributors who are incented by cold hard cash and helpful community members who are happy with a little recognition.
You need a project champion – People are busy. Unless there’s someone around driving the project forward, organizing what needs to happen next, it is very slow going. While nobody likes a drill sergeant, having someone with a vision of where the project is going and a good list of what needs to get done is invaluable.
Break everything down, sum everything up – The idea of joining a project that is entirely crowdsourced is overwhelming. However, the idea of taking on creating copy for an about page, or writing code for a join page isn’t nearly as intimidating. Bit-sized chunks of work are easier for people to grab, depending on their skill-set. Once a week, summarize the high-level view – where projects are at, what projects are doing really well, what’s new – this gives your community members the chance to explore new thing, to know their contributions are making an impact and to stay motivated.
Everybody is good at something – Are your community members contributing to this project as experts pushing a field forward, or are they using the project to work on improving some skills? It is great ot have a mix of both – learners are easily overwhelmed, but can end up being great at QA, or smaller tasks…the same things that experts get really annoyed at having to deal with.
If anyone has anything to add from their experience as a Cambrian House community member, we’d love to hear your advice.
