Pilot checklist - A pilot can be successful even if not all of the criteria are met:

• Functional team need: There is a clear need from a Product or Functional team for this to happen, and they can’t do this on their own, i.e. there is a real incentive to punch above our weight
• Measurable impact: The outcome/results are measurable so we’ll be able to tell whether this was a success or not
• Volunteer incentive: There are real volunteer incentives (can be a combo of recognition, learning, impacting mission, swag, financial, or all of the above)
• Asynchronousity: Most of the real work can be done asynchronously and at scale.

Pilot: Discourse

Background:

• The current mailing list/newsgroup/google group discussion forums have been on Mozilla’s radar for a long time as unwieldy and missing features to truly satisfy our communication needs. This has lead to a fracturing of discussion and project planning tools, including trials of Basecamp, and Yammer. Discourse is a viable option as a single tool that satisfies our needs.

Functional team need:

• Tablet Program: Simple discussion forum which allows the 150 new contributors to easily participate in discussion
• Reps: Event reports, discussions to keep the mailing list low-traffic, ability to like posts without “spamming”
• Community Ops: We are also using it as a discussion forum, though we are the ones running the pilot, so we are doing it on our own so far.
• Common needs: A simple to use, full featured discussion forum that retains key features from the current mailing lists, but also provides missing features.
• Foundation (webmaker?)
• Language exchange: Easy to create sub-categories as we find the need for new language categories that are still linked together. No need to sign-up for multiple lists.
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Discussion_Forums/Problem_Statement
• Restricted access

• Tied to Mozillians groups

• Can still be used exclusively via email
• Web interface for enhanced features

• Move topics between categories
• Like posts without creating “noise” (possible to do over email with a plugin)

• Removes need for giganews bridge
• Easily searchable
• Avoid SPAM that google lets through
• Discoverability of individual forums
• Nozzle for the firehose - allow users better control over notifications via subcategories, individual thread watching
• Comes with global moderators, people doing the actual work don’t have to also make time to moderate/administer

Measurable impact:

• Financial Cost - no additional financial cost per category (is there a cost for the current solution?)
• Participation - how many people are using discourse, what are they using it for
• Participation across categories - an advantage over mailing lists, there is a lower cost to participating in different categories, you don’t have to subscribe to the whole category. Can we see more people interacting in more categories?
• Use of features - Discourse has features that the current discussion forums don’t, we could try to measure the number of times one of those features is used, eg the like function.
• Subscriptions - Number of people watching categories, include sub-categories, are people taking the chance to watch part of a project?
• Administration cost - It’s incredibly easy to set up a new category and doesn’t require many administrators (not everyone who wants a list administers it well)
• SPAM - single forum, means we can keep SPAM under control

Volunteer incentive:

• Ops: Learning
• Users: Don’t have to host/maintain their own discussion platform
• Impact: One sign-up gives you access to all of the categories/sub-categories, you can drop a note in one topic without having to watch the whole thing. (Potentially extends to other discourse instances and services hosted by community it)
• Discoverability: it is easy to browse latest topics from all categories from a single page making it easier to stay informed/participate in relevant discussions
• Volunteer moderators:

• Managing Discourse is much easier than managing a mailing list/group hybrid
• It is easier to allow volunteers to manage categories compared to the hybrid list/groups

Asynchronousity:

• This is one of the main points behind discourse, it allows asynchronous communication.
• Category requests can be made and fulfilled asynchronously
• Searching posts is many times easier than google groups
• Can @message users to notify them specifically that their attention is needed in a particular discussion

Target audience:

• Entire Mozilla community
• RASCI

• Responsible (does the work)
• Accountable (in charge of making sure the work gets done)
• Support (helps the responsible with aspects of the work)
• Consult (people who should have a say in how the work is done)
• Informed (people who are affected by the work and should be updated)

• Reps

• People who run events
• Reps who want easy-to-access meeting notes

Requirements:

• AWS Resources: Need this for hosting discourse (already provided).
• Test communities: Already done, Reps, Community Ops, Tablet program
• Security Review?
• Non-ops team