{"id":2247,"date":"2015-09-30T22:40:11","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T22:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/?p=2247"},"modified":"2015-09-30T23:18:51","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T23:18:51","slug":"whats-in-a-name-volunteer-vrs-contributor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/2015\/09\/30\/whats-in-a-name-volunteer-vrs-contributor\/","title":{"rendered":"Participation Lab Notes: Volunteer vrs Contributor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/files\/2015\/09\/4773973784_8e249c98e7_z.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-2248 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/files\/2015\/09\/4773973784_8e249c98e7_z-600x400.jpg\" alt=\"4773973784_8e249c98e7_z\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/files\/2015\/09\/4773973784_8e249c98e7_z-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/files\/2015\/09\/4773973784_8e249c98e7_z-252x168.jpg 252w, https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/files\/2015\/09\/4773973784_8e249c98e7_z.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As part of the Participation Lab\u2019s efforts we recently began conducting \u00a0experiments on the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/en-US\/contribute\/signup\/\"> Get Involved Page <\/a>seeking to better understand how people navigate and connect (or fail to connect) to <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/2015\/09\/01\/participation-lab-notes-short-simple-tasks-increase-engagement\/\">contribution opportunities<\/a>. In preparation for this experiment we looked at some of the research that the Mozilla.org team had conducted in recent years, and a number of their \u00a0key learnings led us to a deeper conversation about the language and labels we use to invite contribution to Mozilla. Some of the those learnings were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People need to understand what, and why before they\u2019ll be interested in understanding how they can contribute to Mozilla.<\/li>\n<li>We must make it immediately apparent that the Get Involved \u00a0page is seeking volunteers and not employees.<\/li>\n<li>We need to set clear expectation of investment\/journey needed to get involved or become a Mozillian.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This matched some other feedback,\u00a0 and as a result we decided to conduct a series of interviews to discover more ideas and prejudices that exist around the terms volunteer and contributor. Eighteen interviews covering diverse perspectives were conducted, these included core contributors, project leaders, alumni, community project leads, those working in open science, advocacy and randomly selected people in my life who had never contributed to Mozilla.\u00a0 We discovered four interesting insights shared below.<\/p>\n<h2>Project preference is \u2018Contributor\u2019<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Overall, people working in, or already volunteering with Mozilla were more comfortable with \u2018contributor\u2019, but agreed that unless your background was working in a field like software engineering, or science where the term is already part of the language ecosystem, it might be challenging to grasp. \u00a0I also noticed \u00a0a trend in feedback that acknowledged\u00a0 once you\u2019re regularly involved\u00a0 in a project you might no longer be objective, and that we may, in fact, be skewing even the most common understanding of these terms. One example given was the use of \u00a0\u2018paid contributor\u2019 and \u2018volunteer contributor\u2019, which made no sense for most people outside of Mozilla.<\/p>\n<h2>The term \u2018Volunteering\u2019 is more universally\u00a0 associated with lending time and skills but&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>While people seemed to generally understand that volunteering was about lending time and skills, I encountered sensitivities that the word \u2018volunteer\u2019 which invoked feelings of being \u2018charitable\u2019 vs the more empowered feeling of being a \u2018contributor\u2019 .\u00a0 I heard that &#8216;contribution&#8217; lends to a feeling we\u2019re part \u2018part of something \u2019 while &#8216;volunteering felt more detached.\u00a0 One core contributor felt very, very strongly, that volunteering was not the term for what they do at Mozilla.<\/p>\n<h2>\u2018Contribution\u2019 feels more like giving a gift or donation<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Feedback from non-technical contributors ,and those I spoke with outside the Mozilla community indicated that \u00a0the term \u201ccontribution\u201d was easy to misinterpret as being about donating funds or something of greater significance than some people felt they could offer.\u00a0 When asked, a couple of people cited political campaigns, and fundraisers as the most common association they with the word \u2018contribution\u2019.<\/p>\n<h2>What\u2019s in a Name?<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It was also suggested that at Mozilla we should stop labouring over generalized terms like volunteer and contributor, \u00a0and instead focus\u00a0 energies on clarifying ways people can help &#8211; One person felt that such opportunity\u00a0 exists in more explicit \u2018role titles\u2019\u00a0 i.e. <i>Android Community Ambassador<\/i>\u2019. \u00a0\u00a0The hypothesis is, that by providing role titles we can help people connect to opportunities that are resume-worthy with recognition that contribution is an <i>opportunity<\/i>.\u00a0 Of course, there are already examples of success with role names demonstrated by the <a href=\"https:\/\/reps.mozilla.org\/\">Mozilla Reps program<\/a> and most recently Club Captains and Regional Leads in <a href=\"https:\/\/teach.mozilla.org\/clubs\/\">Webmaker Clubs<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Also..<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We had an interesting suggestion that\u00a0 we make up our own name!\u00a0 Create a Mozilla-fied name for volunteers that makes volunteering at Mozilla a unique version of both terms. \u00a0An inspiring example was the London Olympics which called volunteers \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/olympics.time.com\/2012\/08\/08\/olympic-volunteers-are-earning-the-games-makers-title\/\">Games Makers<\/a>\u2019, what a Mozilli-fied version would be remained unclear \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0but I\u2019m sure we could come up with something.\u00a0 What do you think?<\/p>\n<p>Additional lure of a Mozilla-fied name is a chance to help people recognize the amazingness of the community they would be joining which MDN reported to be a factor in repeat contribution in their area \u00a0&#8211; and similar to how an Olympic volunteerism resonated with a name describing their impact.<\/p>\n<h2>So where from here?<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There is the opportunity for continued experimentation and testing using the Get Involved Page, and \u00a0we would love to hear from you &#8211; contributor volunteer, Mozillia-fied name?<\/p>\n<p>What experiment \u00a0do you think the Participation Lab should design \u00a0next with these new insights?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Image: &#8220;Mozilla Summit Day 2&#8221; by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/roland\/\">Roland Tanglao<\/a>is licensed under <a class=\"external text\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"attribution-info\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As part of the Participation Lab\u2019s efforts we recently began conducting \u00a0experiments on the Get Involved Page seeking to better understand how people navigate and connect (or fail to connect) &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/2015\/09\/30\/whats-in-a-name-volunteer-vrs-contributor\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65226],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2247"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}