Firefox for Android mentor bug groups

[Mike Taylor]

On 9/22/15 4:41 PM, Richard Newman wrote:
> One of the problems we face with fatfennec and other big projects is
> that it's difficult for volunteers (and paid contributors, for that
> matter!) to make the jump from [good-first-bug]s to the harder/less well
> specified/less approachable bugs.
>
> That's compounded by over-committed senior folks not finding the time to
> do enough work to break own those big hairy bugs.
>
> We also tend to take an all-or-nothing approach to fixing bugs, so those
> difficult projects tend to sit.
>
> I'd like to get to a place where 'success' wasn't synonymous with
> 'RESOLVED': where we can leverage our contributor base to incrementally
> move some of these bugs forward, whether that's by doing investigation
> (almost triage!), breaking down meta bugs, or even writing up better
> summaries.

I admit it's my tendency to not consider my own contributions successful 
unless I've written a patch and it's landed on moz-central. But then 
again, a comment like this is a super useful contribution (to me as 
someone who might try to fix that) even though it didn't result in any 
code written: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=887517#c8>

I wonder how we can make people feel recognized and valued for this kind 
of non-greppable-in-a-codebase work? I don't actually know.

> That is: can our contributors help our contributors?

One thing that comes to mind is what we try to do on webcompat.com/Tech 
Evangelism bugs. We have a set of whiteboard strings (and labels on 
GitHub) like [needsdiagnosis], [needscontact], [contactready] so in 
theory if someone isn't skilled at debugging minified JS or whatever 
they might be really good at finding points of contact for a given 
website and that's how they contribute. (But we have a lot of work to do 
to make people aware of this and grow our own community of contributors...).

-- 
Mike Taylor
Web Compat, Mozilla