Photo by DennisSylvesterHurd

Think of the last time you walked up to a complete stranger, stuck out your hand and said, “Hi, my name is …” Depending on how often you do that, it was probably a scary moment. Before you walked up to the person, you had to steel your nerves, decide what you were going to say, and then approach them.

Joining an open source software project is a bit like that. You have to send a mail to a huge list of random people. Or file a bugzilla bug that goes to a ton of random people.

And then imagine the immediate response is “WONTFIX” with no comments. That’s like if the person you got up the nerve to introduce yourself to said, “Not interested.”

I once spent weeks convincing a friend she should help out on an open source software project. She did. And she sent in her work to the mailing list and the first response was full of harsh critique. None of the follow up messages made up for that first message. I never did convince her to push her work forward. Nor to participate in open source again. (She does know exactly what she’d say to that first critic if she ever met him in person!)

What can we do to make sure people trying to shake our hands get a better reception?

When I first started using email, I had a part time job in the computer science department at Rice University. A new grad student joined the department and a few days after he started, I noticed it was his birthday. Knowing he was unlikely to know many people in town, I sent him an email that said, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” all spelled out in big letters made out of asterisks. He wrote me back “Thanks a lot”. Now in my world, “Thanks a lot” was always said “Thanks a *lot*” with a slightly sarcastic twist to it. I emailed him right back to ask him if he really liked it or if he was being sarcastic. He said no, of course, he really liked it.

So if one happy birthday email can be that confusing, imagine what can go wrong with a complicated email about project directions and motivations … Especially when it’s going out to a mailing list that has hundreds of people on it. That’s what most of us in the open source space deal with every day. Some of us do it better than others. Some days we do it better than others. But we all work at it every day. It’s the way we communicate with our friends, peers and co-workers.

Please meet the Mozilla Conductors

A few months ago, several of us at Mozilla had a conversation about how we could best help people learn how to communicate well online. We have new people joining the project all the time and they have to learn how to communicate on mailing lists, IRC and bugzilla. Those of us helping them realize daily what a challenge it can be. As much as we don’t think about it, cc’ing the right people, quoting previous mail messages and keeping the conversation from getting argumentative are not easy things.

We were looking for a way to help everyone communicate better, exploring all sorts of crazy options like classes and consultants, and realized we had the best resources right inside our project. We have people that are really good at fostering online conversations. They’ve been doing it for years; quietly (and not so quietly) leading and directing the conversations and projects they are part of.

So we sent out a bunch of emails, came to a consensus and created the Mozilla Conductors!

Mozilla Conductors help Mozillians with difficult online conversations. We offer advice, suggestions, a listening ear, moral support and, in the case where the discussion is public, occasionally direct intervention. But the goal is to help everyone communicate effectively, not to be enforcers.  If you end up in a difficult online situation, you can reach out to Conductors via the mailing list or to any individual in the group to ask for help. Maybe you just need a sounding board or  help figuring out how to phrase a particular idea or how to make someone particularly difficult go away. The Conductors will help brainstorm, ask questions,  provide ideas and help. And where we are on mailing lists, we commit to helping  keep the conversations constructive.

We are not an officially appointed group. We are a peer nominated group. We are a group of people from across the Mozilla project. We are a Mozilla Module.

Please help us make online conversations productive and Mozilla a success!

High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and Japan.

Low context cultures are process driven. They rely on facts and processes. Their communication style is much more direct and action-orientated. They are orientated towards the individual rather than the group. Western cultures like the US and Germany are considered low context.

So if you start a project and send email to a bunch of folks and ask them to just jump in and contribute, which group do you think will get going more quickly? The low context culture folks. As long as you define the process and procedures, they are willing to work alone and with people they don’t know very well. That’s how open source works. So our projects are optimized for low context cultures.

What happens to the high context folks when invited to participate on a mailing list? They have a hard time sending emails and contributions to people they’ve never met and have no relationship with. (Imagine walking up to a random person on the street and critiquing their dress style. It’s that kind of awkward.) Would they make good contributors? Absolutely! Do we need to find other ways other than “join the mailing list” to get them involved? Absolutely! For an example of what’s worked well, see the great work that Emily Chen, Pockey Lam and Fred Muller and others have done with GNOME Asia.

As I think about developer engagement at Mozilla, I realize we need to have different plans for different cultures. It’s even more important to be present in person for high context cultures. To establish a personal relationship before you invite them to join your project. (Or ask them to use open technologies or spread the word.) We should be following up in different ways, setting up different programs for different countries. Luckily the Mozilla Reps program will help provide the infrastructure for this.

How do you think we should encourage high context cultures to get involved with open source? If you are from a high context culture, how did you get started?