How I tried to get involved at Mozilla and why it didn't work

This is a response to David Boswell’s post.

I first tried to get involved with Mozilla in 2007 several years before applying for an internship position. As an insider it’s easy to imagine how one would start to contribute to Mozilla by finding a bug on bugzilla or contacting someone on IRC. In practice this is much harder. I tried searching similar keywords such as ‘mozilla contribute programming’. This search leads to the promising page http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/ which is similar to what I remember finding several years ago. The visual layout of the page however puts emphasis on Webify Me/WebFWD but does not mention direct ways to contribute via Coding and QA.

I still remember the mindset that I had back in 2007. I was specifically looking for a task to work on and I was hoping to get a point of contact to be able to ask questions for that specific task. I finally got involved with Mozilla once I was offered an internship where I received clear tasks and mentors to ask questions to. I hope that the process for new community members will resemble the internship process.

I feel like mentored bugs will help address this. I hope that we focus on making them more visible through SEO, http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/, simplifying wiki links. We need to improve the quantity and quality of the mentored bugs. This is where Contributor Steward will be helpful. Quality for mentored bugs is still lacking. Josh Matthews posted a great explanation, yet I took a random of mentored bugs and myself was confused where to start on certan bugs.

I hope to discuss many suggestions with David Boswell in the future, and I hope others follow suit on the mozillians mailing list.

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