Sugar Labs/Volunteer Funnel
The Volunteer Pathway
We believe that new volunteers typically follow a path similar to the following:
- Become aware of Sugar
- Find Sugar
- Try and successfully use Sugar
- Decide that Sugar is "sweet", i.e., valuable for education, interesting, etc.
- Understand that Sugar is a Community Project supported by volunteers
- Have an initial engagement with the Community
- Want to help, or at least, Be There for Sugar
- Become part of a Task/Team/Group or get a mentor
- Successfully complete a task
- Contribute ideas, take more responsibility, provide leadership, help others, etc.
Examples of contributing ideas, taking responsibility, and providing leadership include:
- Edit the wiki
- Test an Activity
- Pilot at a school
- Mentor a student
- Maintain an Activity
- Develop core software
- Create lesson plans and align with standards
- Create training materials and manuals
- Coordinate Sugar presence at conferences or running Sugar Camps
- Write blogs, press releases, or articles about Sugar
- Write grant proposals
How to improve at each step
Become Aware of Sugar and Finding Sugar
Our Marketing Team is working on this with press releases, etc.
Try and successfully use Sugar
Our Development Team is working on this by making Sugar on a Stick more robust. We also need to keep working on installation instructions and different and every easier ways to get it working on different hardware platforms.
Decide Sugar is Sweet
Our goal is to have storytelling work; video and the main website should all support people understanding how Sugar is used in education, and why it's different and better for 5-12-year-old learners.
A concrete action is to add the Help Activity back into Sugar on a Stick so that people can easily find the manual, etc.
Understand that Sugar is a Community Project supported by volunteers
It is probably not obvious to first time Sugar users that its not another commercial project. We want to add info the Help Activity to let people know its a Community Project.
Initial Engagement
Right now people have to goto an in person meetup or conference or join the mailing list. The vision is to make it easier with "Ask a Question". This would be a link from the Help Activity to a web page with a form. The person puts a question and their email address into the form. The question is sent to IAEP and anyone there can reply answering their question or pointing them to the answer. If we succeed in involving the person in a dialog we can invite them to join the community and IAEP list.
Wanting to help
Our theory is if we involve people in a dialog with the community and they learn about Sugar, our mission and that we are a volunteer community project they will want to help.
Being part of a task/team/group/getting a mentor/buddy
Right now its a big jump from wanting to help to really engaging and being part of something. We are looking for ways to make this easier. One step is to add the email address of a real person to each section of "Getting Involved".
We would also like to create geographical contacts.
Successfully completing a task
Getting your first task complete is hard. Hopefully contact with a real person in the step above will help.
Take responsibility
We want *you* to be a leader. Examples include
- Become a mentor
- Team leader
- Pilot at a school
- Activity maintainer/creator
- Core developer
- Public relations
- Lead a Sugar Camp or a presence at a conference
Become a Sugar Labs Leader?
First step is to read Starfish and Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.