Attendees: Ruth John (@Rumyra), Vadim Makeev (@pepelsbey), Pranshu Khanna (@pransh15), Dipika Bhattacharya (@dipikabh), Florian Dieminger (@fiji-flo), Leo (@LeoMcA), Andi Piper (@argl), Chris (@chrisdavidmills), Onkar Ruikar(@OnkarRuikar), Jessica Rose, Lucas Garcia, Reko, Halil
Host: Pranshu Khanna (@pransh15)
[Pranshu] One important item not on the agenda is the contributor spotlight for August. We are highlighting Josh Cena (@Josh-Cena), one of our contributors whose work we greatly appreciate. Josh has made numerous contributions to MDN, and if you've been around, you’ve probably seen his work. This is just a way to recognize Josh and everything he does for MDN. I wanted to share this on the community call before making the announcement.
- Contributor Spotlight: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/community/spotlight/joshua-chen
In the last community call, I mentioned that we should have a separate reviewers meeting. We've decided to call it the Content Meeting to better reflect the scope and focus of these meetings — this meeting will be our space to discuss all things content.
We're open to suggestions on how to structure this meeting. I was thinking of keeping an open Google Doc with the complete agenda, where folks can add the issues, PRs, and topics they want to discuss.
We currently have everything set up on GitHub, but a running document would help us keep track of everything together, and of course, that doc will be linked.
[Ruth] That sounds great, Pranshu.
[Jessica] I want to interrupt the MDN call to talk about Common Voice. Many of the Mozilla folks had an offsite last week, and one thing I kept hearing from the MDN team was, "Oh, we've got the best contributors!" They were a little bit boastful, if I’m being honest.
One thing that made sense is that MDN contributors are understandably passionate about good documentation. So, I wanted to talk to you all about Common Voice, and this is really just a very soft cry for help.
I’m just starting to rework our documentation. You don’t have to write code or do anything technical, but if any of you have the time and interest, I’d love for you to look at our documentation and give us feedback.
Instead of "PRs welcome", we’ve got a bunch of issues and complaints. If it’s okay, I’ll very briefly chat about what Common Voice is, and show you where the repo lives. It’ll just be a very chill five minutes.
Common Voice is one of my favorite open-source projects. If you've ever used Siri or Google, or any voice assistant, you know they work 100% of the time—as long as you sound exactly like me.
Common Voice is a voice contribution platform that lets people donate their voice by reading clips in their home languages. We release this data under a copyright-free, cost-free dataset. Our goal is to ensure that voice technologies work for more languages and accents and that developers building these technologies have high-quality datasets without cost barriers.
If you want to contribute non-technically, you can read clips in your home language or listen to others.
One criticism we often hear is, "You don’t have my language." We love that feedback, so right now Common Voice offers data in just 530 languages. But if you think we should add your language, come in and request it. We’d love that.
Our docs are currently in our main repo, and we’re debating whether to keep it there. If you all have strong opinions, I’d love to hear them.
I head the project for our main platform and data collection platform. If you have time, it would be immensely helpful if you could take a look and provide feedback. You all are really passionate about contributor guidelines and documentation. Sharing your input would be one of the kindest things you can do.
If you have 5 or 10 minutes, looking at the documentation and saying, "Hey, this doesn't make sense," or "This is weird," would be incredibly valuable. We’re really looking for wider community feedback because we work on it a lot, and we love it, which means we have a bit of expert bias.
If you want to raise an issue, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. But I also understand everyone’s busy. Thank you so much!
[Chris] Cool.
[Pranshu] This is great. I’ve also shared the links for Common Voice and GitHub if you all want to check them out:
- Common Voice: https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/
- GitHub: https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice
Where can we find you if we have questions, Jessica?
[Jessica] The links are in the repo. We’ve also got a Discourse forum, a Matrix channel, or you can email us. There's a 50-50 chance I'll reply, or you might hear from our language community manager, Dina, who is a cooler, smarter version of me.
[Pranshu] Awesome. Thank you so much.
[Pranshu] Next up, this is both an announcement and a call for contributors. We are revamping the community page! We want the page to focus more on our contributors, with space for them to be featured, and clear ways for newcomers to contribute, all while keeping our good first issues front and center.
If you want to be part of the contributor section on the community page, reach out to me, and I’ll send you a form to fill out. We would love to feature you as part of our community.
[Chris] You all might know that we have the MDN curriculum published, and Scrimba is our learning partner. What we’re currently doing is looking for ways to increase engagement. Full disclosure: this brings us affiliate revenue, which goes back into MDN to make it even better.
We’re experimenting with including a few Scrimba links in strategic places in the learning area. We want to get the balance right — we don’t want to add links everywhere, which could seem spammy or like product placement. But we do want to increase engagement.
MDN typically has strict rules about commercial and promotional links, but since Scrimba is a partner and a valid educational resource, we’re going to try adding a few links and see how it looks. We’ll start with 4 or 5.
I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up so that you know what’s going on, and you can respond either here or when the links appear.
[Ruth] We do have a strict policy for adding external links on MDN, but as Chris said, this is a partner. We’re going to see if this drives more engagement, and we’ll take it from there. We’re not going to plaster the links everywhere. We’ve selected a few specific pages, so it’s non-intrusive.
[Pranshu] Okay, we're good. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining. I’ll see some of you at the content meeting in September.