Set Your Project Up For Success With This Working Open Checklist

What are your intentions for 2020?

To start a new project? To broaden the reach of an established project? To strengthen your connection with a community? To learn something new?

Whatever your goals, whether baby steps or giant leaps, set yourself up for success this year by using open and collaborative practices in your goal-setting.

Opensource.com provides helpful and easy-to-follow guidelines for setting better career goals. “The Open Decision Framework provides a useful process for setting goals transparently and collaboratively. Applying it to goal setting means identifying people that will be impacted by your goals or those who could help you make them better. “

Our team has also created an easy-to-use Working Open Checklist for you to use this year to set your project up for open and collaborative success. This checklist includes things you can start TODAY for those new to working open and includes things that even the most seasoned “open” individual can utilize.

4-Step Working Open Checklist

STEP 1 DESIGN: To figure out what you’re doing and why, you can:

Write a POP (Purpose-Outcomes-Process) to help you clarify your aims and plans for your work. (worksheet)
Fill out an Open Canvas to define and share your project goals, community strategy, and needs for resources. (canvas)
Write a vision to describe your project’s big idea in a super short form that you can share with everyone and anyone.

STEP 2 BUILD: To let people know how to join, you can:

Create a short text document called a “README” file, to welcome newcomers to your project
Create Personas and Pathways for your project, a tool to help you plan and test how you'll interact with new contributors.
Write or choose a Code of Conduct, to establish guidelines for how members of your community interact with each other.
Write Contributing Guidelines, a set of instructions that explain how new contributors can help out on your project.
Add an open license to help others understand how they can reuse, remix, and share your work. (choose a license for code or content)

STEP 3 EMPOWER: To Invite people to collaborate, you can:

Develop effective communications channels for your project.
Make personal invitations. People are 4x more likely to contribute if they receive a personal invitation.
Mentor new contributors to raise up new leaders in your project.

STEP 4 WORK OPEN: Collaborate & help others be open!

Join an Open Leaders X cohort.
Join us for MozFest.
Share your work on Pulse.
Keep up with the latest in open programming with our newsletter.
Visit the Vault for previously developed working open resources.
Share the open love! Send this list to others who might be interested. <3 Here’s a sample tweet to get you started:
- Want to work more openly but not sure how to start? Check out this Working Open Checklist from @mozilla: https://mzl.la/work-open-checklist #WOLO #workingopen #openleaders