David Tenser has published an extensive series of blog posts where he has been discussing a comprehensive vision for the scope and role of the Support.mozilla.org (SUMO) project. He has recently published the eighth and final post in the series, this one focused on the innovative and incredibly useful “Live Chat” feature. “If a problem isn’t yet covered in the Knowledge Base, or if the instructions in the article are too hard to understand, Live Chat is a powerful way for users to get in touch with Firefox experts and get hands-on assistance in solving their problems. Live Chat can also be a very fun way for contributors to provide support. Contributors helping out with Live Chat don’t just help users, they talk to each other in the backchannel as well, providing assitance to other helpers whenever needed. This means that although you’re usually the only one interacting with the user you’re helping, you’re never alone.”

David’s blog post goes on to discuss some potential future improvements for the service, including a fully integrated chat client, a simple scheduling solution, support for languages other than English, and automatically saving chat logs and associated user happiness ratings, among other things. If you’re interested in the Live Chat feature of the SUMO project and would like to see how the team is thinking about improving it in the future, read the full post over at the Firefox Support Blog.

Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla’s Director of Localization, recently blogged about some steps the Localization Drivers team is taking to increase the visibility of localization activities and improve project communications. The two primary tools they’re using are the Localization Dashboard and the team’s new weekly triage meetings where they ensure that high priority issues are dealt with quickly. Additionally, the team has created a new Firefox 3 l10n release trackers bug, and are working to make it easier for new localization teams to navigate through the early stages of our process. The results of some of these efforts are clear, as Seth announces that there are likely to be 13 more languages added to Firefox in the 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 releases, which is a huge accomplishment in the span of two minor updates. For more about Mozilla’s localization work, see Seth’s full blog post.