• Web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang, at Mozilla

    November 29th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    I’ve blogged about Jeremiah before and how we met at the >Play Digital Media conference held at Berkeley each year.  Since then, Jeremiah and I kept in touch over email, Facebook, occasional Twitter feeds, etc.  (He’s a web strategist…what do you expect, right?)  After a few exchanges, I took Jeremiah up on an initial offer he made to do a brown bag discussion at Mozilla about various topics where he his expertise crosses-over with Mozilla.

    From a few different people, I heard that Jeremiah’s discussion today was one of the better lunchtime chats we’ve had in a while.  It was mostly due to Jeremiah’s facilitation skills and a lively crowd at lunch.  In our planning for the session, Jeremiah forwarded me a few ideas and specifically asked that the expectation be set that the conversation would be two-way.  I hope we satisfied his hopes and I think we did.

    Our team gathered around the downstairs couches and had a pretty engaging conversation about user experience, product, and marketing for Mozilla.  What was most interesting to me was that we continued to focus on the international aspects of each of these subjects.  What is Mozilla doing to market itself in places like Japan, China, Europe, and the United States?  Is it different across cultures?  How do we localize our products beyond language translation?  What are we doing to engage user (customer) feedback into our product development process?

    Overall, I think we had knowledgeable responses and insights and the conversation flowed nicely.  We honed in on Mozilla’s historic marketing focus on early adopters and how they can become big brand advocates to help spread our products virally.  Although it would be great to have a robust marketing budget to also touch mainstream consumers, I’ll be one of many to tell you that we are never going to fund a commercial for the Super Bowl or anything like that.  Jeremiah seemed really interested in points made by people like Gen (Japan) and Tristan (Europe) and John (U.S./China), who all discussed similarities of early adopters across cultures.

    Before I knew it, the hour was up.  As he closed the conversation, Jeremiah posted a few challenges for our team:

    1)  How is Mozilla going to move its marketing beyond focus on early adopters?
    2)  What other strategies outside of word of mouth does or will Mozilla do to spread its products?
    3)  What localized (yet globally deployed) tools will we create better marketing collaboration and feedback from our users?
    4)  Technographics studies indicate different users need different products, how will Mozilla respond (esp in growth markets like China and India)?

    A great lunch conversation.  Thanks, Jeremiah!

  • AUS for Calendar project

    November 19th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    In Mid-may of 2007,  Stefan Sitter initiated a discussion among Mozilla build and release, the IT team, and the Calendar community about setting up a dedicated auto-update system on a community server for their project.  Sunbird was using the aus2.mozilla.org server for nightly updates, but releases are a different story.  The issue surfaced in Bugzilla and we decided to use some of the dedicated community server for an AUS setup for Sunbird.  The detail of the decision can be found in bug 381420 in Bugzilla.  The old process was creating a pretty big bottleneck for the calendar project’s release process.  With this new setup, they should not have to post any snippets for release, as the old process required.

    Reflecting about this project, I was pretty pleased how it finally came about, in large part because it was a team effort where everyone contributed.  I have to admit, I really took a back seat.  The bug was initiated by Stefan and others quickly contributed.  Two special Mozilla Corp shout-outs:  one to Paul Reed, former Build and Release engineer, and the other to Matt Zeier on the Mozilla IT department.  They really followed this bug to close and made sure Mozilla provided help when and where it could.

    If there was room for improvement, I guess we could have moved a bit more quickly on this.   The bug was initially filed on May 21, 2007 and we didn’t close it out until November 12, 2007.  But, it’s also fair to say that this was a completely distributed decision making process with a good number of people involved.  The problem was presented and a few proposed solutions were suggested.  (See Preed’s Comment 4 as one example.)  I came into the fold because I was able to provide some resources in the way of server space.  With the community server in Amsterdam, I knew we had some resources we could allocate, so we got approval to do this and moved forward.  The discussion progressed back and forth and finally came to a close once we were able to get an SSL cert for the Calendar project to use.

    What I’d like to hear specifically from the Calendar team is how this new setup helps them going forward. We’ve also been talking about setting this up for other community projects (See KaiRo’s comment #18).  Let’s see how this goes and then explore other projects.

    Thanks to everyone involved.  Always feels good to see an idea get proposed and then executed.

  • How we decided upon FOSS.IN

    November 16th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    If you’ve been following this blog, you may have seen some posts over the past few months about Mozilla’s participation in India’s largest open source conference, FOSS.IN.  Our initial planning culminated with Mozilla’s project day proposal being accepted by the FOSS.IN planning team.  That was exciting.

    What did I learn in this process, and what, if any, valuable takeaways from this process are worth sharing?

    Here goes…

    This is one of the first major events that I helped take a lead role in planning.  Mary Colvig is our event planning manager and has been a long standing member of Mozilla’s marketing team.  (If she had a blog, I’d link to her…but no…though she’s thought about it, apparently.)  Mary’s brought some nice rigor to this process.

    Here are some things we agreed were important for this trip to succeed:

    • Create clear goals and potential outcomes if we were to participate;
    • Enlist key constituents from the Mozilla community and Mozilla Corporation to help in the decision process;
    • Host weekly, purposeful meetings to discuss updates;
    • Divide tasks among all involved in planning;
    • Carefully craft and adhere to a budget;
    • Gather approval from senior staff that we should do this.

    I had a few clear cut goals that I knew I wanted to push if we were to participate.

    1. Riding the momentum from our trip to India in late July, use FOSS.IN to grow, build, cultivate our Indian developer community;
    2. To get as many Indian localizers together so we can add a few more languages to our list of localized languages;
    3. To test Firefox in India, creating an evangelism community who can either help file bugs and/or reach out to web developers who sites might not work on Firefox;
    4. To explore and learn about other issues for Indian Web users that will help us better serve users in the region (fonts and font rendering has been an issue in the past…likely to change with Firefox 3).

    To accomplish these goals, we proposed the project day, a large undertaking by me, Mary, Chofmann and a few others.  I wrote the first draft of the proposed events, sent it around for feedback, incorporated that, and then finalized the proposal.  We were then accepted.  After a few enthusiastic meetings, we were suddenly in the midsts of many moving pieces seeming to come from different directions, all colliding at one intersection.  (random picture illustrating how we felt…)

    From one side, we had FOSS.IN asking us to prove that this would be a valuable, contributor-focused day.  The conference organizers were NOT interested in having another discussion about a product or applications of a product.  They asked us to come to the project day with some interesting projects to work on.  They wanted us to get into the code and work!

    Another side came from a set of key decision makers we asked to help think about this day.  The questions we repeatedly had to answer,

    •  ”What value will this bring to the Mozilla community?”
    •  ”Is this a good use of resources and is it a leveraged way to build and empower community members?”
    •  ”If someone is going, is it a good use of their time or would their time be better used elsewhere?”
    •  ”How will each Mozilla participant contribute to an effective project day?”
    •  ”What are the deliverables of this event?”

    Finally, we had emails from contributors, colleagues, and new friends asking how they could participate in the day and where their talents could be used.   With an approved project day and set of events, we had to figure out how to incorporate everyone and meet everyone’s objectives.

    Moving parts.

    What lesson did I reinforce?  As always, get buy-in.  Have clear goals that are both valuable to Mozilla and attainable.  Collaborate openly.  Be creative.  Communicate.  Sure, you might think these are so obvious.  They probably are.  But, tying clear goals and outcomes like these to event planning is something we are trying to do more systematically.  For FOSS.IN, it’s worked for the planning.  We’ll see how the day goes in early December.

    And, if you’re going to be in Bangalore for the conference, please do consider attending our project day.  I think it will be a huge success.

  • Community Survey Program: 3…2…1…lift off

    November 7th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Today, Staś, Pascal and I launched the first of several surveys using the community survey web tool that Staś created.  You can find the first survey here.  We also created a blog where we will post information about upcoming surveys, gather your feedback, and post results about what we learn.

    Here’s a snippet from the first post:

    “With this program, Mozilla will be publishing short surveys with the goal of learning more from its community about decisions needed to be made, and about ones that already may have been made. We want to know

    • your opinions about Mozilla events and projects;
    • ideas on how to improve and evolve;
    • constructive criticism of project plans and policy;
    • and, praise about what is being done well!

    “The vibrant and enthusiastic community is what makes the Mozilla project so unique. And with the community surveys project, we want to embrace this community spirit as much as we can. We’d love to see the community take advantage of this tool. That’s why we are choosing to publish short surveys on a frequent basis.”

    If you’re a member of the Mozilla community, please take the survey!  We want to hear from you.

  • Hearing from the community

    November 5th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Staś Malolepszy spent his summer working with Pascal Chevrel in Paris on a variety of projects for Mozilla.  One such project focused on creating a survey tool that could be used as an information gatherer from our Mozilla community on all sorts of topics.  Staś began grinding away on a web-based platform to post brief questions focused on a single topic and distributed to the community.  The goal was simple:  for Mozilla to learn from the community by sending a series of one to two question surveys on a variety of topics.

    I got involved because Pascal suggested to Staś that he contact me for both input on what we should ask and help with forming the questions.  I agreed.  We envisioned these to be very short surveys that collect a lot of information.  A commonly used technique in survey design is to ask the survey takers one question where they rate several possible responses on a scale of something like one to five.  We used this technique in our first survey and some other ideas to craft our first two questions.  And, working with Staś who was in Poland was both a pleasure and a lot of fun.

    This week, we’ll send out our first survey to understand how active participants of Mozilla’s community think and feel about the community.  It might be best described like taking a temperature of the community and then seeing what we learn and how we can do better.  I personally am curious to hear how Mozilla is doing in building and serving its community.  My guess is that we’re somewhere in the middle of the road.  We probably do some things well and we could probably do other things much better.  But enough guesstimating!  We’ll use this tool to learn how and where to improve.

    We’ve also localized the survey into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish and Albanian.  If you’d like to localize it in your language, please email me and we’ll figure out a way to do so.  Our next step will be to spread it far and wide.  We’ll see what the response rate on our first survey will be and this will give us some guess about what to expect going forward.