Recently, I’ve been helping David Tenser with the SUMO Screencast Contest, which will launch this Monday, May 19.  You’ve likely read about it in the about:mozilla newsletter and on the SUMO blog.  Please consider participating!  Although the microsite for the contest is not live, we are launching the contest through Spread Firefox.  Therefore, we’ll send the link around next week so you can learn how to enter the contest and submit your screencast.

Before I go further though, here’s a bit of why I got involved.  This quarter, I decided to work more closely with David and the support team to help build the SUMO community.  Three weeks ago, I blogged about my experience with Mozilla Live Chat! and why I thought it was an important experience for me to have tried as a Mozilla contributor.  Live support is such a great way to help end-users, and highly educational, but it is likely that it will have some challenges of scale.  Nevertheless, that was one effort by me to become more involved and I’ll keep participating when I can.

Another project I’ve committed to working on is the contest.  David and I came up with the idea to host a contest where anyone could create a screencast that visually demonstrates the instructions that are spelled out in any one of the top 100 support articles in the SUMO knowledge base.  Our thinking was that if we could get people excited to help produce cool, short screencasts that illustrated various support topics, not only would it lead to some great content for the SUMO site, but also to ongoing contributions from interested volunteers.  We’ll see if we are proven right or wrong, but David and I have high hopes.

One reason I find this one so important is that a good screencast can serve as the unique user experience that bridges a well written how-to article together with live support.  With a set of great screencasts, a user not only will read the accompanying article that might solve the issue they are having, but also he or she will see exactly how to perform the fix to the problem.  Without being able to provide live support to every single end-user (we have north of 150 million of users these days!), screencasts are a leveraged solution that come pretty close to live support.  I know I have benefited from live help with other technologies, but also have found that a great screencast can be even more helpful.  I can go back and watch it again, pause the video, and share it with others.

So, if you have time and interest, please participate!!  We have great prizes:

• a unique run of t-shirts for those people who submit the best screencast for each of the 100 articles (yes, that could be as many as 100 winners if we get enough screencasts submitted!)
• and, a grand prize for the best overall video…ok we’re still keeping it a secret, but you can use it to record stuff and then play that stuff back…

Looking forward to receiving your entry!

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