We are in the third week of the Screencast Contest, which has gotten a good number of submissions, but could certainly use some more.  Early next week, we’ll start our final push to get more videos submitted, and the contest will close on June 15th.  If you haven’t submitted a screencast yet, please go visit the contest home page, pick an article, and submit your entry.

In addition to shining a bit more light on the contest, I thought I would also take this opportunity to explain a bit about why I got involved and what went into it.

I met up with David Tenser at FOSDEM in February and asked him what we could do to empower more community members to contribute to SUMO.  Our idea was pretty straight forward and focused: to empower community members to help build a more robust knowledge base for Firefox Support.

One way to make that knowledge base more helpful for end-users was to create screencasts for the most often reviewed articles.  And so, the Screencast contest was created.

We had a lot of options to consider when we first dreamed up this idea.  Would we host the video?  What software could everyone use to film?  How do we choose the articles for the contest?  David had thought a lot about this and had most of these qustions answered.   We wouldn’t host videos, but encouraged participants to use Jing Software to do the screencasts.  David also had a way of isolating the top 100 most frequently visited articles.

But, how would we promote it?  Would we create something like Operation Firefox that had a separately-branded microsite?  Or, would we use existing tools like Spread Firefox to showcase the contest.  We chose the latter for a few reasons:

• Leverage:  (there’s that word again…)  We didn’t have any external costs related to a third-party design firm.  Also, we were able to get front-page placement on Spread Firefox for the first week of the contest.
• Timing:  We could move pretty swiftly since the Spread Firefox platform was built to help do projects like this.
• Ease:  With all the effort our community has put into creating SFx, it was clearly easiest for us to use the tool that’s been designed for something like this.

I created the contest rules with Catherine Brady (one of Mozilla’s legal gurus) and wrote a lot of the content you see on the contest pages.  David chose all the articles that are featured in the contest and wrote a lot of the content for the site as well.  Finally, Tara came in and designed some really great art for us to use.

This was one of the more efficient and tightly run projects I’ve worked on.  We met each week for about three weeks and just kept knocking off tasks left and right.  I had the benefit of helping to guide the Operation Firefox campaign, so I lifted a lot from that experience.  Many thanks to David and Tara for working so hard with me to launch this thing.

Finally, a huge thanks to the community.  From your hard work, the SUMO knowledge base will have *hopefully* 100 great screencasts for more than 150 million users to access if they are having trouble with Firefox.  Very nice.

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