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July 10 review meeting; and iThoughts on the myPhone
We’ll have a meeting on July 10 to review all the recent requests for support from the community program. It is a jam-packed week for me, leaving for India on Wednesday. So, I thought I would blog now about what we will review and then follow-up next week after I land in India.
We’ll look at the following:
1) Hosting and other support for the extension localization project: Babelzilla
2) Hosting support for FoxieWire
3) Support for a QA team member who focuses on Mac platform bugs
4) Setting up a VM for Sunbird community to do their own builds
5) Support for a platform engineer for Firefox.
I’ll report back when I can. I’m especially excited because this time around, we’ll have two new participants in the meeting. I’ve been trying to expand the group and rotate in a few spots so other long-time contributors/module owners/employees/etc. can observe and participate in the process.
Also, Asa and I will be planning our Q3 goals for what we can do to empower more members of our community this week.
(non-sequitor) Finally, I am one of the masses that bit and got an iPhone last Friday when it came out. I was in L.A. for a wedding and ducked out of the rehearsal dinner to text a friend to get me one at the Apple store. One of my friends and fellow groomsmen was lead on marketing communications for the iPhone launch and was watching me pretty intently as I unpacked the device for the first time. Have to say…the Apple team did a terrific job on the experience. I am sure it took countless emails, Powerpoi…er…Keynote presentations, meetings, and TPS reports to get it all together. I was thoroughly impressed at the detail and sleekness of the packaging. Nice job on that, Apple.
The phone is certainly very cool. Being mired in the open-source world, I am disappointed that you can’t add any applications and the phone itself is so locked down. But, I can get past that because the phone is way better than any other mobile device I have ever used.
To the dismay of Apple, I am still using Thunderbird and Lightning as my main email and calendaring clients. Ever since Philipp figured out how to allow read/write to Google Calendar (and since Mac’s iCal can read Google Calendar), I use Lightning in Thunderbird. And, my iPhone syncs with iCal, which is reading my Google Calendars, which are getting all their content from my Lightning calendar extension in Thundebird…phew…did you follow all that?
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I am digging Thunderbird & Lightning
Presently, I use Thunderbird (2.0.0.0) with the Lightning extension (0.5 RC1) for my calendar option, making a pretty clean version of a unified mail/calendar client. Yeah…both have a few bugs, but for me, it has been working really well. A lot of new features have gone into the calendar project, making Lightning a very convenient and extensible application that can sit inside Thunderbird. Here is a little bit of background on my experience:
I have done my best to file new bugs about the tricky things I was experiencing when using both Thunderbird and Lightning. In each case, the developers have responded very quickly with suggestions on how to fix my problems or questions about my experience to verify that it was a new bug. A lot of answers to questions can be found at places like the Thunderbird knowledge base on mozillaZine, so I always check there first. At times, I think I find a bug and do my best to file it.
Until yesterday, I was running Lightning 0.3.1. But, after filing this bug, ssitter suggested I upgrade to 0.5 RC1. What a blessing! The new version of Lightning is great. Nice work guys. I also use the Provider for Google Calendar (developed by Philipp Kewisch) extension that allows Lightning to read and write to the Google Calendar. I now read and write to three different Google Calendars (all the calendars are being used as scheduling tools for specific Mozilla-related projects), and to my work calendar, which is a web-based Zimba app. As a first test, I invited a new Mozilla colleague from China to a meeting with me. The invitation came from my Zimbra calendar through Lightning, inside the Thunderbird interface. Lo and behold, Li accepted and the meeting appeared on both the Lightning app and the web-based version of my Zimbra calendar. Google calendar is working the same way.
Awesomely (is that a word?), I have a unified and tight email/calendar client. Please check it out and email me if you are having trouble setting it up. I can at least tell you what I’ve done.
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Support update
Last Thursday (5/31/2007), another team was assembled to evaluate new proposals for empowering the Mozilla community. We are moving forward on the following ideas:
1) On the weekend of June 16 and 17, 2007, Mozilla will open up Building K for the Camino team to gather and for a developer/community day. Building K is one of two buildings here in Mountain View where Mozilla Corp employees work. We will provide lunches on both days for the developers, give them access to the wireless here, and let everyone use the building for the weekend. Sam Sidler, Mozilla employee and long-time Camino contributor, will be on hand both days to help out.
2) We will also be helping our lead localizer in Italy who has been one of the centers of the community there for some time. He is administrator of the support forum (which he helped grow from about 200 to almost 16,000 users), manages the press, coordinates our QA activities, founded Babelzilla and is an administrator of the Extenzilla project. He is doing a whole lot more and we are so grateful to have his leadership in Italy. Please check out the Italian Mozilla effort at Mozilla Italia. We’ll be providing him with a new laptop because he is currently sharing his computer with his girlfriend. This will help him a lot.
3) In our attempt to relieve some of the burden that localizers face, Pascal Chevrel and I have been working on providing some level of monetary support to cover very basic costs for tools often paid for by the localizers starting communities in new locales (i.e. paying for hosting costs and domain name registrations). We are hammering out the details, but it looks like somewhere around Euro 300 could be enough to offset basic costs that localizers and community members are facing to get a new community in smaller locales up and running. It will help relieve the work of localizers because we can now help cover costs of tools provided by them for the community to use. Hopefully, community forums and discussions will be able to thrive by providing this small level of support.
Questions? You know how to contact me, so please do. I look forward to hearing from you.
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Support Update
On Thursday (05/10/2007), our community program committee met to review several new proposals for supporting individuals in the community. The committee (Seth, Asa, Chofmann, John, and Mitchell) felt that we should support the volunteers below (please note…I haven’t named anyone specifically). I’ve listed each of the cases we reviewed (#1, #2, #3, and #4), telling a bit about how we learned about the contributor, the role they play, and a little about why we decided and how we can help.
1) The first proposal was nominated by our team members in Japan. I met the volunteer while I was there and saw his work first hand.
Role: Administrator of the Mozilla-Gumi web server, including Bugzilla-jp and the gumi forum; I18n version of bugzilla (bugzilla-ja) project; MDC Japanese Localization Team member (leader); and MDC Japan Project (webtools for MDC wiki).
The volunteer started working on Mozilla in 2003, just as a contributor for translation and event support. Since 2005, he has been a member of Mozilla-gumi’s main staff. (I guess you probably know exactly who it is now or can find out quickly…
)While preparing for my trip, I learned this about Bugzilla JP: 3,300 unique accounts; 5,656 bugs have been reported; of those, 4,063 are product-related. The volunteer was in need of a new laptop and we will be getting one his way.
2) The second proposal was a self-nomination, endorsed by one of the Mozilla community members. (The volunteer found the template here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:CommunityProgram/SelectionProcess/ProposalTemplate#Proposal)
Role: Support and help documentation volunteer; administrator of Mozilla’s support newsgroups.
This volunteer has posted over 4,000 messages to Mozilla newsgroups. We’ve decided to support him because of his contributions and because whenever he would create or update documentation for www.mozilla.org/support/, he would have to go fishing for Mac and Linux users to make sure the documentation applied. We’re hoping to get him a machine that will allow him to do this more easily and without having to get others to do it for him.
3) The next volunteer came as a nomination from many of the senior developers of Firefox.
Role: Spidermonkey E4X maintenance, JS decompiler, other JS tasks, the XPCOM HTTP server Mozilla uses to keep our unit tests from depending on external resources, testing triage, and more. In addition, he owned the Help Viewer, and made a number of improvements to get search etc. working better.
As one Mozilla colleague put it: ““His attitude is great, especially so when you consider the fact that he maintains code most employees are unwilling or unable to work on.” We’ll also be getting him a new computer.
4) The final volunteer came as a nomination from Mozilla’s team in Japan.
Role: Focuses on Windows (including Vista); Mozilla support for Japanese fonts and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows; prior to that, he was working on Windows-native parts of the codebase; he has also worked on i18n (for Microsoft Windows and Japanese), gfx (for MS Windows), nspr (again, MS Windows), and software update (for MS Windows, specifically Vista.)
As one of our employees commented: “I believe that for Firefox, about 90% of our users are on Windows. And, as the Vista market share grows, it will be important to have people like [him] (who understand the new issues with Vista) working on Mozilla. Supporting [him] will benefit the Mozilla community, especially the growing percentage of Mozilla users on MS Vista.” Because of his exceptional work hacking on code relevant to Vista and Windows users, we will provide him with new hardware and a software license.
Finally, there was one localizer candidate who I need to get just a bit more research done before we can review. I am prepping that case and a few others now. It is likely we’ll do another (smaller) proposal review in a couple weeks, before the end of May. Please send me your nominations!
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Mozilla Community & Customer Service
If you’ve seen Asa’s blog post or read Sam Sidler’s post, then you are probably well up-to-speed about JT and Sam’s customer service initiatives. But, to recap, here is what Sam and JT are pushing forward:
Starting next Tuesday (May 8), we’ll be holding twice weekly meetings to discuss the future of customer support. These meetings are to discuss implementing some very specific things that are no-brainers in the realm of customer support.
- Tuesday, May 8, 2007 at 10am PDT – End-user knowledge base
- Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 2pm PDT – End-user forums
- Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 10am PDT – One-to-one / multiuser chat
- Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 2pm PDT – How MoCo’s approaching this problem
- Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 10am PDT – Recap and discussion of any other issues ideas
These meetings are open to anyone and everyone. If you or someone you know are currently providing any level of customer support, we want you there. Anyone who participates in any avenue of support is more than invited. That includes the mozillaZine forums and knowledge base, Mozilla’s bugzilla, the support newsgroups, any mailing lists, IRC, anyone working with Hendrix, anyone who works on the in-app help documentation, etc etc etc.
Because my friends and family know that I work for Mozilla, they assume I know everything about “The Internets“. I’ll occasionally install new features on friends’ versions of Firefox or help set preferences to make sure they are optimizing their experience. Can’t wait to learn more so I can become a viral customer service junkie…
Thanks Sam and JT. This should rock!
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