SUMO Blog

In the past, there has been some discussion about how SUMO interfaces with existing local community work. SUMO has been in place for one year now and we have shown many ways where local communities are working directly on support issues for end users. As SUMO grows, we need to be even more efficient as we work together.

SUMO and the local support communities

For many locales, I believe SUMO can really add value to their communities because we can provide things like a solid server infrastructure and an established wiki with a useful review system. But it really doesn’t stop there. SUMO is designed from the ground up to be a platform specialized on support. With the already existing SUMO community, we have shared access to a lot of interesting things, such as an overview of our most critical issues with Firefox, and a way to determine the quality of our content. We also have a pretty close collaboration with the rest of the Mozilla project, such as the amazing QA team. They can provide us with a lot of useful information, and we can do the same thing for them.

How does this relate to the support for your locale? For one thing, it gives you a better overview of what our users are most frequently asking, which helps determining what support content we should focus on. It also gives you the ability to determine the overall quality of your support by looking at things like which articles users find hard to understand. By working more closely with other Mozilla teams like QA and Firefox development, it might also help making your local community feel more involved with the rest of the Mozilla community.

On a more general note, I think we should all think about Mozilla as one united community. The important thing should be the fact that we come together to do all the great things that we do, not on what domain or server our accomplishments take place.

That said, for communities that still prefer to keep their support on their own infrastructure, how can we better promote that content on SUMO? Right now we’re linking to these sites on the “Other Firefox Support” menu item on the start page. Is that enough, or can we do other things to make it easier for our users to get help?

SUMO and Firefox

Another concern some local communities have with SUMO, or at least have had in the past, is its Firefox-centric focus. Readers of my personal blog might have already read my post The scope of SUMO, where I explained the reasons for starting with Firefox, and my thoughts on the project expanding in the future. Let me quote a part of it that I think summarizes it well:

In the future, when Firefox Support is doing really well, I could definitely see the scope being expanded to make the solution work for other Mozilla projects as well (and with the open source nature of the knowledge base and forums, it could even be used by other non-Mozilla projects, just like Bugzilla is used by almost every open-source project out there).

The work we’re doing on SUMO now is there to be done for other projects as well and will come in time. We’re not limiting ourselves to Firefox because we don’t care about the other projects, but because we need to focus on where our resources are needed the most first, and then broaden the scope.

Since that was written, the Thunderbird team has expressed interest in using the SUMO infrastructure to build a similar support site. What this means is that SUMO is not the equivalent of Firefox Support — SUMO really stands for Open Source Support.

How can we make the SUMO community stronger?

Let’s get back to the vision for SUMO. What can we do to strengthen and ignite our already amazing community? Well, an obvious answer would be to just ask the community members, and we’ve obviously done that a lot over the year. I’ve also talked to people at Mozilla closely involved with community building in other projects, to get their feedback. Based on that, we have some ideas to start with:

Understanding the bigger picture

I’ve already covered this in part two of this blog series, but this is definitely very related to building our community. To summarize:

• Work together – Closer collaboration with QA and developers to get a shared understanding of our users.
• Get everyone on the same page – Clear escalation paths for emerging issues that should be handled by other areas of the Mozilla project.

Karma

An online moderation/rating system –- also known as “karma” –- is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a way to encourage participation and allow contributors to really take pride in their work. How many users have you helped using Live Chat? How many have you helped in the Support Forum?

The other interesting thing a karma system would give us is better knowledge about which contributors are our most valuable. This is very useful information when e.g. surveying contributors about how we can improve the site — before making changes to the Knowledge Base article editor, which contributors have the most experience using it?

Showing more gratitude

What impact does a person writing a Knowledge Base article for SUMO make for fellow Firefox users around the world? The answer is, without a doubt, more than most people think. How can we make that clearer? Some things I’d love to see:

• Make the community more personal – Allow contributors to have a personalized profile with info such as full name, location, photo, and description. Make the people behind SUMO more than just a username.
• Show a photo of each contributor at the bottom of each Knowledge Base article under “Contributors to this article” — if they want to show their picture, that is. Make it more obvious to our readers that the content is written by people just like them!
• Add a plain and simple thank you note where appropriate, for example under “Contributors to this article” at the end of each Knowledge Base article.

A thank you note might seem trivial, but it really highlights some of the fundamental elements of a community: helpfulness, friendliness, and appreciation of each other. We’re not like any typical corporate support division. The motivator here isn’t money — it’s gratitude, appreciation, recognition, and a feeling of belonging to the community that motivate people to make a difference by helping people with Firefox.

SUMO is all about that.

One of the problems we had with the Firefox Support Knowledge Base in the past was that locale leaders and approvers had no way of knowing when a new translation was created. As a result, new translations stayed in the unpublished staging area with no-one knowing that a review was needed.

In a recent support.mozilla.com update, a new feature was added enabling you to receive notification whenever a new translation is created in your language. You can even monitor more than one language if you want. Here is a page with instructions on how to enable it. Happy translating!

A critical piece in having a community-powered project run successfully is that all participants understand the bigger picture. In the case of SUMO, there are actually two pictures, and with part two of this blog series I will try to explain both of them.

Picture 1: The truly big picture

Looking at how SUMO relates to the rest of the Mozilla project, this could be called the macro version of the bigger picture. This picture was made for a presentation I gave at FOSSCoach (OSCON 2008, Portland, Oregon) and is intentionally a little busy, and friendly. It does highlight some very important things, though:

• We’re not just helping our users solve their problems with Firefox so they can keep using their favorite browser; we’re here to listen to our users as well. Past readers of this blog series know that part 1 covered exactly this.
• The data we can gather by looking at stats for the Knowledge Base articles combined with incoming support requests in the Support Forum, Live Chat, letters and e-mails all help painting a better picture of what our top issues in Firefox are.
• The support and QA teams can work together and combine their findings from channels targeting different types of users and reach a shared understanding of which bugs we should be working on first.
• Knowing which features and bugs to focus on will be invaluable information for the development team. It will lead to a better product, and a better understanding of what our users want.

That’s the most important way support interacts with other parts of the Mozilla project, but far from the only ones. There are other aspects of the bigger picture, for example that the QA and development teams usually have information about known issues prior to releases gathered from the beta testers. This knowledge should be shared with the SUMO team prior to releases, so we can, among other things, prepare for a better support experience for our users.

In some cases QA might be working hard to track the cause of a known issue down; if the SUMO community is aware of that bug, they can confirm this with the users reporting it and get a unique chance to do some direct QA testing with a user. People from the QA team could even be logged on to the Live Chat component using a Jabber client of their choice, and the SUMO team could invite a QA tester to a chat session whenever a good chance to solve a known issue comes up.

Picture 2: The “support funnel”

This could also be called the micro version of the bigger picture, or the internal picture. As many people are already aware, SUMO is a support project consisting of three major components: the Knowledge Base, the Support Forum, and Live Chat. Many contributors provide support in more than one component. For example, Bo regularly helps out in the Support Forum, but occasionally he also writes Knowledge Base articles for new solutions to Firefox issues. Another example is myles7897, who regularly helps out with Live Chat. Just as Bo, he sometimes writes or edits Knowledge Base articles too.

However, not everyone helping out with SUMO will be aware of how the three components relate to each other, or how the site should work for users. The “support funnel” is a way to describe this:

1. The Knowledge Base should contain the solutions to our most common problems. Users should start by searching for their problem here. Ideally the vast majority of our users find the solution to their problem here; it’s critical both for performance reasons and for quality of support. Using the funnel metaphor, the user would go straight through the funnel without hitting the sides.
2. If they can’t find the solution to their problem in the Knowledge Base, the forum should show if others have already reported the problem. (We’re working on making this step simpler — more on that later in this series.)
3. If neither the Knowledge Base nor the forum contains the answer, the forum or Live Chat should be available to the user. These two components should be viewed as fallbacks when the Knowledge Base fails to solve the user’s problem. Which of the two fallbacks is best for the user depends on the situation. The forum has the benefit that the posted question is public and can be read by many people, thus increasing the chance of getting answered, while Live Chat offers a direct communication with a Firefox expert, if the user is willing to wait for it.
4. Frequent or serious issues solved in the forum or Live Chat should be documented in the Knowledge Base, to ensure that the support quality and performance remain consistently high, and to allow us to get better data on which issues are the most commonly reported.

It’s important that everyone contributing to SUMO has a clear understanding of how the Knowledge Base, the Support Forum, and Live Chat interact and relate to each other. That way we can ensure that the “support funnel” works.

Finally, the insights we will gain from this collaboration will be shared with the rest of the Mozilla project as well. A better knowledge of what our users want in our product would be incredibly powerful information to the marketing team, which SUMO is proudly a part of. Similarly, getting better information about what security issues are most commonly reported would likely be valuable for the security team. Et cetera, et cetera; I think I made my point.

In other words, support is vital to the success of Mozilla, or any open source project for that matter.