SUMO Blog

Just over a month ago, we had our first open-format contributors meeting. It was wildly successful and we are actively taking your suggestions and ideas and using them to make SUMO better. Thus, you can imagine our excitement in announcing that the next contributors meeting will be in just over a week on March 9th 2009 at 10 AM PDT (don’t forget to turn your clocks forward in the US/Canada the day before!), 1 PM EDT, 5 PM GMT (those of you in the UK and Europe, you change your clocks a couple weeks later so the time difference looks off but it’s not, we promise!), 6 PM CET. The details of how to call in are at the bottom of this post (it’s free using Skype or toll free from the US).

In the meeting, we hope to cover the following topics:

• Followup on last meeting. One of the big suggestions from last meeting was to streamline communication. We’d like to know how we’re doing (now that we’ve increased our blogging frequency and added a twitter feed) and what we could be doing even better. Another suggestion was to make it easier for contributors to get started contributing, we’d like to get feedback from you on we’re doing with that as well.
• Firefox 3.1 KB roundup. Firefox 3.1 will soon be in beta 3 and release is coming up! The knowledge base has incorporated some changes and new articles in preparation for Firefox 3.1 and we want to make sure any questions that you have are cleared up as release day approaches.
• Support Firefox Day 5. With four Support Firefox Days under our belt, the next one is in the works! Currently scheduled for the end of March, the topic will be Firefox 3.1 support (there’s a blog post in the works). Of course, it wouldn’t be an event without input from our contributors … tell us what you’d like to see covered or how we can make the event fun and informative.
• Forum participation. As we work to encourage forum participation, we’re always interested in hearing how we can make the experience better for the contributors or get the word out more.

If there are more things you think we should cover in this or future meetings, just post to this Contributors forum thread!

We look forward to hearing from you on the 9th!

Meeting details:

Monday March 9th 10 AM PDT/1 PM EDT/5 PM GMT:

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 92, conference number 280#
• Toll-free (US): 800-707-2533 then password 369, conference number 280#
• Skype (free worldwide): +18007072533 then password 369, conference number 280#

The backchannel (where we post links and share text) is #sumo on irc.mozilla.org and our agenda and notes is on the Mozilla wiki.

If you can’t make the time, never fear, just tell us your thoughts in IRC at any time or call in to one of our weekly phone meetings Mondays at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT.

Firefox support is one of the most rewarding ways you can give back to the Firefox community and answering questions on the forums is the simplest and fastest way to contribute.  There are just two steps: Register and answer.  With hundreds of new threads every day, it’s simple to find an issue you can help with and jump right in. In just ten minutes, you can help two, three or even ten users have a much better Firefox experience.  For some users, a link to the right knowledge base article or just a few suggestions make all the difference between hours of frustration and enjoying the bounty of the internet.  Not only that, but helping research a question can sometimes lead you to discover features of Firefox you didn’t know about, knowledge base articles you hadn’t read or even add-ons that you may want to try yourself.  It’s a win-win situation.

So give this a try: set aside just ten minutes each day for the Firefox support forums.  If you find a question you can’t answer, never fear! Try the knowledge base, ask us in the #sumo IRC channel, use the Contributors forum or simply find another thread you can help in.  You’ll be brightening someone’s day somewhere — and that is the best feeling of all.

In previous months, David has blogged about the Support Funnel. In short, users are directed to the Knowledge Base to get answers to their questions, and if their questions are not answered in the Knowledge Base, they are directed to the forum or Live Chat.

The transition from Knowledge Base to forum/Live Chat is done using a page titled “Ask a question“. You should see a link to the “Ask a question” page at the bottom of every Knowledge Base article and at the bottom of the search results page. In the “Ask a question” page there are links to post-Knowledge Base support options with descriptions.

When it comes to localizing the Support Funnel, simply translating the “Ask a question” page is not enough. The forum and Live Chat are currently only offered in English; so directing non-English users to those venues gives them little or no help. We need to make sure non-English users are being directed to the right places. It is important that Firefox Support localizers translate the Ask a question page, and direct users to a forum where the user will get support in their own language. Translating individual Knowledge Base articles can come after that.

For instance, the German version has links to the German support forum and the German support chat page. The Italian version has a link to the Mozilla Italia forums.

By doing this, we can ensure that non-English users are getting the help they need. It is also a great way to introduce users to Mozilla communities specific to their locale, which should result in more community participation.

One of the main priorities for SUMO in 2009 is to make localization simpler. More specifically, part 5 of the Vision for SUMO includes ideas about a clear locale overview, which is something that a lot of localizers we’ve been in touch with has asked for.

After sharing these ideas with some of the many localizers of SUMO and collecting feedback, we’ve made a mockup of how this overview could look like — let’s call it the SUMO Localization Dashboard:

Mockup of SUMO Localization Dashboard.

There are a few things we’re hoping this dashboard will achieve:

• To provide a clear overview and status of the l10n work on SUMO
• To make the l10n work on SUMO feel less daunting by making it obvious where to start
• To answer the question: “which article is the most important to translate next?”
• To establish a baseline of what we define as a healthy status of a locale, so we can make sure we provide help where it’s needed the most.

On this dashboard, we would also show full lists of articles and their translation status, with direct links to getting started with a translation or article review:

List of the most popular support articles and their translation status.

If you’re a localizer of SUMO, we’d love to hear what you think of these ideas and whether this dashboard would be helpful! Please share your thoughts by commenting on this blog post. For the complete details, see this project page.

One of the change we are making the knowledge base for Firefox 3.1 is taking the large Options window article and splitting it up into several articles (one article per panel). There are some complications in doing this; and I blogged about our need for Firefox Support locale leaders to translate a text file for us.

Out of 20 languages, we’ve received 14 translations. If you are a locale leader who has not sent me a translation of this text file please translate it and send it to me! Once this restructuring of content is done, we can get on with updating the articles to reflect the changes in Firefox 3.1. For more information on the Firefox Support update plan for Firefox 3.1, the plan is on wiki.mozilla.org.

Last Thursday, SUMO 0.8.2 was pushed to the Firefox Support website. This update was more about pushing whatever fixes were checked in, so the SUMOdev team can start focusing on 0.9. However, that doesn’t mean some pretty neat things weren’t checked in.

There are two additions to the article editor. Sometimes people don’t read the documentation before editing articles, and add content to the knowledge base that is against policy. Now we have a notice at the top of the editor that links to the policies page as well as to a couple of other key contributor documents.

In addition, we added a checkbox for you to indicate if the article applies to Firefox 3.1. When the new SUMO search engine is used, this categorization can be utilized to make search results only display articles that apply to the version the user has.

We also had a problem with the Firefox version detection, causing no content to show at all on some articles, and confusing users. That bug is now fixed.

We’ve also fixed the bug in the forums which prevented replies in older threads from bumping threads to the first page.

You can see a full list of SUMO 0.8.2 bug fixes in Bugzilla. Remember that if you see any bugs on support.mozilla.com or you think of a great new feature for the web site, please let us know about it in the Contributors Forum or file a bug in Bugzilla.

Attendees: djst, cilias, cww, zzxc

Sumo

• Brainstorm on how to improve pages like How to Contribute and Contributor Home Page to help grow our community
  • zzxc noticed that people tended to read everything before following instructions.
  • Make the instructions less disruptive – for example, the step by step instructions on Helping with Live Chat links to separate pages without properly linking back to the instructions again (zzxc)
  • New introduction to page describing how to contribute to the forum, and create sticky thread in support forum linking to it (cww)
  • Identify ways to help users filing better forum threads (cww)
  • zzxc posted drafts of new How to Contribute documents — great improvements! team to review and formalize plan
  • cilias suggests adding more screenshots/screencasts
    • For the Installing Spark article, we should have a screencast right now (zzxc)
    • Add more descriptions to Contributor Home Page and move some of the less actionable stuff to the sidebar
• Decide on SFD theme
  • Firefox 3.1 best new features (leveraging press around 3.1) and how to support them and get started using them.
    • Pros: will get lots of people
    • Cons: requires getting input and speaking from 3.1 devs which may be a little hectic.
  • Keeping you and your computer safe online (addressing Firefox 3/3.1 security features, what the different kinds of security certificate mean and why it’s important that we warn users about all the possible problems, also malware, what it is and what to do about it)
    • Pros: really important thing that we cover this for our users and the videos can be great tools later.
    • Cons: It’d be a publicity conflict with 3.1 since it comes out at roughly the same time so I expect fewer participants.
  • Decision: Firefox 3.1!
• Weekly metrics
  • New data: active Live Chat contributors
• Last week’s weekly support issues
  • Bunch of new documentation written. cww to check if it’s searchable in the KB and remove it from Specific issues list.

Knowledge Base

• 3.1 category is up.
• 12 translations of the Options window split text received. I’ve implemented 2, and plan on devoting this week to implementing as much of the rest as I can. [1]
• New help-topic link: about:privatebrowsing is going to have a link to our Private Browsing article. bug 475551
• Firefox 2 EOL text is on support.planning [2]
• 2 new articles:
  • Searches are redirected to another site bug 473810
  • Cannot log in to websites bug 467109
• Looking for McAfee users to investigate how to prevent it from disabling the Firefox pop-up blocker (w/intructions and screenshots)

Forum

• Now consistently more contributor replies than new threads so we’ve hit critical mass. Yay!! Big thanks to co-rel and Quarantine for their great help.

Live Chat

• Metrics update – participation slightly up:
  • 7 new accounts, 1 new active helper, 2 account approvals (NicHelps, orcadas)
  • Open 18.9 hours last week.
  • 12 total contributors active last week
• New room monitor: lslutsky — Welcome aboard!

Thanks to really helpful brainstorming from our community to determine what the SUMO project stands for, followed by invaluable feedback on the initial candidates from the whole Mozilla community, and of course really hard work by Tara, John, and Rubber Design, we finally have our very own SUMO logo to visualize our support project and its powerful community!

This logo represents the whole SUMO community, it’s underlying project to create what we call Open Source Support, and the help our community provides to users around the world. The hand represents the nurturing aspects of our support — a place where people come for discussion, answers and connection from all points of view and experience. We care about our users, and we care about our community.

The globe can represent many things: the global SUMO community, or the fact that we help people from all over the world. With the Mozilla manifesto in mind, the globe can even represent the entire Internet, in which case SUMO is represented by the hand supporting it.

How do you interpret the logo? Do you have other ideas on what represents SUMO? We’d love to get that incorporated into the visual identity and we hope to make it possible soon. Read Tara’s announcement of the SUMO logo to find out more about this, and expect more to come shortly.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the SUMO logo, and especially to the SUMO community itself — this wouldn’t have been possible without your participation.