SUMO Blog

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.

Activity in the SUMO has increased rapidly over the past year and our community has really grown! Now we have this blog, a contributors forum and a newsgroup. There’s all sorts of work being done with users, finding common issues, writing help documentation and developing the many features on the website and tons more in the works in Bugzilla. With all this stuff going on, naturally, we figured a twitter feed would be a great way of letting community members know about things as-they-happen — in short 140-character bites. The feed will announce blog posts and discussion threads that may be of broader interest as well as give announcements that may be useful to SUMO contributors such as new KB articles, common issues or just to give a welcome to new people.

This is still very experimental and we’d love to get some feedback as to what you want to hear about. Either way, it’s casual, it’s informative and hopefully, it’s also a fun way to keep up to date with all the great things going on in the wide world of SUMO support.

If you’re new to twitter, it’s a webapp that lets users quickly update others with short messages and statuses. If you already have an account, just go to the moz_sumo page and click Follow! and you’ll be updated as to all the great things going on in the world of SUMO. If you would rather not get twitter, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite reader or with a live bookmark and follow things right in your browser.

Welcome to the future everyone! This is 2009, the year of opportunities and, if we’re lucky, a stronger world economy. Earlier this week — well, last year — I was writing about the accomplishments we made with SUMO as a project, a team, and a community in 2008. Now I’d like to spend some time to talk about our plans for 2009.

Back in September last year, I was writing a series of blog posts about what I called the vision for SUMO, which was largely based on ideas and suggestions from our vibrant SUMO community. For your reading pleasure, here’s the full list of blog posts:

• The vision for SUMO – Part 1: Listen as hard as we can
• The vision for SUMO – Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture
• The vision for SUMO – Part 3: Increasing community participation
• The vision for SUMO – Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse
• The vision for SUMO – Part 5: Localization
• The vision for SUMO – Part 6: Knowledge Base
• The vision for SUMO – Part 7: Support Forum
• The vision for SUMO – Part 8: Live Chat

This blog series wasn’t meant to remain just a vision. In fact, in 2009 we’re making it our goal! We’ve actually already started — the latest 0.8 release includes a number of significant achievements — but there’s much left to be done. Since the vision for SUMO was published, we’ve prioritized the individual goals and created an aggressive timeline that we’re confident will address many of the concerns we’ve heard from our community.

So without further ado, here is our ambitious development roadmap for SUMO in 2009!

It’s not easy to plan a detailed and accurate roadmap a whole year ahead, and as such not everything is set in stone yet. We’d love to hear what you think of our plans for 2009 and whether we’ve missed something you find important.

Also, we will definitely need more development manpower in order to pull this off. If you’re interested in helping out and have PHP experience, let us know or, even better, submit a patch to one of our 350+ open bugs!

In just 15 minutes, the European session of our Support Firefox Day starts, where we’ll introduce people to SUMO localization and discuss Mozillas goals for 2010. For the full schedule, see the previous announcement on the Mozilla Blog.

Head over to the Support Firefox Day page, tune in to the video channel to see my Scandinavian face, log in to the chat, and engage in the discussions!

Today (or tomorrow, depending on where in the world you live) is the fourth Support Firefox Day, which starts in Asia in just ten minutes. For the full schedule, see the previous announcement on the Mozilla Blog.

If you’re living in Asia or Australia, or if you live in Europe and just got up, or if you live in the Americas and you’re a night owl — the action is just about to start.

What are you waiting for? Head over to the Support Firefox Day page, tune in to the video channel, log in to the chat, and engage in the discussions!

Support Firefox day is an event that the contributors with the Firefox Support project (support.mozilla.com or SUMO) hold to introduce new people to working with Support, help people with any questions they may have and have a little fun.

The next Support Firefox Day will focus on localization of the Support project. Primarily, in this case, localization is translation of support articles into a number of languages for our users worldwide. Firefox is available in over 30 languages and with so many users, support documentation is also needed in all these languages. We are also leading a discussion with the SUMO community about Mozilla’s goals for 2010 as Mitchell  has been blogging about recently.  Even though the discussion is about Mozilla as a whole, it’s important that everyone who’s helped with SUMO or looks to start helping with SUMO participates — you’re all members of the greater Mozilla community.  Whether you work with the knowledge base, help on the forums or are active on Live Chat, we’d like you to join in and offer your input during this roundtable discussion.

While the final schedule is still being worked out, we’re hoping to work the following into each three hour slot:

• Presentations on how to localize SUMO articles, finding articles that need to be translated and how to keep up to date with changes and get changes approved by others in your locale.
• A roundtable on Mozilla goals for 2010 and how user support and our contributors ties in with those goals.
• An open meet-and-greet. This will give you all a chance to find other people interested in Firefox Support in your language and coordinate your efforts. This includes getting translation questions answered by a locale leader.  Some of our most active contributors will also be available to answer questions about SUMO in general.

Due to the global nature of localization, rather than having one large event that spans a full day as we have had in the past, we’ll be having a few smaller events (about 3 hours long) with a slot for our Asian contributors, one for our European contributors and one for those in the Americas. Primarily, the event will take place on Friday, November 21st, 2008 in your local time zone. (Of course, while the slots were designed with certain locales in mind, they’re open to everyone; discussion will be in English.)

Our three sessions are at the following times:

• Friday Nov 21st, 5:00 AM GMT (2 PM Tokyo time, 6 AM Central European time, Thursday 9 PM PST)
• Friday Nov 21st, Noon GMT (9 PM Tokyo time, 1 PM Central European time, Friday 4 AM PST)
• Friday Nov 21st, 7 PM GMT (Saturday 4 AM Tokyo time, 8 PM Central European time, 11 AM PST)

We’ll be hosting the event, as we always do from our Support Firefox Day page where all the information will be posted as it comes out.  We’re asking you to start spreading the word in your various communities and among your friends and get the word out.  We’re also looking for help putting the event together and for some volunteers to lead sessions (especially in Asia).  If you’re interested in user support or would like to help us, please respond in this forum thread.

Thanks and I hope to see you on the 21st!

There has been some changes to the SUMO team recently. Jason Barnabe, who maintains the Support Forum, unfortunately doesn’t have enough time to maintain a full-time job and administrate the Support Forum at the same time. He has made awesome contributions to the project over the year, and we’re incredibly thankful for that. Fortunately, he will remain an active SUMO contributor, so we certainly haven’t seen the last from him!

Also, our Live Chat maintainer Majken Connor (most of the SUMO contributors know her as “Lucy”) is moving on to explore other opportunities. We have all valued her contributions to the project and we wish her every success.

With that said, I’m very excited to announce the new team:

• Chris Ilias remains the “keeper of the Knowledge Base,” as he likes to call it. He is responsible for, among other things, reviewing article edits by the community, training and answering questions from contributors, improving our contributor documentation, gathering article feedback and statistics and ensuring that it is shared with the community.
• Matthew Middleton is the new Live Chat maintainer. Matthew started as a Live Chat volunteer back in January, and since then he’s become more and more active. He has actually been a Live Chat administrator in over a month now, but will now take an even more active role withing the SUMO community. He has impressed a lot of people at Mozilla recently with his incredible dedication, so I’m very happy to have him as part of the SUMO team.
• Cheng Wang is the new Support Forum maintainer, and will work on various things in the project, like administrating the forum, room monitoring Live Chat shifts, and collaborating with the rest of the team and even other parts of Mozilla like the QA team, to figure out our most commonly reported issues with Firefox. Cheng also started contributing back in January and has already made a huge difference by introducing new volunteers and helping the planning and organizing of events like the Support Firefox Days.

This picture was taken from the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, BC. From left to right: Nelson Ko, Jason Barnabe, Laura Thomson, Matthew Middleton, Majken Connor, me, Cheng Wang, Brian Krausz, and Chris Ilias.

Together we will work hard to make our users happy, grow our community, interact with other teams at Mozilla to share insights and information, and shape what we think will become the future definition of Open Source Support.

Stay tuned for part four of The vision for SUMO…

We are proud to present the winning screencast made by the one and only, Cameron Roy:

• Article: How to customize the toolbar
• Screencast: Click to view

His video won because it best satisfied the four judging criteria.  For one, Cameron showed how to customize the toolbar, which is not the easiest concept to communicate or digest.  For many users, it’s a new concept to change around the position of the buttons that sit in the browser.  With his great video, Cameron really demystified how challenging this could have been for an end user.  The production quality met our standards with great timing and flow (not too fast, not too slow) and everything fitting well in the screencast.  Of course, we would not have chosen him if his video had not covered the concepts completely.  Finally, his screencast really matched the information in the article.  Users who read this article and view his screencast will have a very detailed explanation with an illustration of just how to rearrange the buttons on the toolbar.

This is exactly the type of screencast we were looking for – a visual medium to help translate and communicate technical concepts to a wider audience. Overall, a terrific effort by Cameron.  Nice work!!

The other winning screencasts will be announced soon…

The SUMO Screencast Contest is over and we now have 50 new videos to accompany the articles in the SUMO Knowledge Base.  Thank you for participating!!

We are thrilled to post them so our end users can begin to use this new content. And, we are excited to announce our winners!

For his work with How to customize the toolbar (note: that’s the Knowledge Base article; we’re still working on making the resulting screencast public!), the judges chose Cameron Roy.  Cameron submitted several stellar videos, many of which will be featured in the KB.  This video was high quality and complete — Cameron took a tricky topic, thought of a creative example to illustrate it, and did a great job filming the video!

If you submitted a video that was ranked best among the submissions for a particular article, you will be contacted shortly about your prize: a SUMO screencast t-shirt!

Thanks again, everyone.  Your work will have a lasting impact on Firefox’s 180+ million users who might need a little extra support.  Congrats!

The SUMO contributors have all worked incredibly hard to make our user-to-user support experiences for our users positive. Today they will need our help in order to maintain the quality, as the services will explode with new Firefox 3 users. Below are three ways you can make a difference to the hard working contributors as well as our new users.

Even if you only have a few minutes to spare, your effort can help one, two, three, or ten new users.

Super Easy

• Monitor the support forum for unanswered questions — Just browse through the list of questions and see if there is anything you know the answer to. You don’t even have to have an account, although I recommend you get one anyway to show who you are.
• Hang out in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org — Other Live Chat helpers may find you there and ping you to help them out in case they run into a hard question. You don’t have to participate in helping users directly, just answering questions other Live Chat helpers might have.

Relatively Easy

• Help users directly in Live Chat — Actually it’s not that hard, but it’s definitely more time consuming than the other ways of helping out. Read all about how to get started — it only takes 5 minutes! Seth Bindernagel’s blog post on why you should try Live Chat out is definitely worth a read too.

Thanks for considering helping us today! If you have any questions about how you can help out, don’t hesitate to contact us. Find out more on the How to contribute page on support.mozilla.com.