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Big things this week

• Next SUMO meeting – Monday, Feb. 13th (call in details & meeting notes) at 9am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.
• Next SUMO release – Tuesday, Feb. 7th
• Video of the SUMO meeting (embeded below).
• Our new search engine is serving 50% of our searches.
• UX work is ongoing. We’ll be testing a new information architecture with users soon.
• Home page experiment is working well. We got rid of lots of questions that were already answered by an article.
• Cheng is working with Engineering and UX to do something about search hijacking.
• Notes from this SUMO meeting.

I will help moderate the support forum from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -8) to encourage new forum helpers with answering support questions. I’ll be available on the #sumo IRC channel, michelleluna, or by private message to myself using the SUMO web site.

Just create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to respond to every new question posted Thursday, so please commit to answering 10 questions throughout the day.

Grab your cape and join us! See you there.

This is weekly Mozilla project meeting for January 30, 2012. These are great for keeping up with the cool stuff happening all over the project. Here are the meeting notes.

Download video: MP4 format | WebM format

Big things this week

• Next SUMO meeting – Monday, Feb. 6th (call in details & meeting notes) at 9am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.
• Next SUMO release – Tuesday, Jan. 31th
• Video of the SUMO meeting (embeded below).
• Welcome Rosana Ardila, our new Community Support Program Manager
• Congratulations to Kadir who now becomes (officially) the Kitsune Product Manager.
• New home page experiment is active.
• Kb review sprint was awesome. Thank you Alice Wyman.
• Notes from this SUMO meeting.

I will help moderate the support forum from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -8) to encourage new forum helpers with answering support questions. I’ll be available on the #sumo IRC channel, michelleluna, or by private message to myself using the SUMO web site.

Just create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to answer 200 additional questions throughout the day, so please commit to answering 10 questions throughout the day. If you can’t answer 10 on SUMO day, well, then there is always tomorrow.

Helping people is its own reward! Learning about how users experience Mozilla products pays infinite dividends for the web! See you Thursday.

The SUMOdev team meets every other Tuesday to agree on a theme for the development work of the next two weeks. The goal is to produce specific benefits for users with every sprint.

The first sprint started on January 3 after the sprint planning session. The 2012.1 sprints’ two themes are:

• Getting better search results for users by turning on Elastic Search for real users (specific percentage will depend upon stability and quality)
• Giving the SUMO team a dashboard with User to User help KPIs.

There are a number of other important things going into this sprint, like integration market place support, Karma dashboard features, etc. You can see the full list here.

Every sprint has a number, like “2012.1″. If you search for “s=2012.x” in bugzilla’s whiteboard field you’ll get back the list for sprint x.

We will try hard not to add any more bugs to this list during the sprint, but also: the team is committed to get those bugs fixed within the two weeks of the sprint, so that we’ll have a completely finished product increment after every sprint (we will need 2-3 sprints to figure out our actual velocity, so the first 3 lists might still fluctuate in terms of completeness).

If you want to add anything to the list, please talk to me and I’ll try to schedule it in for the current or next sprint in discussion with our developers and UX designers.

Also, one more note: Since we don’t have Continuous Deployment yet, but push code after a week long baking time on stage, the full results of this sprint will not be in production at the end of the sprint, the 17th, but one week later, on the 24th. This means: Expect a working Elastic Search and a dashboard with user to user KPIs to be live on January 24th.

This is an exciting change of pace. Hopefully it will allow us to spot issues early, and give us a chance to react to them in time, to make sure our plans stay on track. It will also lead to more transparency, and the benefit of more information will hopefully make for happier developers and a happier SUMO team.

Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback on this, I’ll try to answer quickly here or in the SUMO community forums.

It is the last SUMO Day of the 2011 calendar year, let’s make it great! I will help moderate the support forum from 9am to 5pm PDT to encourage new forum helpers with answering support questions. I’ll be available on the #sumo IRC channel, michelleluna, or by private message to myself using the SUMO web site.

Just create an account and then take some time on Wednesday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to answer 200 additional questions throughout the day as this is the average number of questions each day that go unanswered. Firefox users need your help!

It is a very rewarding contribution that will instantly put you in touch with Firefox users and those who upgraded to Firefox 9 this week! And you’ll feel good afterward. Put it on your calendar and contribute your expertise.

If you want to hang out with your SUMO friends, IRC is still up: connect your IRC client to: irc.mozilla.com and join channel #sumo.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: We seem to be back up and running.  You can check the status of SUMO on our status page

Just create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Our goal is to answer 200 additional questions throughout the day as this is the average number of questions each day that go unanswered. We need your help!

We have a group of champions who answer a large number of questions and we want to ask everyone who doesn’t regularly answer forum support questions about Firefox, to join us on Thursday for a sprint to relieve some of the fatigue our SUMO forum superstars and moderators feel each week.

It is a very rewarding contribution that will instantly put you in touch with Firefox users! Even just 30 minutes of your time would help us immensely! And you’ll feel good afterward. Put it on your calendar and contribute your expertise.

Superpowers don’t come easy, so I’ve been participating in lots of exercises to increase my strength.

I attended a brainstorming session about use cases for mobile Firefox during my first week. We discussed everything from educational tasks, such as learning the recipes for a variety of mixed drinks, to traditional business communication needs. It was a passionate dialogue about mobile users, their characteristics, and how those characteristics drive needs on the mobile web.

There were a few takeaways from this think tank that I think we should consider when designing mobile support:

• Every piece of data is useful and precious
• Sometimes a data plan is too expensive and free wifi is not readily available
• The internet can cause fatigue

I keep these in mind while planning the project to achieve SUMO’s mobile goal for this quarter, to make Android a top tier platform on FIrefox for Mobile Help. The plan proposes development of new knowledge base articles to describe Troubleshooting, Privacy & Security, and Advanced topics along with documenting new features. I also plan on making some changes to existing content to optimize for small screens, improve visibility of support resources and grow our community of experts.

Do join SUMO and participate in developing this content and in answering user questions with me. It has been incredibly rewarding to help new Firefox for Android users and I think you’ll enjoy it too. Just register and add some feedback on the Discussion tab for any article that you think needs some work, every extra voice will improve the final articles a great deal.

Firefox for Android is really new, so if you want to influence the direction of this technology, you should join in the conversation on the #mobile channel, I’m michelleluna, so say hello! All of the development and test engineers along with user experience designers, marketing and product managers and new folks like me hang out there.

If you’re in San Francisco, join our next meetup where we talk about Firefox for Android and enjoy brewery delights.