Talk:Engagement/Developer Engagement/FirefoxOSAppsv2

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Please provide feedback on the Firefox OS Apps & Marketplace Developer Engagement plan here by clicking the "Edit" link above. Be sure to save the page before you exit. Even though the history function shows editor names, we suggest you use this format:

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Havi: here are the proposed uber-categories -

  • Content
  • Events
  • Tools
  • Support
  • Contests & Incentives

Added "Feedback Collection" and then bucketed all the activities accordingly. (Some were a bit of a force fit, but I think that's okay.) Also provided a table at end of doc to describe the categories.


Stormy:

Great job pulling all the information/plans into one place and making sense of it! In particular, I really like the phases approach.

Goals:

  • I like Ali's specific to the audience goal suggestions
  • I don't think the goals should be so specific to the Brazil launch; I think we should just say "initial launch" addressed
  • "vital ecosystem" -> "vital developer ecosystem" addressed
  • Do we want to populate the marketplace or get individual developers to populate the marketplace? addressed
  • The first goal "generate enthusiasm ..." is important but not measurable. (Some of Ali's suggestions might provide some measurement.) In the short term, recognized this as more of a vision statement and suggested the other bullets as the specific goals/metrics for the plan.

Strategy:

  • I think we could tighten this up and include more of what we are doing. addressed
  • We should mention contents/incentives/big developer party addressed

Participants & Stakeholders:

  • Just an FYI, I don't think all the evangelism reps are on engagement-developers. There's a separate list for evangelist reps. addressed
  • Why are their tools under Marketplace & Apps and tools under developer experience/developer tools? Do Ali/Kevin have a document some where that describes how they are working together/merging plans? clarified players; Ali has a line item regarding MDN/DevHub rationalization, and see her remark below
  • What about Lisa Brewster? addressed

Raise Developer Awareness:

  • quality app says done, is that in a form we can disseminate as part of our outreach? This is baked into Lisa Brewster's guidelines, which will be published. Do we need more?

Enable App Prototyping:

  • Sync developer tools, MDN and DevHub added tools
  • Brazil support community has "Continue" as the owner addressed
  • Feedback capture: we need a good way to give feedback (not on games but in general) suggested weekly report
  • Joe has been working on a sample app addressed
  • Close the time frames or change the title to be "start time frame" addressed

Ali: here are some of my thoughts on goals & strategies...

Goals - I'd like to see something less defined by what we (Mozilla) want and more developer-centric.

Could we possibly add something along the lines of providing a certain percentage of new apps developers training or assistance with their apps. Or a goal around providing developers with an audience (I guess I'm getting at the thought that we are focused too much on looking at what we want, as opposed to what we are doing for developers to help them help the web).

Ideas for goals for target demographics:

  • Number of existing (platform, marketplace, type) apps moved to FFOS/Marketplace
  • Provide (# or %) of general web developers with training on apps & related technologies
  • Get (x)% of developers who participate in an event, training, etc to submit an app
  • Number of existing mobile apps ported (could be by platform, type, etc)
  • Get a specific number or percentage of Mozilla community members submit an app (provide support / training for this)
  • Train a certain number of people in (x) market(s) how to make apps

Christian and I were chatting about this, and he added some ideas as well. Specifically:

  • Chrome HTML5 apps developers could be a target demographic for porting over apps
  • It would be smart to do some fact finding in existing web app communities (i.e. Chrome) and get their feedback about what they are missing that we could provide, and develop goals around that...

Similar thoughts with the strategy, I'd like to see more about how we can help people upskill to creating apps, or helping developers (recruiting isn't very helpful if they don't have or gain the skills to develop apps). Having the regional communities do training assumes they have the skills needed, which may not be the case (most of our community members in ReMo are Firefox contributors).

In the short term, punted on goal rejigging. I was struggling with the concern that we would be adding a false precision, but let's discuss further face to face. I see the value and the desire to make the goals more developer-facing. Did add several action items around Chrome developer demographic.


ali: re: Do Ali/Kevin have a document some where that describes how they are working together/merging plans? I'll be working on this next week and will post a link to it...


Rob: Overall, I'm happy with the goals and strategies. I just have a few things I want to clarify and some bits to make everyone aware of that might prove useful.

  • Should another primary goal be to educate and evangelise the 'why' behind Open Web Apps?
    • This might be assumed in a larger goal but I want to make sure we focus on the reasons why this is happening as well as getting bums on seats in the Marketplace

Added specific action to articulate value proposition for developers

  • It's worth pointing out that we have Mozilla-produced tools like Emscripten for converting native apps to JavaScript
    • Right now, this converts from C++ though there are other tools around that convert from C#
    • I'm not sure if anything exists to convert from Obj-C (iPhone) though

Called out specific action item around Emscripten. I had misunderstood the capabilities of this and thought it was intended for Android (Java) apps.

  • One strategy that we could explore is reaching out to tool developers so we can change things from the top-down
    • This is something that we're exploring with game engines and game-creation tools
    • I think it will be easier to get apps if developers don't need to change their process aside from adding a new target or re-exporting from their existing tool
    • I believe we'll have a battle on our hands if we try and convince all developers to take a manual approach to this, unless we do a very good job explaining the 'why' (they should care) and prove that the apps will work cross-platform (which they don't, atm – meaning devs will need to manually change things at some point in the future)

Added one action item on manifest creation tools. Can you suggest other tools we should target?

I'm not exactly sure where to put all those but they're my general thoughts so far.


Robert: Thanks for putting this together! Some feedback:

  • There seems to be a gap between existing HTML5 APP Developers and Web Developers described as "General web developers unfamiliar with HTML5 specifics". I think we have a LOT of HTML5-knowing web developers out there, but they don't have an existing app. "All" they need is information about APIs etc needed for creating an app.

Used HTML5 knowledge as the major category and app availability and type as the sub-category

  • Incentive. Even while we know it's good for the Open Web, why would developers use it? E.g. what's the projected user base, markets, backwards compatibility, monetization options.

Added value proposition action item.

  • Platforms. This document is very Firefox OS-centric, for obvious reasons, but I think we need to cover desktop in general.
    • Rendering engine. To my knowledge, the APIs etc will only work in Gecko (Firefox). Then we're "just" another Chrome Store and it will be hard to convince developers

Agreed. Perhaps we can view this as phase I and address desktop in broader 2013 planning.


Tristan:

  • Just wanted to reiterate my willingness to do my share of raising developer awareness when I give talks in conferences.

Very good.

  • in the same table, on top of posts to Hacks, I (we) could post to Beyond The Code.

Yes, that was an oversight. Thanks for making the change.

  • In #Activities_3 (Enable Marketplace Readiness table), about "develop performance tips and tricks", I agree that developer Evangelists should own this, and I expect we could use a lot of expertise from the Gaia team for this, since they have for sure encountered platform limitations while building Gaia, and could probably share a few of their hard-learned lessons.

Added Engineering as a partner for the deliverable.

  • In the same table, I really like the idea of providing access to Professional UI design consultancy.
  • With regards to "Expand Reach" (section V), I'd like to learn more about this iOS/Android app Converter thing. If this thing can exist, I have no idea of what it could look like, and how it would work (but in the same vein, I had no idea that Emscripten could even exist ;-) .

That was my misunderstanding. I was unknowingly referring to Emscripten, but didn't understand the capabilities. I've updated it reflect reality. (Darn!)