Evangelism/For The Record

Purpose

When someone at Mozilla sneezes, there's someone somewhere writing about it. From Twitter to the New York Times and everything in between, Mozilla attracts an amazing volume of coverage.

This volume is both good and bad. We don't have the marketing and pr budgets of the software mega-companies so the press buzz we get organically is wonderful. The downside is that because of the sheer volume of coverage, it's difficult to follow it all and make sure that Mozilla is being represented fairly.

What Mozilla lacks in marketing and pr budget, however, it more than makes up in the enthusiastic and capable community of participants who have already brought Firefox to 130 million users and made Mozilla a household name.

For the Record (FTR) is a community-driven public relations and press response program that will harness the energy and knowledge of the Mozilla community to 1) catalog all of the online coverage of the Mozilla Project, 2) develop a sustainable team of spokespeople who feel empowered to respond to online coverage, and 3) build a collection of talking points and responses to frequently asked questions.

Deployment

FTR will be rolled out in three phases. The first is a quick and dirty phase with a simple mailing list and wiki/forum for coordinating the inflow of stories, discussing responses, delegating follow-ups, and developing pat responses for FAQs. This phase will start this week and the plan is to have a minimum of 20 people participating within 10 days of the roll-out.

The second phase will consist of increased recruiting, expansion of ad-hoc tools, and group participation in tool design. This phase should be wrappped up by the second week of December and will conclude with the roll-out of a real website facade (site minus the tools,) a report on the first month of progress, and a call for increased participation. At this point, we should have at least 100 instances of community participation -- contributed a lead (story that needs response), nominated a question needing a reusable answer, or sent a clarifying comment/email response.

The third phase will be the roll-out, testing, and shipping of the tools that will make up the full platform of For the Record. The platform will include feed aggregation tools to provide the to be monitored flow of stories, FAQ generation tools, and stats reporting. Phase three should be completed by the end of Q108.