Goodbye old page.

This page is all about Support Firefox Day.

Here's the philosophy I'm going to go by: If we make this a BIG event and invest heavily in it, people will feel motivated to come. If people are thusly motivated, we'll get publicity. Publicity is good.

So the goal of the planning breaks down into four sections:

1. Making the event something awesome and newsworthy.
2. Getting people who hear about it early to stick around and people who do come to stay afterwards.
3. Getting the word out.
4. Making sure people who do show are well prepped.

Awesomifying the event

Yeah, that's the word. Awesomifying. Live with it :) Here's the plan: pack the day full of events, not just stuff to do, but real events.

So here are some ideas... add to them:

Video contest

This one is easy, make videos, add them to the KB, get shirts. Yay. Fill out details here:

Workshops

How awesome would it be if we had a few workshops during the day about Firefox? The kind of thing that would appeal to the user who wants to trick out Firefox and knows it pretty darn well but may not be so technical as to know how to get started on CODING. These are exactly the people we want to take part in Support Firefox Day and maybe a workshop will be what they need.

The overall theme around the workshops should be to "learn about the new features of Firefox 3 to better help others." The aim should be to educate current and potential new contributors about the new features, which will lead to a higher quality forum and live chat support, as well as potentially improved support articles about these topics.

Here are some workshop ideas:

1. The new security features in Firefox 3
2. Why the new Location Bar is the AwesomeBar
3. 15 awesome things you can do in Firefox 3... that you could also do in Firefox 2!
4. Turbocharge your browsing: using all keyboard or all mouse navigation. (This is one of my favorite sets of Firefox features.)

A workshop would be either all IRC with a moderator to vet the questions and a workshop leader. As the leader, you prep a few materials ahead of time and basically guide people through them, taking questions, cracking jokes etc. Better would be a video feed with a text component again moderated. Or something. We need people to sign up to lead workshops... come up with an idea of a workshop you want to lead, work with someone else...

To do: Need to figure out a format for these things. Should we try to get live video with live screencasts? It'd be pretty sweet but that adds another layer of things that can go wrong and things that need to be set up and put together.

Question: Will we have time to focus on this and the Q&A sessions, and Live Chat and forums, and' screencasts? Or is this something we could save for a future Support Firefox Day?

Q/A/F sessions

More of a marketing thing to drive more people to the event. A panel or one person with a topic and a moderator to vet questions. Q/A/F stands for Questions, Answers, Feedback. These have to be big-name people but it's only 30 minutes or so, so hopefully we can pull it off.

Confirmed topics:

• Mozilla. How did it start, what's the difference between MoCo and MoFo, how can I get involved (support of course :p), etc. Celebrity host: John Lilly
• Software design at Mozilla. How is it organized, how feature decisions are made (user demand, usability, support, etc). Celebrity host: Mike Beltzner
• Firefox 3. Yak and yak and yak on about Firefox 3. Celebrity host: Mike Connor

Other ideas:

• What's it like to work for Mozilla? Maybe what it's like to intern at Mozilla, with one of the interns (old or new) taking questions about the other people in the office etc?
• General. Funny story time. Random important people can be in a panel just to talk about the FUN side of being a Firefox junkie. Best memory, what they do in their free time... ha! free time, no free time for you! stuff like that. Ideally we'd have more than one host in this session.

Of course we won't take all these ideas, but maybe 4 total between workshops and QAF sessions.

In progress: one more speaker needed! Asa is up for a chat, what would be the best topic? General fun story time? He is a storyteller after all!

We need moderators. I'm working on some really simple guidelines depending on how we get everything set up.

Support sessions

Rather than have LiveChat open all day, alternate workshop/QA and help session with sessions no more than 2 hours. That way people who show up for the workshop will be all gungho about Mozilla (hopefully) and stick around for the help session. Ideally, they'd all have spark installed so the transition is seamless but we'll see. What would be really needed is a way to close Livechat without begging everyone to close. I know Lucy can do it from the control panel. Hopefully she'll be around.

Give out prizes for support work. Bonus incentive... also turns the focus on support.

Retention

The first part of the retention idea is to have people register with Sumo to take part in Support Firefox Day. That means we have their e-mail address on file but it also means they're more likely to stay for the day since they've already committed. But if we have early registration, we'll need some kind of way for them to stick around and stay engaged.

So the proposal here is to have a forum community (maybe a subforum of the contributors forum) where we have just small fun threads... like "tell us about yourself" and "what's your best support moment (not just Firefox related)." and totally random fun threads: "post a crazy photo". Also a nice google maps mashup showing the other contributors and geoIPs of people whom we're helping right now. A nice rolling ticker: support.mozilla.com, over 4931 people served. Stuff like that.

Before Support Firefox Day, we'll also take ideas for workshops and stuff like that so people who register early can feel like they're actively part of the action. After Support Firefox Day, the community center will be in place so this will encourage sticking around.

To do: look into what ticker/stats options are available.

Have people sign up / blog about what their participation

As discussed after SUMO Day #1, it would be very useful if we could get people to "commit" to what they're doing during the day, by e.g. blogging about it, listing it on a wiki page or similar. This also gives us a much better overview on who did what.

• Setup a wiki page, a forum thread, or similar
• Encourage people to post there what they've done, or link to their blog post about it.
• This way, we automatically get the sumo user names of the people who contributed (allowing us to reward them), and we also encourage them to blog about it, giving us more publicity.

Preregistration

I filed a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432343 to get the forums split up. zzxc is working on making trackers for each workshop, Q/A, support session so people can register.

Get the word out

The last SUMO Day wasn't really well publicized; we should do better this time. Here are some ideas:

Reporters/Bloggers

Invite them to the event. Seriously, you have no idea how much a personal invite means to people. "I know you wrote about Livechat when it first came out, but here's an unprecedented chance to see behind the scenes a little, ask questions of the Mozilla head honchos as well as meet other people working with the support project. We've matured a lot since December, come see! And hey, you may learn some stuff too: There's a special Q&A session about Firefox 3!" These bloggers, especially the middle-range ones, will certainly mention the event whether they come or not.

Draft e-mail

(PS, I still am in favor of personalizing this as much as possible but here's the gist.)

Mozilla is hosting Support Firefox Day on May 23rd 2008. As the head of the Firefox Support project, I wanted to send preliminary invitation to you and your readers. The event is geared up to be all about users. You'll get a chance to learn more about the Mozilla Corporation and Firefox 3 and have your voices heard as well. We've got lots of things planned! In particular, we've lined up a prestigious group of Mozilla celebrities who will be taking YOUR questions and feedback about a variety of subjects. We'll also have workshops where we'll be focusing on all the new features of Firefox 3.

However, the big highlight of the day will be the best new feature of all: Firefox's new user-based support system. All throughout the day, we'll be showcasing the various aspects to the support system: from the collaboratively written knowledge base to the forums and chat-based support and inviting you to take part. In addition to support-related contests with some pretty sweet Mozilla gear for prizes, we'll be around all day to answer questions and help you get started helping your fellow users and Firefox enthusiasts.

The event is still in the planning stages, of course, and we have a preliminary schedule and plans up at (link) where we will putting up more and more information as we get it ironed out. However, as I really appreciate the support that you've shown us through the years, I'd like to give you and your readers this opportunity to register early and give US feedback on the event. Perhaps there's a particular topic that you want to see a panel on that we can arrange, perhaps there's a feature you'd like highlighted or more information on, perhaps you want to help out with doing support on the day or get more information about the contests. This event is all about you, our wonderful users so we're going to do everything we can to make it great for you.

Yours, David Tenser (totally not ghostwritten by Cww... not at all.)

In progress: djst has sent an email to our awesome metrics guy (ken) and über blogging tracker (asa).

Banner ads

May require a lot of time and money from marketing or PR. But hey, it's guaranteed to be put up on the major sites.

Video

Can we be funny, silly and creative enough to have the top YouTube video? Want to try?

Training

This one is a toughie since the above is already a lot of work. But the idea is to take any preregisterees and offer to give them one-on-one training so they'll be approved and ready to take chats as soon as sumoday starts. We'll be too busy on the day just running it to be training as well so training in advance is really the best way. Yeah, it means EVEN MORE work before the event and I'm not really looking forward to it either. But otherwise, zzxc and I will go up in flames on the day.

Schedule

All times in PDT

• 8:00 AM - 10:00: Support session #1
• 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 (with a focus on Live Chat). Host: Lucy
• 10:45 - 11:00: Break/transition
• 11:00 - 11:30: Speaker: mconnor on Firefox 3
• 11:30 - 12:30: Support Session #2
• 12:30 - 1:15: Workshop: Learn about Firefox’s new bookmark system (tags, smart location bar, keywords) to better help others. Host: Dietrich Ayala
• 1:15 - 1:30: Break/transition
• 1:30 – 2:00: Speaker: Mike Beltzner on Software design process at Mozilla (how support and user feedback loops back into product)
• 2:00 - 3:00: Support Session #3
• 3:00 - 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro
• 3:45 - 4:00: Break/transition
• 4:00 - 4:30: Speaker: John Lilly on the Mozilla Corporation (how it was created, MoCo/MoFo, ideas, why we're doing this)
• 4:30 - 5:00: Speaker: Asa Doltzer on what it's like working for Mozilla (it's not a dull as you think!)

There are four support sessions. During each session, we will open LiveChat and have room monitors on duty as well as lots of other support staff and Mozilla staff to help you answer questions and help the users. As an added incentive, prizes will be awarded to the top few helpers (preregistered) during each session. You can also help on the forums, too! We’ll be watching there as well. (If you do not preregister and receive training for LiveChat in advance of Support Firefox Day, you’ll be unable to take LiveChat requests and hence severely hamper your eligibility for prizes.)