Support/Weekly Meetings/Minutes 2009-01-12

Support » Weekly Meetings » 2009-01-12

Attendees: mzz, Quarantine, zzxc, cilias, kbrosnan, Tanner, Cww, underpass, michro, myles7897, tom06, Jammer400 (came late)

Sumo

• Weekly metrics
• Last week's weekly support issues
  • Malware (redirected searches, popups, etc) are starting to be a bigger problem.

Roundtable

• Introductions

• Wrapup of past year and SUMO thoughts
  • LiveChat 20K Questions in one year!
  • From the Italians community: SUMO is a great project and we've solved lots of KB problems and bugs (especially in terms of localization over the past year)
  • Forum: major issue (outside of lack of contributors) is that tikiforum format is different from phpBB and can be perplexing to people used to it, also search is making it difficult for users and threads fall off the top page too fast.

• The SUMO community
  • Where contributors come from: Most from word of mouth, #firefox, very few from the how to contribute page. Italian localizers mentioned the difficulty in getting people who weren't already big contributors in mozillaitalia to contribute to SUMO.
  • Improve the community in terms of attracting non-en users. How?
  • How do we best communicate known issues so that contributors know what's going on during server breakdowns and/or know when fixes are coming down the pipeline.
  • What do contributors follow in terms of communication channels: almost everyone follows the blog (most via planet) and some follow the newsgroup as well, see also this survey, question 16
  • The sumo blog:
    • don't be too frequent, bug fixes/releases are good. About:sumo newsletter may incorporate minutes and other things. Lists of KB articles that need work may be nice.

• Goals for 2009
  • Here is djst's vision for SUMO:
    • 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
  • Always need more contributors
  • What makes you as a contributor stay around:
    • People on IRC/in forums are friendly and fun to be around
    • It's a worthwhile project/good browser
  • Ideas for fun things:
    • Twitter feed?
    • Have a voice call more frequently?
      • Have meetings more open and make sure people feel comfortable voicing opinions, maybe not special meetings
    • Mozilla community project
    • Does this distract from SUMO?

• Making helping easier
  • Problems with getting Livechat contributors to work on the KB also: it seems hard to get started on the KB. What if we made the KB have more "unapproved/informal" content that contributors can see? Better article editor?
  • Make an extension for sharing notes/snippets/weekly common issues for forum users/live chat/kb article writing... may not need to be this complicated. Use unapproved KB articles?
  • An about:support extension for users so it's easier to get lists of extensions/plugins/useragent. -- mzz is on this. Has limited value as an extension (won't work in safe mode, most extension users are more advanced) but is a good proof of concept for maybe being built into Firefox proper.

• Firefox 3.1
  • Support for 3.1 is here: See this blog post and this article and this wiki doc. New 3.1 category in Thursday's push.
  • Perhaps we should sit down with a fresh install and brainstorm the major user changes that may confuse/upset users (like the Smart location bar in 3.0).

• Open Discussion
  • Should we do this more often? (That is have an explicit meeting for contributors?)
    • General consensus is yes, but shorter.
    • Monthly? Different time zones? Pre-submit topics for smoother flow?