Saturday, July 28, 2007

Seeding Mozilla marketing in India and beyond

Mozilla in India...
Seth B., Manager of Mozilla's community giving program, and Chris Hofmann (chofmann), Director of Special Projects for Mozilla, went on a 2 week community building trip to India as a part of our larger objective of seeding Mozilla marketing around the world. Seth's blog has an incredible account of the trip (many great blog posts). I recommend that you check it out. A quick summary is that Seth and Chofmann both feel that the Mozilla community in India is incredibly vibrant and excited to help spread Firefox.

... and Beyond
As I mentioned earlier, Rishi, one of our interns, has been researching the state of the web and the state of Mozilla in Russia, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, Canada and Mexico. We will be publishing what we have learned within the next week. We look forward to your feedback on the information and possible next steps.

What's up in Brazil and Argentina? Lots!
I have heard from a few of our Brazil volunteers that they have begun organizing action teams around getting local computer makers (small businesses-- almost like mom and pop shops) to put Firefox on all the computers they build. Mozilla Argentina volunteers are testing a similar program at Internet Cafes/LAN Houses. We are all excited to hear how these efforts work and see if they can be replicated elsewhere.

Friday, July 27, 2007

1 week until SUMO knowledge base alpha-- we need your help!

If all goes to plan, the Firefox Support Working group will be pushing the support.mozilla.com knowledge base live for community review next Friday, August 3rd.

We still have some open articles, as well as plenty of claimed articles that need writing and editing. Check our our community contributor page to learn how you can help. It is going to take a full team effort to get the alpha live by the end of the week, but given the overwhelming response thus far, I think it is doable.

Forum design feedback needed
We are now in the process of designing the look and feel of the SUMO forums. If you have any feedback on what they should look like (remember, we have already chosen TikiWiki as the solution) or any examples of easy to use support forums out there, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

Do you know any good chat solutions?
We also are looking for live chat solutions. If you know of any good easy to use chat solutions, please pass those along too!

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

First Enterprise Working Group call a success!

As I mentioned earlier, we now have an Enterprise Working Group that is exploring how we can make Firefox easier to use/deploy for large organizations (companies, schools, governments, universities).

Check out a quick recap of today's discussion. Thanks to everyone who participated.

The next call will focus on improvements/features in Firefox that would be helpful for enterprises. We are still looking for participants in the group, so definitely feel free to join. Once we have details for the next call, I will also post them here.

47 out of 64 Firefox support articles claimed (WOW)!

We are on a roll here folks! Great work by a large number of volunteers.

If you want to get involved, please jump on in today! Get started now and claim your article(s). It is an easy way to have a major impact on millions of Firefox users.

I will be posting more information soon on SUMO next steps.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

28 of 64 Firefox support articles claimed

Saturday has been a busy day for the Firefox support article writers. We now have people signed up to write 28 of the 64 articles needs to launch the SUMO project.

You too can join in the fun! Get started now and claim your article(s). It is an easy way to have a major impact on millions of Firefox users.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Get 'em while they're hot: write a Firefox support article

12 of the 64 Firefox support articles have already been claimed... sign-up for an article today before you miss out!

The number of people who have volunteered for this project has been amazing so far (10 different people-- none of them paid to do it)! Get started now (even if you can't write the article today-- put your name next to the article you want to write).

Can't decide whether or not you should do it?
Tens of millions of Firefox users will benefit from your work. We make it easy to get involved and we are definitely happy to answer your questions.

Don't have the time?
Writing an article shouldn't take too much time. We have done much of the research for you. Most of the articles have sources you can refer to in writing the article. Plus, it is way more fun that doing your laundry.

But JT, I'm a really, really, really bad writer: If you can't write, I'm sure you are good at communicating in other ways. Use those skills to get others to help out.

I don't know how to use the wiki?
Tell me which article you want to write (jt at mozilla dot com) and I will sign you up. Then, write the article, send it to me and I will post it for you.

The SUMO project is a Mozilla wide effort that needs your help. Get started today. Thanks in advance!

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Write a Firefox support article today!

After many months of hard work, we are now ready to start writing support documentation for the support.mozilla.com project!

This is an awesome way to impact the experience of tens of millions of people in a very real way. Let’s be honest, how often do you get to do that? Whether you are an engineer, writer, marketer, salesperson, student or none of the above, you can write support documentation for Firefox. It’s easy to get started!

But I am not a good writer! No problem… we need people who can write out the core content. Once we have that, we can have people who are “writers” and “editors” clean it up and make it sound pretty.

Get started now by following the instructions on our “Get Started Now” page!

Update:
We are 1 down and have 63 more to go! (Congrats to Andrew for finishing the first draft!)

I will be posting daily updates on our progress. Please help us spread the word!

Monday, July 16, 2007

Join the Firefox Enterprise Working Group

Firefox has shown incredible growth in the consumer market over the past few years. We have done that through laser focus on developing a product with the user's interests driving our decisions (in addition to a little marketing and lots of happy users spreading the word). With that focus on users, we have not been as focused on serving large organizations. While we do know that some major corporations deploy Firefox, we haven't been able to address their needs with the same veracity that we have for individual users (luckily we are an open source organization!).

To help figure out what can be done to make Firefox the best choice for enterprises (we define this as large companies as well as non-profits, educational institutions, governments and even medium size businesses), some Firefox community members have gathered to form the Firefox Enterprise Working Group.

The group will take a similar approach to the Firefox Support Working Group: understand the current state of the market, identify ways to improve our support of enterprise and build consensus around what action is possible by Mozilla community and MoCo. I am looking forward to working with them.


Check out the info from the two community leaders Michael and Yuriy:
What
The first Global call focused on the Enterprise Working Group around Firefox is currently scheduled for July 25, 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern, 17:00 UTC.
Where
Please see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise for Objectives, Rules of Engagement, and Dial-in Info.
How
Each of the calls will be organized around a central theme, with the primary goal being to simply communicate information and document that information, in the hopes that people inside and outside the group can learn from our experiences.

P.S. Figuring out enterprise is particularly important in locales where a majority of users access the internet through the workplace (or at least a large percentage of them). For us to ensure meaningful market share, we don't necessarily need a full outbound enterprise program overnight, but we do need to work well for those who are interested in using Firefox. That is what we are trying to figure.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Firefox market share trending up globally

Thanks to all the hard work of the Mozilla community, Firefox market share is trending up all over the globe. Check out this Xiti Monitor article (in French) that goes in to more detail. Hopefully, with our efforts to help develop and support the marketing communities in each locale, we can help accelerate this growth.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

support.mozilla.com and community support sites

Since the Firefox Support community working group announced its PRD to create a knowledge base, forum and live chat at support.mozilla.com, many people have asked me how this will affect the community support sites around the globe. I will answer that in two parts: 1) Why we think the community driven support.mozilla.com is important 2) Community support sites are and will still be integral parts of the Mozilla community

For the long time that Mozilla has not addressed user support of Firefox, these community sites have done an incredible job providing user support on behalf of the Mozilla community. However, as the user base has grown beyond tech savvy users, the support needs for Firefox have changed. After an open planning process of a few months, the support working group has determined the best way to meet the needs of the average Firefox user is to create SUMO.

Firefox support, even on Mozilla.com, will always be community driven. We couldn’t and, just as important, wouldn’t have it any other way. We also need to increase participation beyond the current contributors to meet the expected demand. To get involved, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

We fully expect that community support sites will continue to meet the needs of their users after the launch of SUMO. The larger the support community there is, the better things are for Mozilla users (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc). I suspect there will be lots we can all learn from each other.


What about L10n?
The SUMO project will first be rolled out for en-US (because we have volunteers to make it happen). Locales who want to participate in the beta of SUMO are definitely welcome. Please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com for more information. Until others are rolled out, we will link to the community support sites in those locales (similar to what we do now).

Monday, July 9, 2007

Firefox Support Project Manager

As a part of our efforts to improve Firefox support, we are looking for a Firefox Support Project Manager. If you are interested or know someone who is interested, please let me know (jt at mozilla dot com).

Thanks,

JT

Firefox Support Project Manager

Duties:
Responsible for all aspects of the support.mozilla.com platform
Mobilize volunteers for successful platform roll out and continued support
Spearhead efforts to recruit and train more volunteers
Develop and track metrics to ensure quality user support and healthy support community
Identity, develop and support volunteer community
Develop and implement formal feedback loops
Serve as primary interface for support between marketing, product, QA and engineering
Responsible for overall user care efforts (including responding to letters, voicemails, etc.)

Required Qualifications:
Team player attitude
Self-motivated and quick learner
Excellent verbal and interpersonal skills
Excellent written communication skills
Strong multitasking and troubleshooting skills
Good organization and time management skills
Customer management skills
Familiarity with personal computers, desktop applications, web browsers, and Windows operating systems
Strong familiarity with Mozilla and Firefox required, experience working with open source or community driver organization strongly preferred

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Firefox support platform vendor selection call today

Tuesday, July 3rd at 2pm pacific time-- we will decide between the mediawiki/drupal, tikiwiki and jive software systems for the support knowledge base and forum platform.

Call in details:
* California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
* Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
* Toll-free: 800-707-2533 (866-879-4799 as a backup) then password 369
* Conference bridge: 280

Agenda:
General overview of process
Walk through of matrix for each solution
Decision time!

The latest of the requirements matrix:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pnnxzqhCygtc_zRTAr0C-VQ