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).

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