Categories: Discussions

Reflections on the first SUMO Day

I said before that the SUMO Day was a success, and wanted to provide some highlights to better illustrate it:

  • More than 80 articles in the Knowledge Base were edited or created during that single day. That’s about three times the amount of work done during a typical full week!
  • A lot of work was spent on improving our documentation for contributors, such as how to add screenshots, how to translate articles, etc. This is an important part of making it easier to get involved with SUMO.
  • With more than a few eyes on the Firefox 3 product help articles, we were able to finalize and freeze the content so localizers can start to update their translations in time for the release.
  • Many people, both within MoCo and the community, joined the #sumo IRC channel and helped making the day both fun and productive. Since that day, there has been more activity in #sumo — it feels more like a community now, which is simply awesome.

So, while the day indeed was a success, we think we can do better next time. Some thoughts and ideas that popped up:

  • We should make it easy to track what is being done during the day, and encourage people to tell us what they’re working on. This would give everyone a better overview of what’s going on, and we could more easily give credit where credit is due. Maybe something as simple as a wiki page would be sufficient for this.
  • For the next SUMO Day, it might make sense to approach people outside the traditional Mozilla community news/blog channels. After all, the SUMO project offers something for almost everyone to get involved with, regardless of interests or skills.
  • We must offer even better documentation. Although the first SUMO Day really helped improving our documentation on things like translating articles and writing OS or Firefox version specific content, we’re still not integrating it well enough on the site. Ideally, you should never have to ask yourself “Where can I find more info on how to use x?” because that info should be where you expect it to be, when you need it. For example, if you click on “Translate this page,” you should see links to the translation documentation right on the translation page.

Thanks again to everyone who helped us out during the SUMO Day, and to everyone who continues to log in to #sumo to provide feedback, share knowledge, and ask questions.

2 comments on “Reflections on the first SUMO Day”

  1. Seth wrote on

    To document what is done during the day, maybe we should ask people to blog about it and submit their posts to you so you can show everyone what has been done? Or, if people do not have blogs, perhaps they can send you a write up of what they did and you can post that to your blog? I agree though, it would be nice to see what everyone was doing and what people thought about the day.

  2. Flüge wrote on

    Seth suggestion is just great. You could ask the people to add their blog on a bloglist so you will really have a broader insight of the reactions, not only by the participators but by the commentators as well. How about RSS feeds and twitter in a second step?