One week after our fourth Support Firefox Day (SFD for short), it’s time for reflection! This time around, Cheng was doing most of the work of pulling it all together, as well as hosting a fair share of the individual sessions throughout the day. That said, it was very much a display of great team work where everyone from the SUMO team was involved to ensure that the day would become a success.
Chris hosted the localization sessions during the European and American time slots, while Cheng was covering for Chris when he was enjoying his good night’s sleep during the Asian time slot. Matthew worked hard on the technical backend, making sure we had a decent landing page and were properly set up with Mogulus and other technologies used throughout the day. We were also privileged with Asa‘s great technical expertise during the American session.
Initially, the focus of the event was going to be 100% localization. However, before the agenda for the day was set in stone, Mitchell contacted me about getting the SUMO community involved with the Mozilla 2010 goals discussions she had initiated on her blog. She asked me if I wanted to lead a discussion about this and asked what would be the most appropriate channel for such a discussion, and I immediately thought that the upcoming SFD would be a good opportunity.
Mitchell and I sat down a few weeks ago when I was visiting the Mountain View office to discuss how we wanted to go about with this discussion, and after a few ideas being bounced back and forth, we agreed that we would primarily be using IRC for the discussion, but also to use video to kickstart it and explain why Mozilla’s goals are important for everyone in the community (since it’s really the community that has the power to make our goals become our reality).
The Asian and European sessions were hosted by Cheng and me, respectively. Since Cheng lives in Mountain View, we thought it would be cool if he could actually broadcast the Mozilla 2010 American session live with Mitchell. If you missed this discussion, you can still watch it from the SFD4 start page. In the video area, click “On Demand” and then choose the Mozilla goals 2010 session. A summary of the thoughts and ideas that were gathered throughout the course of the day can be found on this wiki page.
It was an interesting challenge to split this SFD up into three separate time slots for the Asian, European, and American time zones. For me personally, it was pretty exhausting since I chose to attend to the full day, which meant that I started my work day at 5:30 am and ended it at (I think) around 11:30 pm. :)
But more generally, we were surprised to see that there were more people attending from Europe during the American session than there were during the actual European session. Although when you think of it, it actually makes sense, since many people in our community has daytime jobs that makes it hard for them to participate in the middle of the day, making an event starting at 7 pm more natural to attend to.
It was great to see so many people getting together in our IRC channel #sumo, both existing and new community members. I personally think this is the most important part of a SFD — to ensure that people get together in real time to meet, chat, and have fun. We had lots of that during the day (I need to dig up a good IRC quote from the day to show an example!).
A huge thanks to everyone that participated, both actively and passively, last Friday! It was a great experience and we all enjoyed it very much. And of course, a special thanks to Mitchell and Asa for setting aside time from your busy schedules to join us in making the day a Great Success!