Here’s one of those things that make me feel good about being a part of SUMO and Mozilla.
In late 2008, the SUMO team started to collect feedback from the community about what we should focus on in order to make the platform and Firefox Support website a more exciting place to collaborate on. We also added our own ideas about how to improve the experience for both Firefox users visiting the site and contributors helping out. The result of this work is something I called the Vision for SUMO followed by the SUMO 2009 roadmap.
Since then, we’ve worked to make the vision a reality. We’ve improved the quality of our support. We’ve improved our ability to provide user insights and track user trends. We’ve managed to implement many cool and useful features (with lots of help from the amazing web development team at Mozilla) which really made it easier and more fun to contribute on SUMO as well as improved the experience on the website for users. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve had a good time.
All these amazing achievements aside, this is what makes me the most proud:
Growth of SUMO community since October 2008
In a little less than a year, we’ve managed to double the number of active locales, doubled the number of translated articles, and most importantly, more than doubled the number of active SUMO contributors!
As a side note, the survey that was sent out after MozCamp 09 in Prague showed that 30% of the attendees were involved with user support. That’s an amazingly large proportion of our European community actively involved with helping our users having a great experience on the web!
30% of Ludovic Hirlimann's photo of the European community, used under CC-BY-NC license
Even though it’s just October, I’m already blown away by the achievements by everyone in the SUMO community in 2009. And by the way, I’m glad it’s just October: it’s time to start thinking about where to take SUMO in 2010! More on that tomorrow very soon…