Hello, SUMO Nation!
You may have heard of SUMO Buddies and noticed that recently we have not been particularly active in that area. Time to update everyone on what’s up with Buddies and where we want this idea to go this year.
We can not start talking into the future without a brief look into the past, of course. Soon after I had the honour of joining SUMO, Madalina asked me to take a closer look at Buddies and lead the charge in organizing the way SuMozillians support one another and help new members of our community get started.
The idea behind SUMO Buddies is a very simple one, but also one tied directly to how Mozillians as a community operate and succeed: “no new contributor left behind”. This means that whenever there is a new person joining SUMO and wanting to help as a member of the Support Forum Army of Awesome, the KB Editors, or the L10ns (rawr), there would be someone to show them around, answer their questions, and make sure they feel confident, comfortable, and happy to contribute to SUMO’s and Mozilla’s mission.
To achieve this, we tried to organize through different ways of communication (including IRC meetings on #sumomeet and #buddies, as well as forum threads on Discourse) and documentation (which you can find on the Mozilla Wiki, where it migrated from SUMO KB and was significantly expanded).
With time, it slowly became obvious that we were facing a few factors that made the Buddy format obsolete:
- We were too spread globally to meet at regular times. We tried supplanting that with asynchronous communication (also known as “forums”).
- Forum communication was not working, because being a Buddy was an extra activity for the majority of Mozillians willing to “buddy up”, already busy with the many aspects of supporting Mozilla’s mission in their free time.
- Too much structure felt restrictive and “mechanical”; not enough structure felt loose and disorganised. At its core, the need and will to help others comes from within, and putting too many rules and regulations around it destroys that.
Having learned all this through trial and error, we discussed the state and future plans for Buddies last year in December, and now it is time to share our ideas for the next iteration of the idea with you:
- We will keep encouraging all new SUMO contributors to introduce themselves in the forums.
- As much as possible, we (Madalina and Michał) will take care of the new contributors and guide them to the SUMO experts – you :-)
- Everyone (and we do mean everyone!) is welcome to jump in and be friendly and informative – the new SuMozillians count on you!
- We will encourage new contributors to nominate the most helpful among you as “SUMO Buddies”. Yes, there will be badges…
The “SUMO Buddy” title will therefore be more of a badge (heh ;-)) of recognition for your friendly community presence and general awesomeness, rather than another role to fill in.
Confused? Concerned? Got questions or comments? Let us know in the forums!