Categories: Meetings

Minutes of SUMO meeting 2009-01-12

Attendees: mzz, Quarantine, zzxc, cilias, kbrosnan, Tanner, Cww, underpass, michro, myles7897, tom06, Jammer400 (came late)

Sumo

Roundtable

  • Introductions
  • Wrapup of past year and SUMO thoughts
    • LiveChat 20K Questions in one year!
    • From the Italians community: SUMO is a great project and we’ve solved lots of KB problems and bugs (especially in terms of localization over the past year)
    • Forum: major issue (outside of lack of contributors) is that tikiforum format is different from phpBB and can be perplexing to people used to it, also search is making it difficult for users and threads fall off the top page too fast.
  • The SUMO community
    • Where contributors come from: Most from word of mouth, #firefox, very few from the how to contribute page. Italian localizers mentioned the difficulty in getting people who weren’t already big contributors in mozillaitalia to contribute to SUMO.
    • Improve the community in terms of attracting non-en users. How?
    • How do we best communicate known issues so that contributors know what’s going on during server breakdowns and/or know when fixes are coming down the pipeline.
    • What do contributors follow in terms of communication channels: almost everyone follows the blog (most via planet) and some follow the newsgroup as well, see also this survey, question 16
    • The sumo blog:
      • don’t be too frequent, bug fixes/releases are good. About:sumo newsletter may incorporate minutes and other things. Lists of KB articles that need work may be nice.
  • Making helping easier
    • Problems with getting Livechat contributors to work on the KB also: it seems hard to get started on the KB. What if we made the KB have more “unapproved/informal” content that contributors can see? Better article editor?
    • Make an extension for sharing notes/snippets/weekly common issues for forum users/live chat/kb article writing… may not need to be this complicated. Use unapproved KB articles?
    • An about:support extension for users so it’s easier to get lists of extensions/plugins/useragent. — mzz is on this. Has limited value as an extension (won’t work in safe mode, most extension users are more advanced) but is a good proof of concept for maybe being built into Firefox proper.
  • Firefox 3.1
    • Support for 3.1 is here: See this blog post and this article and this wiki doc. New 3.1 category in Thursday’s push.
    • Perhaps we should sit down with a fresh install and brainstorm the major user changes that may confuse/upset users (like the Smart location bar in 3.0).
  • Open Discussion
    • Should we do this more often? (That is have an explicit meeting for contributors?)
      • General consensus is yes, but shorter.
      • Monthly? Different time zones? Pre-submit topics for smoother flow?

One comment on “Minutes of SUMO meeting 2009-01-12”

  1. Cheng Wang wrote on

    sorry this went up so late, the difference between Post and Publish is subtle but critical.