Category Archives: Contributor News

Community newsletter message, e.g. announcements about technical or content updates relevant to our contributors.

“Top 100″: the SUMO localization challenge!

Over the years our localizers have been supporting SUMO in all of it’s efforts to provide information and help for every user and every problem. Since SUMO has been growing constantly it seem very daunting (although not impossible) to maintain all articles up to date.

Recently we have added some new products and some other might get added soon. So we want to make sure that you can focus on what’s most important and provided the needed help for the users in your locale. For this we want locales to focus on translating and maintaining the Top 100 articles up to date.

By focusing on the Top 100 articles you are helping close to 95% of the users seeking help and your efforts go to articles that actually get a lot of views. I have talked to some localizers and they think that focusing on “only” 100 articles seems much more doable and it’s something that localizers can commit to. Also, if you have a support forum for those 5% users with an edge case that is the best place to get help.

How will this work?

To make it easier we will do some changes:

New progress bar for the Top 100 articles (bug filed, waiting to be implemented)
New “Top 100″ historical graph with all the other metrics (bug filed, waiting to be implemented)
Reviewer digest: we realized that in many cases the reviewers weren’t getting back to the articles, so we will be sending them a weekly digest with the articles that are waiting to be reviewed (bug filed, waiting to be implemented)
With the current L10n dashboard the articles with the highst visits go on the top, so just working your way from the top of the list is the way to go

We really hope that this change will help you focus on the articles that matter the most for users, so that you know for sure that your time is well spent. We would of course love and welcome if you would translate more than the Top 100, but we want to set a goal that makes sense and gets you motivated. Because 100 articles is actually reachable!

We will still want to have articles localized for special occasions: like the launch of Firefox OS. So apart form the Top 100 articles we might ask you to help us with other articles. But that’s because it will be very exciting : )

I hope you are as excited as we are about these new changes. Now we just need to rally around one simple goal. So, do you take the challenge?

Let us know if you want to be part of this challenge or if you have any thoughts around this on the l10n forum!

(Thanks Jan B for the art work : )

Localization of SUMO: focusing on our active locales

Providing localized support has always been one of the core purposes of SUMO and we’re very proud to be able to reach 85% of our users in their native or preferred language! We are constantly trying to improve the experience for our localizers and users and by assessing data from last year we came to the conclusion that we could do a couple of changes to provide a much better experience for our SUMO users.

What

We think that focusing the efforts of the community in the languages that are being translated and have an active community is the best way to help users. This means that we want to encourage inactive communities to take a different approach for helping users.

Why

Although we would love to provide support even in Klingon, the reality is that if we don’t have an active community who can help translate all content into Klingon, users end up in a page they don’t understand and most importantly: a page that doesn’t help. So we’re actually not providing a good experience. We want everyone that comes to SUMO actually finding help. And a page that is only partially translated or has outdated content is more frustrating than saying upfront that we don’t translate to their language.

Also asking community members to translate long and difficult articles that might not be read by anyone is a waste of their time and efforts, so we rather have you doing fun and rewarding activities.

How

The way we want to approach this is to suspend the SUMO locales that have little traffic AND aren’t active. This means that almost no users will be impacted, since the locales have already little traffic and are anyway almost empty. We hope that this will help our contributors to focus better on more impactful activities at Mozilla and SUMO.

Wait, what happens to the locales that go away? Project F+F!

We want to support every locale that has an active community willing to help users. So don’t worry, we’re not closing down SUMO for anyone. We just want to work with you on a tailored solution for the needs and capacities of the locale.

The idea is to offer an FAQ and/or a Forum, depending on what works best for your locale. And we will work with you to find that out. This means that if you want to support your locale and are alone or have little time, there are only a handful of articles to translate. You can also decide to open up a forum and help users as they need. So for example if you’re alone in your locale you could just maintain an FAQ. If you have a small team of helpers you can maintain the FAQ and open a forum too.

The specifics of this will be worked out later this year, but we will certainly not let any users or any community down.

Who

Some of the locales that we will remove will be redirected to another language (e.g.Catalan to Spanish) and for others like Hebrew the English version should be fine. Indian languages have little visits, but if they become much more popular we can definitely rethink the strategy. Which goes to any of the other locales in case anyone makes a good case and is motivated to help. So if you want to have the full version of SUMO and you have a committed team, we are waiting for you with our arms open!

Based on the data from last year here’s the list of locales that we would like to remove from SUMO because they have little traffic and had almost no activity from the community last year:

lt	Lithuanian
ca	Catalan
nb-NO	Norwegian (Bokmal)
he	Hebrew
et	Estonian
mn	Mongolian
mk	Macedonian
is	Icelandic
eu	Euskera
ach	Acholi
sr-Latn	Serbian – Latin
sq	Albanian
ms	Malay
ak	Akan
sw	Swahili
my	Burmese
az	Azerbaijani
be	Belarusian
as	Assamese
mr	Marathi
kn	Kannada
af	Afrikaans
eo	Esperanto
fy-NL	Frisian
rm	Rhaeto – Romance
te	Telugu
si	Sinhalese
pa-IN	Punjabi
hy-AM	Armenian
ga-IE	Gaelic – Ireland
gd	Gaelic
kk	Kazakh
ff	Fula
gu-IN	Gujarati
zu	Zulu
sah	Sakha
gl	Galician
rw	Rwandan
ilo	Ilokano
ast	Bable – Asturiano
mai	Maithili
lg	Luganda
son	Songhay
nso	Northern Sotho
fur	Friulian

What else could be replaced by a F+F solution?

These locales have either little visits or aren’t very active (For example Tamil and Nepali have lovely localizers but not too many visits and Portugese could be put together with Brazilian Portuguese). So we should have a conversation with the communities and figure out which solution makes more sense:

vi	Vietnamese
pt-PT	Portuguese (Portugal)
bg	Bulgarian
hr	Croatian
uk	Ukranian
fa	Farsi
bs	Bosnian
bn-IN	Bengali
ta	Tamil
ta-LK	Transitional Tamil
ml	Malayalam
km	Khmer
ne-NP	Nepali

We would like to transition the locales in the first list by the end of March. For the locales in the second list we’ll start a conversation to figure out how to proceed. So please let us know until March 15th if there’s anything in this plan that doesn’t seem like a good idea. And please let us know how to improve it too! We’ll be reaching out to the active contributors in the locales that we want to transition to find a good solution.

We would love to keep the conversation open and transparent for everyone so let’s talk about this on the SUMO L10n forum: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/l10n-forum

Let us know how this sounds and give us all your ideas!

Getting closer to 1 Million Mozillians

As you know, community is a critical aspect of everything we do at Mozilla. We simply couldn’t be as successful as we are today without the invaluable contributions of every single Mozillian. Last year we created a long term strategic plan to achieve 1 Million Mozillians, a goal that requires internal organization and scalable programs.

Because of this, it’s really exciting for me to announce that Rosana will be transitioning to take the role of Reps Program Manager, under Brian King within the Community Engagement group (a.k.a. just across the corridor).

Since joining 2 years ago, Rosana has brought structure and scalability to our Community Management initiatives. In coordination with Madalina, she has represented us in almost every continent (except Australia?), engaging with local super-heroes (creating a beautiful set of images around the topic too) and promoting the SUMO brand (something that is paying off greatly as we experienced at the Summit). Her efforts around the Buddy Program and Contributor Tools are just 2 of the projects that have dramatically increased the success of SUMO and Mozilla in general. I’m grateful for her contributions and really thankful for what she has enabled us to achieve.

Rosana having a blast with the team

Her move doesn’t do anything but reinforce the great work the whole SUMO organization is doing to enable volunteer Mozillians to participate and create value. With such an ally leading Reps I’m confident that the future is even brighter for SUMO representing our leadership in community involvement.

We are working on the transition plan as we speak. Rosana has kindly agreed to work with us to make this process as smooth as possible. In the meantime, you can contact me or Madalina to help you with anything that you may need help with.

Please join me in congratulating Rosana and wishing her the best in the new role.

The quest to solve all the issues. Part 1.

Last fall we did a report on the SUMO support forum to assess the current situation, so we could make informed decisions about what to work on next. In particular, we wanted to know what was keeping us from solving all issues that were brought up in the forums. After analyzing several thousand support forum threads, we came up with a number of suggestions and decided to implement the low hanging fruits right away. Among those low hanging fruits were:

We were dropping the ball on users, not getting back to them.
We were telling users that we didn’t know how to solve their problem.
There were off-topic issues that we didn’t know what to do with.
People often didn’t tell us when a solution didn’t help, because it was hard to do so.

We knew that we had to address these issues, if we wanted to increase the “solution” rate. So, we came up with a number of programs and platform changes late last year to eliminate those issues. Specifically, we had the following planned:

Make it easy for contributors to tell what needs their attention, so we can drop the rate of cases where we leave them hanging to zero.
Extend the reach of the helpdesk to cover those cases where our community doesn’t know how to move forward, and by marking such threads as “hard” allow for specially motivated contributors to become focused on hard issues.
Mark things that are off-topic as such, so we can hide them from the general audience and can take special care of them.
Users can mark an issues as solved from their email, but telling us that the solution didn’t work required them to log-in. A big an unnecessary hurdle. People should not need to log-in. They should just click on the link in the email and start telling us it didn’t work.

I’m happy to say that we were able to follow through with our plans and those solutions are active on our production systems already. We are now seeing the first results of those changes and I’d like to share them with you. However, I need to preface this with a warning: Unfortunately the timing for the roll-out of those changes was as bad as it gets. First we had the release of a Firefox version that coincided with the launch, then we had the Christmas holidays and then new year. Each of these events leads to highly irregular usage patterns on SUMO, so we need to take the data with a pinch of salt. However, without any further ado, here are two charts, that show the first results:

Questions states on a higher level

Questions states on a higher level as a stacked area chart

You can see very clearly that we have significantly reduced the number of cases where we left people hanging, the cases that needed our attention. That was one of the primary goals of our efforts and it seems like we’ve achieved that part with great success. Unfortunately this didn’t translate directly into an increase in the “solution” rate yet, but as I mentioned before, the previous few weeks were highly irregular in terms of usage patterns, so we’ll need to wait a little longer, before we can say reliably how our changes affected the overall goal of increasing the “solution” rate.

In the mean time, we are coming up with ideas on how to challenge the bigger issues, now that we have taken care of the low-hanging fruits. I’m incredibly excited about the opportunities in front of us and the new ways we’ll try to address them with. If you are interested in taking part in that discussion, head over to the community discussion forums, and join us in our quest to solve all the issues.

Community growth in 2013: we’re ready for 2014

2013 was a fantastic year for the SUMO community, we grew in numbers, but more importantly we grew much stronger as a healthy community. This is the result of the efforts of a passionate community that has not only done some crazy amounts of contributions, but has also been actively building and growing our community.

So let’s see what growth means:

We grew across the board 20% ! in 2013 we have in average 20% more contributors that accomplish 20% more contributions than in 2012. And if we break it down we see how impressive the accomplishments are. For example the support forum almost doubled the amount of daily active contributors. We now also support Firefox OS and Webmaker and we are ready for 2014.

And so how could we grow 20% this year? It’s the mix of many initiatives:

we have built tools to help communities organize themselves and provided many dashboards,
we have made contributions more transparent on the profiles recognizing the great work,
we have rallied contributors for the Firefox OS releases and on our bi-weekly SUMO days,
But most importantly many contributors have stepped up and are leading our community building efforts. We have a community that welcomes and helps new contributors. And we coordinate many efforts in the contributor led buddy program.

We couldn’t achieve this without the help of all of our contributors, but we want to acknowledge our top contributors:

Forum:
cor-el
jscher2000
philipp
Waka_Flocka_Flame
iamjayakumars
the-edmeister
John99
feer56
ComputerWhiz
ideato
amitshree
James

Army of Awesome
sajeevsoni
ram_gurumukhi
imsurit
andreea_popescu
douglasc_hill
hatuwal
FxAyuda
rtsayles
mad_helper
lightspeedKEN
varunkaushik07
AjayJogawath

L10n
Tonnes
Unghost
avelper
feer56
scoobidiver
Verdi
marsf
michro
ouesten
teo951
amitshree
soucet

KB
Tonnes
feer56
scoobidiver
michro
teo951
amitshree
soucet
underpass
Wawuschel
JasnaPaka
yfdyh000
Meghraj

So thank you all for making SUMO vibrant, fun and incredibly powerful. We are ready to take on the next challenges in 2014.

Open Badges 1.0: Minimum Awesome Achievement

Just before the Mozilla Summit back on September 30, we launched the first phase of SUMO Open Badges. They are: Minimum Awesome Achievement Badges for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013:

The KB badge for our awesome knowledge base writers (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
The Forum badge for our splendid English language forum support contributors (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
The Army of Awesome badge for folks who have contributed to the Mozilla SUMO twitter awesomeness (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
The L10N badge for our fantastic folks who translated KB articles from English (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).

By “Minimum Awesome Achievement” we were trying to recognize significant non-trivial contribution on a yearly basis.

Four badges awarded algorithmically for four years: 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. In total: 16 badges. And we will issue these four badges automatically for 2014 and future years.

What’s next? Badges for the awesome folks who helped us with SUMO Live Chat support and badges for the “OG”s (the original SUMO gurus who contributed from 2007-2009). And adding our SUMO badges to the Mozilla Open Badges Backpack.

Got some ideas for future SUMO badges? Please add them to the future SUMO badge etherpad.

Want to be help lead the future of SUMO badges? I am looking for somebody to be a “co-driver”. All you need to do is read up about Open Badges and be passionate about them and be willing to work with me for about five hours a week (usually far less than five hours!). If you are interested email rtanglao AT mozilla.com

UPDATE: A big thanks to all who made SUMO open badges happen: Yvan for the awesome badge designs; Ricky and Will of the superb SUMO-DEV team for the SUMO badge code; Les for the excellent Django Badger code; splendid SUMO colleagues: Ibai, Rosana, Madalina, Kadir and Michael for feedback and guidance; Carla, Emily and Sunny of the Mozilla Foundation badges team for great Open Badges mentoring and ongoing badge system design advice; David of the community team for building the community of open badges within Mozilla and most importantly all those who contribute to support at mozilla!

Big things this week