As some of you know, David Tenser, project leader for Mozilla's support platform (aka SUMO) has been writing a series of posts on the vision for SUMO and how we can expect it to evolve over the coming months and years. If you haven't read them and if your interested in Mozilla, I strongly recommend you do. Being a relative newcomer to Mozilla and to open source in general, David's posts gave me clear and thorough insight into the inner-workings of the platform, key challenges and opportunities, and a glimpse at how SUMO can one day become a very powerful tool other open source projects can learn and build from.
As the community marketing guy for Mozilla in Europe, I've obviously been particularly interested in the "community" dimension of SUMO, namely, how local Mozilla communities across Europe can contribute to SUMO and conversely, how SUMO can help them back. Lengthy discussions over the past weeks about this with David, with other fellow Mozilla colleagues and of course with community members across Europe, have painted for me a really interesting picture of the synergies between SUMO and local communities, but have also highlighted a few misunderstandings.
To be sure, the first reaction I often get from contributors from local communities when talking to them about SUMO is one of both curiosity and skepticism. It's not hard to understand why : one of the great strengths of local communities is the support they offer for specific locales. Mozilla Hispano, for example, is an independent community portal dedicated to promoting Mozilla's products and vision in Spanish. The portal is rich with news, documentation, discussion forums and has a particularly vibrant support forum. The website www.firefox-browser.de, dedicated to German-speaking Firefox users is another good example of a community providing excellent Firefox support. It's therefore not surprising that many community members see in SUMO a Mozilla-led project that's basically replicating what they already do, which ultimately drives traffic away from their forums and undermines one of the pillars of their activity.
Another contentious issue seems to be the current scope of SUMO and how today the focus is entirely on Firefox. Other Mozilla products, such as
Thunderbird, have a particularly large European user-base, compared to other parts of the world. Why, some ask, is SUMO completely Firefox-centric?
What the above shows is that we at Mozilla have to continue to work hard to communicate and explain what SUMO is really about and to shed light on those areas that appear to be unclear to local communities.
The SUMO project was launched last year to help provide a high-quality community-driven support channel to Firefox users that can scale upwards to meet the ever-growing demand for support from an ever growing user-base. While the project focuses on Firefox today, in time, it will widen its scope to include Thunderbird and other Mozilla products. SUMO relies on an active community of 70 contributors, a solid server infrastructure, an established wiki with a review system, close collaboration with QA and DEV teams, a rich metrics system to provide deep analysis on trends, and an exhaustive knowledge base. The more community members contribute to SUMO, the richer and more refined the support-channel becomes and in turn, the more SUMO can give back to the community. I really want to stress this last point : SUMO exists first and foremost to support and assist Mozillians, and that includes local communities.
Indeed, Mozilla communities who provide support to their locales, be they in Spain, in Germany or anywhere in the world, should see in SUMO a new opportunity to contribute to the Mozilla project (for example by localizing documentation or updating the knowledge base). But they also should see in SUMO access to a deep well of support-related information for communities, providing documentation, articles ranked by poll scores, data reports on trends and recurrent/new problems, statistics etc... SUMO has the potential of being a powerful tool to assist and strengthen communities, not to undermine and replace them. And this, we realize, needs to be communicated much better.
What I would like this blog post to do is kickoff a discussion on how we can reinforce the community/SUMO synergies. What can SUMO do to engage more with communities and facilitate contributions? Conversely, how can SUMO better assist and support local communities ? How can SUMO promote communities?
The more we reinforce these synergies, the likelier it is that SUMO will live up to its full potential as an open source support project.
I really look forward to getting your feedback !
Last Friday, we launched the second round of the Firefox in Your Country Survey. The aim of the survey is to help Mozilla have a clearer idea of how well Firefox is doing in different countries, namely, by having a better understanding of who is using it, why people choose to use it, and how people use Firefox.
Next weekend, in beautiful Barcelona, Mozilla will hold its first ever 
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As some of you may know, the idea has been brewing for a while now and, after getting great feedback from Brian, Basil and the whole french crew at the 
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