Neben Diskussionen über die aktuellen Produkte und die Situation der deutschen Community, wird auch die (Technik-)Welt im allgemeinen Thema sein. Außerdem helfen wir auch gern bei Problemen mit den verschienen Mozilla-Produkten, wie Firefox, Thunderbird oder Seamonkey.

Die Daten im Überblick:
Zeit: Dienstag, 3.1.2012, 19 Uhr
Ort: unperfekthaus. Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 18, 45127 Essen-City

Ihr erkennt uns am Firefox-Maskottchen auf dem Tisch

The new Verbatim registration

Verbatim is probably one of the least known and at the same time one of the biggest L10n tools at Mozilla. If you see localized text on one of the mozilla.org sites or Mozilla campaigns, chances are it was localized with Verbatim. Hundreds of localizers are registered for the various sites and languages that are managed by Verbatim.

Registration was always open at Verbatim, but to commit any localized text, you had to file a bug, print out the committers  agreement, sign it and send it back by fax or traditional mail. That’s quite a barrier, if all you want is just to help localize a mozilla campaign. Some time ago we made that easier by allowing contributors to take a picture of the contributor agreement and email the signature. But still, the agreement had to be processed by someone at Mozilla and only after closing the bug we’d be able to assign you commit rights.

Last week we went one step further and removed the necessity for the contributor agreement altogether. Now we ask you to accept our license agreement upon registration, and locale leaders can request commit access for any registered user. This will reduce the overhead for contributors and Mozilla staff significantly, and it will hopefully lead to more contributions in 2012 and happier localizers overall. Of course we are not done yet, you can see our immediate plans for Verbatim on the Verbatim planning page. One of the next steps now is to allow the management of contributors by locale leaders instead of the Verbatim admins.

Another feature we added last week is acknowledgment of contributors on Verbatim. We now have a page linked from the Verbatim footer that shows each languages with its supported projects and the contributors to each project. The next step for this is to allow individual sites to credit their localizers directly on the sites. And hopefully we can crosslink the names to Mozillians sometime soon, to make it even easier for new contributors to get in touch with our established localizers.

Implementing bureaucratic overhead is usually rather simple, but reducing it is an order of magnitude harder. Especially as organizations grow and people change, it sometimes becomes unclear why a process was put in place and sometimes the process stays even as the world changes and the need for it goes away. That makes it all the more important for each and every one in an organization to constantly re-evaluate existing processes to simplify them and to eliminate the ones that are no longer needed.

In the case of Verbatim registrations several teams at Mozilla helped to lower the bureaucratic overhead needed to contribute as a localizer. I’d like to thank Seth Bindernagel who agreed to start the discussion about that with me, and Gerv, who drove the change to allow camera-pictures as contributor agreements last year; Chris Hofmann and the L10n team, who helped to drive the main discussion on Verbatim and localizer tools forward, the legal team for reviewing our processes and giving us the green light; Mike Morgan and Laura Thompson for assigning the necessary web developer resources to make those changes happen, Peter Bengtsson for the fantastic implementation and finally Stas Malolepszy for his continued support throughout the whole process.

If we had an international standard, you could so easily video call everyone in the world over IP, *every* camera-equipped phone, but no, reaching every phone in the world is reserved to a technology invented in 1876. Imagine going back to your younger self and explaining: “Yeah, actually video calling is not a technical problem anymore, but hardly anyone uses it. Why? Because greed keeps companies from working together.”

That’s not how I envisioned the future, and I’m so glad that I work for an organization whose mission is to make the Internet better, for everyone, with zero regards to monetary gain when it comes to the mission. Yes, “we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives instead of benefiting shareholders. We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.”

So glad to be with Mozilla

We have around 400 million Firefox users by now, that means that offering traditional support to them is completely impossible, especially since the support team has only 5 employees. But we still want happy users, and the only way that works is when users help other users. So, after evaluating the situation, we spent most of last year designing the best possible tools for our community. Because we are facing the same challenges most free software projects will face, I wanted to share our assessment and our solutions with the broader free software community, and since I needed a catchy title, it’s called “How to support 400 Million users with 4 employees.”

Instead of boring you with the slides, that don’t makes any sense on their own, I tried a little experiment. I recorded the whole presentation with my voice on it and exported it as a video. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but hopefully still useful. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

1. Wenn ich wissenschaftliche Aufsätze lese, muss ich exakt zitieren können. E-Book-Reader haben aber keine Seiten, jeder Reader bricht den Text anders um. Dies betrifft insbesondere PDFs. Die meisten Aufsätze heutzutage liest man als PDF. Fast alle Reader konvertieren diese PDFs in ein eigenes Format und ändern den Umbruch, damit man nicht horizontal scrollen muss. Sehr angenehm zum lesen, aber absolut unbrauchbar, wenn man zitieren möchte.
2. Ebenfalls ein Problem beim wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten: Das Markieren. Ja, viele Reader erlauben es, Markierungen zu setzen oder Notizen in den Text zu schreiben, aber einerseits sind die Möglichkeiten beschränkt und andererseits ist diese Funktion nicht standardisiert. Wenn ich einmal anfange, Markierungen und Notizen in einem Reader oder in einer App anzulegen, bin ich auf ewig den Launen des Anbieters ausgeliefert, die Transaktionskosten für einen Wechsel zu einem anderen Anbieter steigen ständig an und ich trage auch noch selbst dazu bei. Diese Funktion ist so essenziell, dass die Anbieter sich zusammenraufen und auf einen Standard einigen müssen. Er muss nicht perfekt sein, aber er muss Cross-Plattform sein.
3. DRM. 3 Buchstaben, die den Erfolg von kommerzieller Musik im Internet behindert haben, und die mich davon abhalten eBooks zu kaufen. eBooks kosten genauso viel wie Papier-Bücher, aber ich bin nicht etwa der Besitzer dieser eBooks, sondern erhalte nur die Lizenz zum Lesen. Sollte der Anbieter, bei dem ich diese Lizenzen gekauft habe, aufhören, ist völlig unklar, was mit den Büchern passiert. Wer DRM-Musikstücke gekauft hat, kann sich aber wahrscheinlich noch erinnern: Sie sind dann weg. Ich kann also nie sicher sein, die Bücher auch in einigen Jahren noch zu besitzen, selbst wenn ich den vollen Preis bezahlt habe. Zudem hält mich DRM auch noch davon ab, das eBook auf dem Reader meiner Wahl zu lesen, es muss der Reader oder die App des einen Anbieters sein, bei dem ich das eBook gekauft habe.
4. Damit ist auch schon das nächste Problem angesprochen. Die Auswahl an eBooks ist an sich beschränkt. Bei weiten nicht jedes Buch ist auch als eBook erhältlich, nicht einmal absolute Weltbestseller wie die Harry-Potter-Reihe. Was aber noch schlimmer ist: Jeder Anbieter hat eine andere Auswahl an eBooks, Was Amazon fehlt, findet sich bei Apple, was denen fehlt, gibt es bei Sony, und umgekehrt. Damit bin ich gezwungen, unterschiedliche Apps oder Reader zu verwenden, wenn ich Zugriff auf alle eBooks haben möchte. Und wenn Apple ein neues Gerät auf den Markt bringt, beispielsweise ein iPad, muss ich hoffen, das Amazon auch seine App für das iPad anbietet, sonst bin ich aufgeschmissen. Andersherrum bietet Apple gar keine App für das Amazon Kindle, und Sony ist eine Insel.
5. Zu guter letzte sind da auch noch technische Beschränkungen. Entweder man bekommt nur schwarz-weiß oder man ist bereit, beim Lesen in eine Taschenlampe zu starren. Das iPad hat einen normalen TFT-Bildschirm, der hintergrundbeleuchtet ist. Zum einen ist die Auflösung viel geringer als bei einem normalen Buch, zum anderen schaut man aus nächster Nähe in eine Lichtquelle, das ermüdet die Augen und führt bei vielen nach einer Weile zu Kopfschmerzen. Zudem ist damit die Akkulaufzeit auch stark begrenzt. Reader wie der Kindle sind in der Hinsicht besser, die Auflösung ist so hoch wie bei einem Buch und der Text ist auch ohne Hintergrundbeleuchtung lesbar, dafür dauert der Seitenwechsel eine gefühlte Ewigkeit, und man kann dem Gerät dabei zuschauen, wie er die Seite neu aufbaut. Außerdem muss man bereit sein, in der Zeit zurück zu reisen, als die Welt noch schwarz-weiß war, denn die aktuellen eReader-Displays sind allesamt Monochrom. Diagramme, Grafiken oder gar Fotos kann man also vergessen.

Fazit: Ich würde zu gerne schon heute auf eBooks umsteigen, die Vorteile liegen auf der Hand, aber noch überwiegen die Nachteile. Keines der genannten Probleme ist unlösbar. Der Markt für eBook-Reader ist extrem viel versprechend, die technischen Probleme werden früher oder später gelöst werden, der Erfolg wird dann größtenteils davon abhängen, ob alle Beteiligten ihre Gier unter Kontrolle halten können. Die Musikindustrie hat es leider nicht rechtzeitig geschafft und schafft sich im Zuge gerade selbst ab. Hoffen wir, dass Verlage und Reader-Anbieter daraus gelernt haben.

A few days ago we started a new campaign on SUMO, the Army of Awesome. It’s an effort to allow casual Firefox users to get in contact with other Firefox users who have something to say about Firefox, positive or negative. There is a back story to this project. We at SUMO started a similar campaign earlier this year and launched it after some initial testing. Our focus was on answering as many help requests as possible and we used Cotweet to coordinate our efforts with our core contributors and new volunteers could use their own account and the #fxhelp hashtag so we could track their contributions. That worked fairly well for a while. But in the end it was too inclusive with the Cotweet account being the main tool, and surprisingly enough looking at long rows of only negative feedback turned out not to be really motivating, but we have been doing it since then with new contributors joining from time to time.

A little later the engagement team also started to experiment with Twitter. They also went for the cotweet approach, but answered all kinds of Tweets instead of just the ones relevant for support. That worked much better, but since the engagement team is not the support team they couldn’t answer all the different kinds of support requests on Twitter, and also: we have up to 10.000 Tweets about Firefox a day, it’s impossible for a small team to really answer all those teams, so apparently cotweet wasn’t the correct answer here either.

So a few weeks ago the SUMO team and the engagement team came together to evaluate their own programs and see if we could come up with something better together. We then quickly decided that we’d need an open approach. Much broad in reach than what we had with cotweet. And we decided early on that our help would not be reduced to support tweets but that those would be an important part.

So we began sketching out a micro site that would allow casual Firefox users to skim a stream of Tweets about Firefox, pick one that they wanted to reply to and offer them an easy way to reply by giving them pre-written snippets that they could modify. With a lot of hard work from William Reynolds and the awesome Webdev team we had the basics for the page done pretty quickly.

From our experience within SUMO we knew that support on Twitter quickly evolves into a back and forth and Twitter is not the best tool for discussions. So we wanted to come up with a way for casual contributors to select a pre-written tweet with a link to a support article, and send it to a Firefox users in need of help, but with the good feeling that the tweet would most definitely solve the users problem.

To accomplish that we wrote 3 articles specifically for Twitter users:
* http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Firefox+does+not+work
* http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+is+slow
* http://support.mozilla.com/kb/How+to+avoid+crashes

We knew from earlier testing that those were the top support related tweets on Twitter, and we wanted to create articles that would specifically target them, so we could send one tweet in reply instead of having to enter a rather difficult support discussion in 140 characters.

A few days ago all of this came together now and works just great on the Army of Awesome. One user called the experience ‘addictive’. Go check it out

I like to think that the Balkans event was as fun as it was productive. For us it’s important to reach as many people in their native language as possible, especially with support and that’s a goal we share with our localizers. We already had locale leaders for half of the languages spoken in the Balkan region, big thanks to Aleksandar, Edo, Milos and smo; and we added 3 more with Bulgarian, Greek and Mazedonian, another big thanks to Emil, Martin, Pierros, Contanton and Gorjan. This event was a first in that the locale communities set goals for themselves to track their progress. There we didn’t but here I pledge that I’ll try everything I can to help the locale communities to bring support to people in their native language. And hopefully we will have localized support for the top 20 articles in every language spoken in the Balkans by the end of the year

And a huge thanks to William and especially Gorjan (who is 17!), for making the Balkans meeting such an amazing event!

Patricia was so kind to translate this into Belorussian. How cool is that?! Check it out here:
Belorussian by PC

If you are a localizer and want to know about the popularity of an article, just ask in our contributor forums, I’ll try to come up with an answer quickly.

Firefox is used by around 350 million people all over the world. There aren’t many commercial applications that can claim that and I don’t know of any free and open source software that has a userbase even close to that. And what is even more amazing: Almost all of our user have chosen our product over another one. Almost all of them already had a browser on their system and still did download our software.

But even more amazing: We are competing with Apple, Google and Microsoft, the biggest IT companies in the world. Having even only one of them as a competitor is crazy, but we are competing with ALL of them and we don’t have a real advertising budget. In fact our whole income is not even close to the marketing budget of even one of our competitors. And what is even more amazing: Not only are we able to compete with them, but we even do better than them. People are choosing us actively over Apple’s pre-installed Safari and Microsoft’s pre-installed Internet Explorer.

While this is all … well … amazing it also puts a lot of responsibility on us. A great mind once said: “With great power comes great responsibility”. A quarter of the Internet population trusts us with their data (passwords, browsing history, bookmarks) and their browsing experience. They trust that we will make sure they will never ever lose their data and they trust that we’ll make sure that their browser will just work. Always.

That’s a lot of pressure coming from 350 million people. We work hard, everyday around the clock (benefit of having contributors in almost every time zone) to make sure we meet the expectations of our user. Still, nobody is perfect. In some cases we may have screwed up, after all we have 350 million users on just as many different computers with different operating systems. In other cases someone else may have screwed up and may affect the browsing experience of our users. In a perfect world that would never happen, users would know the manuals by heart and no software would ever be released with any bugs left in it. Well, the world is not perfect, users don’t know all the tricks needed to get the software to do what they want and software, operating systems and applications do have bugs. This is our opportunity to shine. We can’t create a perfect world nor can for example doctors, but like doctors we can help people and heal what is broken.

That is the power of support. We can give people aid in how to prevent problems and we can give them instructions what to do if something goes wrong. Sure we seldom engage in life and death matters, but neither do most dentist or optometrists. I still wouldn’t want to live without them. There are even more parallels if you think about it: nobody want’s to go to a doctor, but everybody is hoping for them to be available should they ever need them.

Unfortunately tech support has a bad reputation. Most organizations see support only as a cost center. But cost centers have to be held down, nobody will praise you for having doubled your expenses for a cost center. That is why people dread tech support and just hope to never have to deal with it. That is both, the giving end and the receiving end. Fortunately though Mozilla sees support as an important part of the project and one more way to be a pioneer for free and open source software. There are not many projects to take cues from on how to offer support for 350 million people, but that makes it all the more challenging. And since it is our goal to offer the best possible support experience in the world, the winners will be all users, not only ours.

today is my first day as the SUMO community manager. I actually do plan to put that on my business card “SUMO community manager”. I guess it will lead to a lot of interesting questions And that will give me an excuse to tell people about the extraordinary privilege that I have doing just my job.

I have been with Mozilla for more than seven years now. I started as a localizer for Firefox (then m/b or Phoenix) and lead the German Firefox community ever since. A few month ago I applied for the position of the “Support community manager” at Mozilla. After all, managing a support community is what I’ve been doing for several years as a hobby.

I mean that’s the dream of most people, right? Getting payed for something you would do even if nobody happened to pay you. Turning your
hobby into your job. But it’s more than that. Now I don’t have to feel bad for putting so much time into it and I get to extend the scope of my
work, which is just awesome.

While leading the German community I had a lot of time to gain experience in building communities and working with them. I’ll still be
part of the German community, but now I hope to use that experience to work much more closely with the international community on global support issues at Mozilla. Coming from a local community I know the pain points of those communities and my hope is that as part of the SUMO-Team I’ll be able to guide the way to a much more localization- and community-aware SUMO.

So, all in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better situation to be in, I’m grateful everything worked out so perfectly and I’m excited to get
started. Oh, and I have one more blog post about why I think I have one of the best jobs in the world.