Communications features in L10n tools

[Jeff Beatty]

I'm curious to hear opinions about adding communications features to
existing and new L10n tools. Specifically, automated SMS notifications.

Here's my reasoning:
1) Many times we have short announcements that need to be made to the
communities (e.g., new source strings have been added to a web project
out of schedule, a new project is available to be localized, reminders
about migrations, etc.).
Some of these are on a tight deadline, but our current communications
platforms either
a) don't reach everyone (e.g., mozilla.dev.l10n.announce only has 10
subscribers) or
b) don't reach everyone in time.
SMS would allow us to send out short announcements when direct contact
is necessary.

2) Most of these announcements are manually made by l10n-drivers, but
we're not always going to be available to make them. Having automated
SMS messages take us out of the equation will still directly
communicating crucial, time-sensitive info to you.

3) Have a wider breadth of notification functionality built into the
L10n tools could centralize where the notifications are coming from and
enable users to customize their notification settings all within one
L10n tool.

4) As the number of mobile devices continue to grow and even outnumber
computers in various regions, this may become the most effect way of
communicating announcements to communities that belong to these regions.

Personally, I like the idea of requiring l10n team leads/owners to
provide their mobile info to receive SMS notifications, simply because I
feel the high level of responsibility associated with that role implies
that they be well informed of anything that affects their locales. From
them, the notification can be shared with the appropriate team member,
creating a sort of "chain of communication."

I also understand and respect the need to retain privacy, so I also like
the opt-in idea, with the caveat being that at least one person per l10n
team should opt in.

Anyway, what does everyone think?

[Axel Hecht]

Erasing Jeff's post, as I'm not gonna reply specifically:

Firstly, I do think that our communication should get closer to where
people are. Wow, it's pretty much two years since I filed
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563823.

The idea is that folks can specify which messages would reach them
through which media. Mails, digest mails, twitter messages, anything
with an API basically.

Regarding SMS: Here are my counter points:

- receiving text messages isn't free of cost, at least not everywhere at
all times
- text messages usually make devices rattle, shine, noisy
(- I personally hate phones)

I don't think that anything mozilla does is important enough to wake up
a volunteer in the middle of the night, and have them pay 50 euro cents
for that or so.

So, yes, it'd be nice to get notifications closer to where people are in
their lives (online lives, in particular). Not trivial and around the
corner, and IMHO with external dependencies like pulse.
No, I don't think that text messages are early on the list of answers.

Axel

PS: I'm pretty strongly opposed to frame this discussion around handling
project management issues, also a reason why I drop most of the context.

[Staś Małolepszy]

On 04/13/2012 01:31 PM, Axel Hecht wrote:

> Regarding SMS: Here are my counter points:
>
> - receiving text messages isn't free of cost, at least not everywhere at
> all times
> - text messages usually make devices rattle, shine, noisy
> (- I personally hate phones)

One other problem I see when I think about SMS it that it's a push
notification, so I don't control when I get it. If I'm working,
socializing or working out, I won't get to react upon the notification
immediately, which sort if defeats the purpose of it being a text
message. Like, you could have just as well sent me an email.

If we can mitigate this, maybe by letting the localizer to set a
preference that says 'Only text me between 7pm and 10pm,' SMS could
become a more viable channel.

What I do like about SMS, is that I could periodically opt in for it,
and get notifications even when on vacation, or when I'm otherwise
offline. Even if I can't do the required work, I can at least let my
teammates know about a short deadline or a last minute string landing.

One last thought: if dev-l10n-announce only has 10 subscribers, I think
we should first focus our efforts on promoting it, rather than engineer
new solutions, which, as this thread show, can be more controversial.

> I don't think that anything mozilla does is important enough to wake up
> a volunteer in the middle of the night, and have them pay 50 euro cents
> for that or so.
>
> So, yes, it'd be nice to get notifications closer to where people are in
> their lives (online lives, in particular). Not trivial and around the
> corner, and IMHO with external dependencies like pulse.
> No, I don't think that text messages are early on the list of answers.

Here's another idea.

Over the past weekend Brian King showed me the addon he's been
developing for ReMo:

https://github.com/brianking/ReMo-Helper

Here's what it looks like:

http://imgur.com/u2grL

It should be trivial to add a feed in there, and maybe a popup
notification too. By adapting the addon to localizers' needs, we could
end up with another convenient communication channel right there.

-stas