Mozilla L10n twitter feed

[Jeff Beatty]

Hey everyone,

Part of my Q3 goals is to improve communication/notifications of events,
deadlines, newcomers, calls for participation and congratulations. I'd
like to get your opinion about creating a Twitter feed for Mozilla L10n.
Here's what you could expect from the feed:

- Event/deadline notifications and reminders
- Public welcome to newcomers
- Calls for participation in new projects
- Recruitment calls for specific locale communities needing more members
- Congratulations to specific contributors and communities for reaching
various milestones
- Brief updates to external sources about all of our l10n advancements
and efforts.

So what do you think? Do you use twitter? Would you follow us? Do you
think this platform could effectively communicate the above topics? Do
you feel comfortable with that level of public exposure?

Tell me your thoughts by replying to this thread.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Mihovil Stanic]

>> So what do you think? Do you use twitter? Would you follow us? Do you
>> think this platform could effectively communicate the above topics? Do
>> you feel comfortable with that level of public exposure?

+1 for Twitter, I hate these damn lists. :)

Mihovil

[flod]

Il 18/07/12 20.28, Jeff Beatty ha scritto:

> So what do you think? Do you use twitter? Would you follow us? Do you
> think this platform could effectively communicate the above topics? Do
> you feel comfortable with that level of public exposure?

In my opinion Twitter has too much noise to be reliable for this kind of
communication.

I personally don't have a problem if you create a Twitter Feed for
Mozilla l10n, as long as you let access these contents in other way: a
specific RSS feed is still the best asynchronous option for me if you
don't want to use this mailing list.

Francesco

[Besnik Bleta]

Please, keep in mind that many of us contribute to several other
projects. Adding a new communication channel
for things already working well would be a burden for us. Even more for
them without a Twitter account, or any other
kind of account for that matter. The mailing lists were working and
working well. Then we added other tools (RSS, planets, suns and such,
Google groups...)
To me that's adding too much unnecessary confusion. If Twitter presence
is needed for Mozilla, find a way to keep our work flow out of that please.

Më 07/18/2012 09:28 PM, Jeff Beatty shkrojti:

> _______________________________________________
> dev-l10n mailing list
> dev-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n
>

[Philipp Kewisch]

I think its important to make clear how to best follow announcements.
There is no use in adding yet another channel if not all announcements
are made on that channel. For project owners, yet another channel means
yet another channel they have to post their news to. For localizers, yet
another channel means it is even more unclear which channel gives them
the right set of information and a new localizer will not know where to
subscribe to first.

Ideally, I think there should be a tool that allows localizers to
subscribe to certain kinds of notifications. For example, offer them a
one-stop page that has a few checkboxes for the different kinds of
announcements you can get:

1. Event/deadline notifications and reminders
- For Firefox
- For Thunderbird
- For Calendar
...
2. Calls for participation in new projects
- Website
- Products
...
3. ...

And then the localizer will get email on those topics. Also some links
to the newsgroup, potentially twitter and so on. With this tool you
could even integrate the text messages as suggested some time ago: the
localizer can choose how to be notified.

Project owners would need a way to post their announcements once which
is multiplexed to all communication channels. Also, specifically for
release announcements, it should be possible to only send messages out
to certain locales (and obviously only certain products).

For Calendar Project l10n announcements I'm personally going to stick to
emailing localizers until a such tools exists, as this has been most
successful in the past.

Philipp

[Axel Hecht]

Does https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Dashboard/Apps/Drain fit that bill
mentally?

I'm not promising to have an implementation for that, just curious to
see if that's the same thing.

Axel

[Philipp Kewisch]

That sounds general enough that it could fit in, yes.

Philipp

[Michael Bauer]

I don't think Twitter would work for me ... I'm not glued to it and it's
really easy to miss stuff on Twitter. It might serve as a publicity
thing but only in addition to this mailing list. I really prefer the
list cause:
* it archives
* the lists don't suffer downtimes the way Twitter does
* my inbox is my to-do list (pretty much) these days, when I'm done, I
move the email into a different folder. I know there's memo tools but
they just add more time to a task, so I just use emails for the most
part, if needed in conjunction with Lightning. That wouldn't work with
Twitter where it's "blink and it's gone" and copy and past is just a
pain from Twitter.
* you can be more verbose in an email. Some of this stuff is arcane
enough in prose, I'm not sure I'd always understand it in 140 chars ;)

The "exposure" wouldn't bother me.

Michael

18/07/2012 19:28, sgrìobh Jeff Beatty:

[Jeff Beatty]

El 7/19/12 8:54 AM, Michael Bauer escribió:

Thank you all for your comments. After reading the discussion so far, I
realize that I neglected to make a few things clear in my initial post
introducing this topic.

I'm not proposing that Twitter be used as a replacement for the mailing
lists or newsgroups. There is simply no way for it to provide the same
platform for interaction and discussion that the newsgroups and mailing
lists do. I also don't want the scope of the Twitter feed's purpose to
interrupt the workflow for localizers who have found something that
works for them. For many of you, the mailing lists and newsgroups fit
within the scope of staying up-to-date on current topics, announcements
and notifications and I'm not looking to replace that. I believe it was
Michael who even said that his inbox is his to-do list, and so the
newsgroup fits his contribution style the best.

However, not everyone pays attention to the mailing lists/newsgroups.
Some teams even have a difficult time remembering key dates for their
l10n work and need to see short reminders in a different medium. Last I
looked, there are over 800 people subscribed to this newsgroup, however,
when there's a call for discussion on a key l10n issue, to participate
in a survey, or even a note from a new contributor introducing
themselves to the project, only a small fraction of those 800+
subscribers proactively respond.

That being said, as communication evolves and new contributors join the
project, we also have to adapt to fit new comm frameworks. While a
Twitter feed may seem redundant to avid and active participants in the
newsgroup, we have seen successes in using it to make project
announcements, calls for participation, and recruit new localizers in a
shorter period of time than it would have required had we turned to the
newsgroup. For example, the Swedish team needed more localizers. Pascal
and Axel took to Twitter and received responses from interested people
within 30 minutes. Three new additions to the Swedish team resulted from
that 140 char message.

In addition, we want to publicize your successes to as wide an audience
as we can find. After all, you all work very hard and deserve that
recognition. The wide audience that can be reached via social media can
help us showcase these successes. The Mozilla L10n blog, which
spotlights individuals and l10n teams, has recently risen in popularity
because of Twitter, which in turn has introduced your l10n efforts to a
wider audience than the current mailing lists and newsgroups do. This
has the potential to attract new localizers and even new users to your
localized builds of Firefox, mobile, and in the future, Firefox OS. For
example, because of Twitter, I have been contacted by people telling me
that they're excited about the new Fulah Firefox release and had no idea
that it even existed.

In brief, Twitter cannot replace this forum. However, this forum does
not have the audience reach nor does it capture the attention
(internally & externally) that we need it to. If you can't see Twitter
fitting within your workflow, please let me know and I'll try to keep it
out of your way. If you can, also let me know and I'll keep you informed
once it's available.

[Michael Bauer]

Jeff,

Thanks for clarifying. But I suspect that's just the normal ration of
lurkers to posters you get anywhere on the web, whatever conditions that
behaviour. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker :/

But that doesn't mean a more effective way of keeping ppl up to date
with deadlines wouldn't work.

Michael

19/07/2012 16:55, sgrìobh Jeff Beatty:

[Jesper Kristensen]

Den 19-07-2012 17:55Jeff Beatty skrev:
> I'm not proposing that Twitter be used as a replacement for the mailing
> lists or newsgroups. There is simply no way for it to provide the same
> platform for interaction and discussion that the newsgroups and mailing
> lists do. I also don't want the scope of the Twitter feed's purpose to
> interrupt the workflow for localizers who have found something that
> works for them. For many of you, the mailing lists and newsgroups fit
> within the scope of staying up-to-date on current topics, announcements
> and notifications and I'm not looking to replace that. I believe it was
> Michael who even said that his inbox is his to-do list, and so the
> newsgroup fits his contribution style the best.

A Twitter feed may be a good idea, but there is always a danger of
fragmentation when adding a new communication channel. Even if you don't
intent the Twitter feed to replace this newsgroup, it can still have a
negative effect. A partial replacement, where some small amount of
information is posted to the Twitter feed without also being posted to
this newsgroup, will require everyone to follow a new channel. If you
keep that in mind and you can successfully avoid that, I am all for a
Mozilla L10N Twitter feed.

/Jesper Kristensen

[Jeff Beatty]

El 8/5/12 2:24 AM, Jesper Kristensen escribió:

Thank you for pointing this out Jesper. I think the best approach for
avoiding fragmentation hear would be to add links back to the newsgroup
topics when tweeting about topics currently being discussed. This not
only would keep people involved in the newsgroup for that single topic,
but the multiple references back here would ensure that Twitter
followers continue to stay up-to-date on all topics for discussion in
the newsgroup.