about:sumo Newsletter
myles7897
to about:mozilla one. It would be nice for users that are necessarily
involved with sumo but still want to know whats going on. We could
post a summary of weekly metrics, events coming up and milestones/
goals that we have met. It would help centralize all the stuff being
talked about here, contributor forums, IRC, and the weekly meetings.
-myles7897
Ciaran Welch
Your Regards
Ciaran Welch
EOM
2008/11/24 myles7897 <myle...@aim.com>
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>
Cheng Wang
We already have the blog. Should we be posting more often there? While I like the idea of consolidating all of our outreach, adding a new communication channel seems like more work.
Cheng.
Chris Ilias
How would it be different (content-wise) from the meeting minutes?
David Tenser
> On 11/23/08 3:05 PM, _myles7897_ spoke thusly:
>> I think it would help if we created an about:sumo newsletter, similar
>> to about:mozilla one. It would be nice for users that are necessarily
>> involved with sumo but still want to know whats going on. We could
>> post a summary of weekly metrics, events coming up and milestones/
>> goals that we have met. It would help centralize all the stuff being
>> talked about here, contributor forums, IRC, and the weekly meetings.
>
While I can see the benefit of having this, I tend to think this could
be done on the SUMO blog itself to ensure we don't scatter our
communication even further. We could possibly set up a new blog category
called Newsletter, so people who are only interested in that could
subscribe to that RSS feed instead of the full blog.
> How would it be different (content-wise) from the meeting minutes?
Just like Myles said, it would probably be more of a digest sized
summary of the interesting activities that are going on, e.g. contests,
SFDs, top issues gathering and reporting, etc, along with maybe a
featured SUMO tutorial, e.g. how to translate an article.
The meeting minutes aren't exactly engaging for casual readers.
Cheng Wang
Ooh, this is a good idea. (Yeah meeting minutes are kinda dull -- no offense David, bullet points just aren't edge of your seat reading material.)
Josh (myles7897), want to draft the first issue? It'd be great to have it as a community-contributed thing. So you can take short submissions from other people in the support community and write some stuff yourself. You can even add or have people contribute fun features you think would be interesting to community members (off the top of my head, a "Did you know" column showing off SUMO features or a fun "Ask Foxkeh" section or maybe a few funny quotes from the past month in #sumo or interviews with members of the community. I'm sure you can come up with much better ideas.)
How does that sound?
Cheng.
David Tenser
> David Tenser wrote:
>> Chris Ilias skrev:
>>> On 11/23/08 3:05 PM, _myles7897_ spoke thusly:
>>>> I think it would help if we created an about:sumo newsletter, similar
>>>> to about:mozilla one. It would be nice for users that are necessarily
>>>> involved with sumo but still want to know whats going on. We could
>>>> post a summary of weekly metrics, events coming up and milestones/
>>>> goals that we have met. It would help centralize all the stuff being
>>>> talked about here, contributor forums, IRC, and the weekly meetings.
>>>
>>
>> While I can see the benefit of having this, I tend to think this could
>> be done on the SUMO blog itself to ensure we don't scatter our
>> communication even further. We could possibly set up a new blog
>> category called Newsletter, so people who are only interested in that
>> could subscribe to that RSS feed instead of the full blog.
>>
>>> How would it be different (content-wise) from the meeting minutes?
>>
>> Just like Myles said, it would probably be more of a digest sized
>> summary of the interesting activities that are going on, e.g.
>> contests, SFDs, top issues gathering and reporting, etc, along with
>> maybe a featured SUMO tutorial, e.g. how to translate an article.
>>
>> The meeting minutes aren't exactly engaging for casual readers.
>
> Ooh, this is a good idea. (Yeah meeting minutes are kinda dull -- no
> offense David, bullet points just aren't edge of your seat reading
> material.)
Maybe i should slide in more bad jokes in the minutes... ;)
Majken Connor
It'd actually be nice if the minutes said a bit more about what we said
about each point and what we decided rather than just be a close copy of the
agenda, though I don't think the meeting minutes are a good way to really
reach out to the community. I think they're good for making sure people know
what we're talking about so that they can ask more if something is important
to them.
In terms of really keeping people up to date I think something like a
newsletter is a good idea. My one concern with a newsletter would be that
it's a lot of info at once. It might be better to just blog more often, and
blog certain things on a schedule. Like every Friday do a little bio on a
contributor. I also think the team members should be blogging once a week
about what they actually worked on, even if it's short.
There are 2 key points here: we need to have regular content to keep people
watching the blog and we need to let people know what we're doing and how
they can help if we want them to get involved.
The 3rd point would be to make sure we're doing that in a way that gets
people excited, but that's not important until we're actually communicating
regularly ;)
I do like the idea of letting contributors write content as well. I think
we talked about this in an older conversation about blogging. If a
contributor sees a new issue for example, it'd be great to let them write up
a blog post about it themselves, or if they come up with a good fix for a
hard issue, or a good trick for making contributing easier etc. Best way to
do this is probably to pull some good threads from the contrib forum and
turn them into a blog post - either by posting the first post and linking to
the thread (probably a good idea for moving people to the forum), or letting
the OP write it into a better format for a blog post.
I'm not sure about getting a newsletter category per se. Our blog shouldn't
be about meeting minutes, it should be about interesting things that people
want to read. The boring meeting stuff should be segregated out rather than
the other way around. So basically I totally agree with the type of content
everyone's talking about putting out, I jsut think it should be the type of
content we push to the blog as individual posts, rather than condensing it
all to a single large post.
David Tenser
> The 3rd point would be to make sure we're doing that in a way that gets
> people excited, but that's not important until we're actually communicating
> regularly ;)
It's the opposite imo -- we need to communicate in engaging ways. All
our blog posts tries to do that, except perhaps the meeting minutes
which are exactly that -- minutes.
> I'm not sure about getting a newsletter category per se. Our blog shouldn't
> be about meeting minutes, it should be about interesting things that people
> want to read. The boring meeting stuff should be segregated out rather than
> the other way around.
We have a category for meetings as well. That's not segregating
anything, it just categorises the content.
Majken Connor
> Majken Connor skrev:
>
>> The 3rd point would be to make sure we're doing that in a way that gets
>> people excited, but that's not important until we're actually
>> communicating
>> regularly ;)
>>
>
> It's the opposite imo -- we need to communicate in engaging ways. All our
> blog posts tries to do that, except perhaps the meeting minutes which are
> exactly that -- minutes.
>
Even if we communicate in engaging ways, if we don't communicate often
enough people won't be looking back to see what else we're saying, even if
they're interested in what we do. I can't find it now, but there was a good
article about blogging and this was the first rule. Obviously it's best if
we do it all ;)
>
>
>
> I'm not sure about getting a newsletter category per se. Our blog
>> shouldn't
>> be about meeting minutes, it should be about interesting things that
>> people
>> want to read. The boring meeting stuff should be segregated out rather
>> than
>> the other way around.
>>
>
>
> We have a category for meetings as well. That's not segregating anything,
> it just categorises the content.
It's segregating in that we're talking about creating a newsgroup category
so that people can only subscribe to that rss feed. Rather than segregating
the interesting exciting content into a single category we should be
segregating out the less interesting content - we should be able to offer a
feed that excludes the meeting minutes category which would achieve the same
thing, but let us leave all the interesting content in appropriate
categories (events, contributor news) etc.
David Tenser
That's just a matter of setting the appropriate parent categories. Now,
I think few people actually select to subscribe to specific categories
of a project blog, so I think this discussion is mostly irrelevant --
but it would certainly be possible to set it up so people could
subscribe to "all but foo" if that's a popular request.
David Tenser
> Majken Connor skrev:
>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:54 PM, David Tenser
>> <djst.m...@gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Majken Connor skrev:
>>>
>>>> The 3rd point would be to make sure we're doing that in a way that gets
>>>> people excited, but that's not important until we're actually
>>>> communicating
>>>> regularly ;)
>>>>
>>> It's the opposite imo -- we need to communicate in engaging ways. All
>>> our
>>> blog posts tries to do that, except perhaps the meeting minutes which
>>> are
>>> exactly that -- minutes.
>>>
>>
>> Even if we communicate in engaging ways, if we don't communicate often
>> enough people won't be looking back to see what else we're saying,
>> even if
>> they're interested in what we do. I can't find it now, but there was
>> a good
>> article about blogging and this was the first rule. Obviously it's
>> best if
>> we do it all ;)
>>
>>
Whether that article is correct or not, I won't be the judge -- but in
any case we're already blogging frequently, so that's not a problem here.
Majken Connor
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>
No, we're not. Many weeks the only blog post is the minutes. That doesn't
count.
In November the only other blog posts were about SFD, and one about the
article editor.
October has a few of your SUMO vision posts in the first week, two posts
from Chris in the first two weeks, 3 posts all on the 15th and nothing but
minutes after that.
September has minutes, your SUMO vision series, a post at the beginning of
the month about the new team, and a post midway through the month about the
article editor. Take out your series (which isn't a regular fixture) and
that's only 2 posts besides the minutes.
Cheng Wang
I think we can all agree that we aren't doing as much as we could be to keep contributors in the loop and engaged (which is the issue that myles' original proposal is trying to address). We also agree that there's no point in making a new channel of communication when the blog already exists so we should really make better use of the blog.
Now as I see it, we have essentially one proposal with two "formats". The original proposal is a newsletter which is a monthly/biweekly post which has a few regular features and contains information about events, status updates, common issues and maybe some "fun" things like interviews and featured articles. Lucy, from what I'm reading, you seem to be saying that instead of a single large block of information once a month, we should spread that same information out over the month. Have one post with an interview, one post about events, etc, so that there's smaller bites of information more frequently -- at least a couple posts a week.
I think this a matter of opinion and since we all agree that we should have this stuff on the blog, why don't we start collecting the info and then decide what format is better to present it? I feel somewhat strongly that it shouldn't just be info from the SUMO team. I would really like to have our contributors provide content as well, especially the fun stuff. So I think we should have a call for submissions and maybe have people commit to a monthly column or feature. We'll aggregate this and then decide if it should all go out as one newsletter or if it's better as separate posts or maybe even a nice glossy full color magazine with glorious photos and professionally laid-out spreads. That's just a format question, let's get going on the content!
Cheng.
Majken Connor
> Cheng. _______________________________________________
>
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>
Yes, I agree entirely on the content. I just think it should be broken into
individual blog posts throughout the month rather than posted all at once in
a digest.
Ciaran Welch
We should blog more to provide content for about:sumo, about:sumo will
provide the information without going into much detail, people who are
interested can read further, the draft myles has so far looks good :P
Your Regards
Ciaran Welch
EOM
2008/11/26 Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com>
>
> Yes, I agree entirely on the content. I just think it should be broken into
> individual blog posts throughout the month rather than posted all at once
> in
> a digest.
David Tenser
> Yes, I agree entirely on the content. I just think it should be broken into
> individual blog posts throughout the month rather than posted all at once in
> a digest.
I agree with that. I think we do blog a lot, but we can always do more;
if people have any suggestions on what we could blog about, please come
forward -- or even better, send a blurb to djst at mozilla dot com. ;)
One thing that we'll do a better job of from now on is to blog about the
new features in SUMO after each point release to make sure people are
more informed about what's going on on the development side of SUMO. I
want to make sure that process gets more visibility for a number of reasons:
* It gives the development of SUMO more focus, which it deserves since
it affects most people working on the project
* It increases visiblity of new features, allowing more people to test
them and provide feedback
* It keeps people in the loop of our priorities and roadmap, and gives
people a chance to say if we're missing something important in our
priorities
* It's a way of increasing the blog frequency
It would be cool if we could get the developers like Nelson, Eric, Paul,
etc. to blog too.
myles7897
fun little things.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfckqvv_7ftd98jgc
hope you like it.
oh, and I have to give credit to Bubo for doing an awesome job proof
reading it and cww for some of his ideas.
Majken Connor
contributor homepage and for the blog.
i love how there are lots of simple things that can get people involved. of
course i love ask foxkeh ;)
i'd really love to see some of these be weekly features on the blog. what a
great way to give our contributors extra responsibility and let them help
reach out to the community.
myles7897
maybe we could do both.
David Tenser
WOW!
I need to reflect a little before saying anything else, but this is
fantastic stuff!
Gen Kanai
let me second that- it's a great, great job!
Gen
Chris Ilias
Come on guys; why do I have to be the negative one? :-)
I see a lot of pointless content: Helpful Tips, Ask Foxkeh, Bigger
Picture, Random Question, and #sumo quote.
"Contributor of the week" should be part of the newsletter.
There's nothing regarding sumodev. The upcoming new search engine would
be of interest.
"Chance to Shine" doesn't really tell anyone what that section is about.
David was recently interviewed on Swedish web site, wasn't he? That
might be worth adding.
The top issues is something I would put more emphasis on. Maybe focus on
one issue, and talk about the analysis, and what is being done about it.
Michael Connor
On 27-Nov-08, at 11:52 PM, Gen Kanai wrote:
> On Nov 27, 2008, at 7:03 PM, David Tenser wrote:
>
> let me second that- it's a great, great job!
Ship it!
-- Mike
Majken Connor
> On 11/27/08 11:52 PM, _Gen Kanai_ spoke thusly:
>
>> On Nov 27, 2008, at 7:03 PM, David Tenser wrote:
>>
>> myles7897 skrev:
>>>
>>>> Ok, I did a draft. Followed the about:mozilla format and included some
>>>> fun little things.
>>>> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfckqvv_7ftd98jgc
>>>> hope you like it.
>>>> oh, and I have to give credit to Bubo for doing an awesome job proof
>>>> reading it and cww for some of his ideas.
>>>>
>>>
>>> WOW!
>>>
>>> I need to reflect a little before saying anything else, but this is
>>> fantastic stuff!
>>>
>>
>> let me second that- it's a great, great job!
>>
>
> Come on guys; why do I have to be the negative one? :-)
>
> I see a lot of pointless content: Helpful Tips, Ask Foxkeh, Bigger Picture,
> Random Question, and #sumo quote.
>
That depends on the audience really. Given that the point of this idea was
to give something more basic for people who aren't as involved in the
community I really like the sections that are about basic questions with
simple answers.
I really like Random Question and #sumo quote because they help humanize
sumo (though I'd pick a better quote ;-) )
I'll agree on Bigger Picture though. I don't think we really need to be
advertising other projects, especially if we're not tying it in to how SUMO
fits in. I think this section would be more effective if it talked about
SUMO in context of larger happenings, like how we fit in to the 2010 goals,
or how we're part of the in product support.
>
> "Contributor of the week" should be part of the newsletter.
>
> There's nothing regarding sumodev. The upcoming new search engine would be
> of interest.
Again, a matter of audience. Given the audience I think announcing it after
it's live and people can try it would be better, though I do agree it's
something that would be good content.
>
>
> "Chance to Shine" doesn't really tell anyone what that section is about.
Yeah the heading isn't explanatory, but once I read it it made sense. I
think this can be fixed by adding "your" to the front, i.e. Your Chance to
Shine.
>
>
> David was recently interviewed on Swedish web site, wasn't he? That might
> be worth adding.
>
> The top issues is something I would put more emphasis on. Maybe focus on
> one issue, and talk about the analysis, and what is being done about it.
I agree or not depending on the format we end up deciding on. If this is a
monthly thing, then including the weekly issues here doesn't make sense.
Teaching people how to fix a common issue from the month would be a good
idea.
I think we need to talk about the weekly issues from a "how to solve them"
perspective on the blog on a weekly basis - as opposed to from a report on
numbers which is what we need to do for metrics. Also I think people who
care about the weekly issues will care about all of them, so I don't think
going in depth on this is a good idea for a newsletter even if we put it out
more often. I think we should blog about them separately and maybe link that
post if we go with a newsletter as opposed to regular blog posts.
David Tenser
> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Chris Ilias <n...@ilias.ca> wrote:
>
>> On 11/27/08 11:52 PM, _Gen Kanai_ spoke thusly:
>>
>>> On Nov 27, 2008, at 7:03 PM, David Tenser wrote:
>>>
>>> myles7897 skrev:
>>>>> Ok, I did a draft. Followed the about:mozilla format and included some
>>>>> fun little things.
>>>>> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfckqvv_7ftd98jgc
>>>>> hope you like it.
>>>>> oh, and I have to give credit to Bubo for doing an awesome job proof
>>>>> reading it and cww for some of his ideas.
>>>>>
>>>> WOW!
>>>>
>>>> I need to reflect a little before saying anything else, but this is
>>>> fantastic stuff!
>>>>
>>> let me second that- it's a great, great job!
>>>
>> Come on guys; why do I have to be the negative one? :-)
>>
>> I see a lot of pointless content: Helpful Tips, Ask Foxkeh, Bigger Picture,
>> Random Question, and #sumo quote.
Some of it could improve and change, but as a proof of concept this is
really really good. Most "pointless content" you're referring to is
about one of the most important aspects of being part of a community --
having a good time.
>>
>
> That depends on the audience really. Given that the point of this idea was
> to give something more basic for people who aren't as involved in the
> community I really like the sections that are about basic questions with
> simple answers.
>
> I really like Random Question and #sumo quote because they help humanize
> sumo (though I'd pick a better quote ;-) )
I agree 100%. This newsletter mockup oozes with positive community
feelings. That's exactly what we want and need for SUMO anyway.
>
> I'll agree on Bigger Picture though. I don't think we really need to be
> advertising other projects, especially if we're not tying it in to how SUMO
> fits in. I think this section would be more effective if it talked about
> SUMO in context of larger happenings, like how we fit in to the 2010 goals,
> or how we're part of the in product support.
>
The "Bigger Picture" here could instead focus on how SUMO/Support fits
into the bigger Mozilla picture -- how e.g. we're working with QA to
nail some of the newly discovered issues, and generally explain why
support matters. Or how mconnor & beltzner is finally getting some top
issues metrics from SUMO so they can make the next big Firefox release
better than ever.. ;)
>
>> "Contributor of the week" should be part of the newsletter.
>>
>> There's nothing regarding sumodev. The upcoming new search engine would be
>> of interest.
>
Once we ramp up the blog frequency of new and upcoming SUMO features,
including a blurb about that in this newsletter would be straightforward
and could definitely make sense.
More generally, as long as we're blogging frequently on the SUMO blog,
getting good content as a once-in-a-month newsletter should be a smooth
process.
Chris Ilias
>> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Chris Ilias <n...@ilias.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> I see a lot of pointless content: Helpful Tips, Ask Foxkeh, Bigger
>>> Picture,
>>> Random Question, and #sumo quote.
>
> Some of it could improve and change, but as a proof of concept this is
> really really good. Most "pointless content" you're referring to is
> about one of the most important aspects of being part of a community --
> having a good time.
Working on Support is what I have a good time doing. That's why people
should be involved in Support, not for discussion about superheros. I
wouldn't mind if it were one section at the end of the newsletter; but
it seems like half the content. Meanwhile, we have contributors
complaining that there are aspects of the project that we do not do a
good enough job of communicating, like sumodev work.
Majken Connor
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>
Again, I think this goes toward target audience. I don't think the people
who will be watching a newsletter are the ones looking for deeper
communication about the development work. Now I would agree with you if it
really were half the content, but it was one question and an irc quote, and
the irc quote can easily be more on topic to support.
Support is hard, and when we do a good job we make it look even harder.
Talking about superheroes helps people identify with us and helps them
realize that they can fit in our community even if they're beginners, which
is the people we'll attract from a newsletter. People looking for more in
depth answers will be better served by blogging more regularly. We could
add minutes of the dev meeting to the blog at least, or at least blog after
the weekly pushes about what went live.
David Tenser
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Chris Ilias <n...@ilias.ca> wrote:
>
>> On 12/1/08 6:47 AM, _David Tenser_ spoke thusly:
>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Chris Ilias <n...@ilias.ca> wrote:
>>>> I see a lot of pointless content: Helpful Tips, Ask Foxkeh, Bigger
>>>>> Picture,
>>>>> Random Question, and #sumo quote.
>>>>>
>>> Some of it could improve and change, but as a proof of concept this is
>>> really really good. Most "pointless content" you're referring to is about
>>> one of the most important aspects of being part of a community -- having a
>>> good time.
>>>
>> Working on Support is what I have a good time doing. That's why people
>> should be involved in Support, not for discussion about superheros. I
>> wouldn't mind if it were one section at the end of the newsletter; but it
>> seems like half the content. Meanwhile, we have contributors complaining
>> that there are aspects of the project that we do not do a good enough job of
>> communicating, like sumodev work.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> support-planning mailing list
>> support-...@lists.mozilla.org
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-planning
>>
>
> Again, I think this goes toward target audience. I don't think the people
> who will be watching a newsletter are the ones looking for deeper
> communication about the development work.
I wouldn't say that -- we should definitely include (high level) info
about this as well, to let people know which new features are being
developed. However, they should be explained with the target audience in
mind, e.g. "what's in it for contributors?" and not talk about pointless
technical details.
All content should be engaging and targeted towards our contributors. We
should explain why a new feature matters to contributors and how they
can make use of it. Or, why a new feature will make a difference to our
users looking for help (e.g. the e-mail notification feature).
We shouldn't go into details about security bug fixes and other bug
fixes that aren't relevant for the target audience. The people who care
about that will be following our sumodev meetings or Bugzilla anyway.
> Now I would agree with you if it
> really were half the content, but it was one question and an irc quote, and
> the irc quote can easily be more on topic to support.
>
> Support is hard, and when we do a good job we make it look even harder.
> Talking about superheroes helps people identify with us and helps them
> realize that they can fit in our community even if they're beginners, which
> is the people we'll attract from a newsletter. People looking for more in
> depth answers will be better served by blogging more regularly.
I agree with everything here. And just to be clear, I personally don't
care about a superheroes poll, but the main point here is that we should
allow everyone to have a good time. Back in the days when I was an
active member of the MozillaZine community, a strong reason why I kept
logging in every day was for the "fun" discussions with the community,
not just to provide support. We just launched an off-topic forum --
linking to that from a poll about superheroes would be a perfect way of
giving it more prominence.