Mozilla Tech Evangelism
Bob Clary
This note is intended to jump start a discussion of where
Mozilla Tech Evangelism stands today, and what we can do to
make it more effective in the future.
Mozilla Tech Evangelism is an effort designed to help increase
support for Mozilla and it's related browsers on the web and
inside of corporations.
The graphs at
<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/status-graphs.html>
show that while we have seen positive movement in terms of
resolved issues with sites we continue to have an ever
increasing number of Tech Evangelism bugs with a decreasing
effort being applied to contacting sites. Today there are over
2500 open Tech Evangelism bugs out of almost 38000 open bugs in all
of bugzilla.
Evangelism is a thankless task that has few rewards. I would
like to publicly thank everyone who has reported or triaged a
Tech Evangelism bug or contacted a site with an Evangelism
problem. None the less, we have seen a decrease in the numbers
of people who have been actively contacting sites and need to
recruit more people to help, make their efforts more efficient
and drive the number of open Evangelism issues down to Zarro.
What is the goal of the Mozilla Tech Evangelism effort? I
believe it is to make the use of Mozilla and other Gecko-based
browsers relatively easy for anyone who chooses to use it. In
order to accomplish this goal we must convince web site and
web application business owners, administrators, and
developers that it is in their best interest to support
Mozilla and Gecko. Simply evangelizing Standards is
insufficient if the site can not economically justify the
costs involved in updating their content.
What tactics can we use?
I. Increase market share (and pressure) of Mozilla and other
Gecko-based browsers.
Sites and developers will not expend the resources necessary
to support Mozilla/Gecko if they do not see the potential loss
of customers or income. We need to get Mozilla/Gecko's share
above the current 2-5% in order to get their attention.
A related need is to get web site analytic software to report
total Gecko percentages and not just specific branded versions
of Gecko. By splitting our reported percentages across the
multitude of browsers based upon Gecko we artificially
decrease our reported market share.
In the past we have relied upon the Tech Evangelism effort to
contact sites, to educate them concerning the error of their
ways and convince them to update their content to support us.
This reliance on a small group of people to accomplish this
has not been as effective as we might have wished.
A more effective course of action would be for large numbers
of customers to complain to sites/developers regarding their
products. We have continually seen responses from sites where
they say "We do not support Mozilla. It is not used by a
significant percentage of our users." They may say this to the
first, second or tenth person to complain however after the
hundredth or thousandth complaint they might change their
position. We need to leverage our users to contact sites and
complain while we dedicate our evangelism resources to more
productive efforts of helping organizations support
Mozilla/Gecko. How can we do this?
I believe that most of the people who are likely to adopt
Mozilla or other Gecko-based browsers without effort on our
part have done so. In order to increase the share of
Gecko-based browsers we must be proactive in reaching out to
new users.
New demographic targets for Mozilla/Gecko are high schools,
colleges/universities, corporations and governments
world-wide. Mozilla and Gecko have many advantages for these
potential users such as the ability to run on a variety of
operating systems, customization, localization and security.
By promoting alternative operating systems such as Linux we
also promote Mozilla and Gecko as the premier browser on those
platforms. How would we approach the effort of demonstrating
to schools, corporations and governments the
cost effectiveness of adopting free, open source operating
systems where we have dominance?
By providing the means for customizing Mozilla for
distribution to specific target audiences we provide a another
potential benefit of adopting Mozilla in an organization. The
Client Customization Kit (CCK) has much potential to help
distribute Mozilla to internal users of schools, corporations
and governments. The CCK needs to be improved and extended to
work in other operating systems than Windows. How can we get
the work on the CCK moving?
We need to ease the transition from content designed for
fourth generation browsers. While the focus for many of us is
the promotion of the use of standards, we can not expect
organizations to expend significant resources to adapt their
existing content in these difficult economic times.
Development of compatibility libraries which would allow sites
to continue to use existing web applications with little
modification would help to convince them that standardizing on
Mozilla/Gecko is economically viable. For example, can we
contribute to http://layeremu.mozdev.org/ ?
If an organization wishes to transition from using Netscape
Communicator 4.x to Mozilla/Gecko what guidance can we give
them? What are the issues these organizations face related to
Email/Profile migration issues, Plugin compatibility issues,
Security, etc. What organizations can we use as examples and
case studies for the migration from Netscape Communicator 4.x
(or even Internet Explorer) to Mozilla/Gecko?
Many organizations will not consider switching to Mozilla or
other Gecko based browsers without some level of technical
support available. What can we do about providing support? Are
there reliable, respected organizations which can take
advantage of this business opportunity?
II. Develop support oriented documentation
Once a site, developer or organization decides to support
Mozilla and Gecko we need to have the documentation resources
they need available for them to use. This includes guides to
developing modern standards based web applications, technical
notes on specific issues in various releases of Mozilla/Gecko,
guides to adopting Mozilla/Gecko in organizations etc.
I tried to get an effort started for using existing Tech
Evangelism bugs as sources for identifying issues which could
be documented as technical notes which would help web
developers. David Baron agreed that these technical notes
could be hosted inside of the docs/web-developer directory
inside of a technotes subdirectory. Although I began
identifying potential technotes and formats for them, I failed
to follow through with the idea and it has stagnated. One of
the common objections I received was the lack of a means of
organizing and searching technotes. I still believe the
development of a "knowledge base" for our web developers is a
good idea. How do we go about getting this effort off the
ground?
How can Tech Evangelism and the Documentation projects work
together to identify and produce the documentation that our
web developers need?
III. Tech Evangelism Bugs
Tech Evangelism Components are currently organized by
language/region and are geared towards triaging reported
issues, contacting sites and convincing them to update their
content. Many of the original owners and qa assignees for Tech
Evangelism bugs are no longer available to handle these bugs.
The current situation is summarized in
<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/components.html>.
Is this organization appropriate? Should we combine
components? Add new components? Who is available to take over
the components in need of owners and qa assignees?
IV. Cooperation, Communication and Management.
The Tech Evangelism effort does not exist in a vacuum. It
involves coordinating work between the Tech Evangelism
project, the Documentation project, the Mozilla University
project, developers and others. How can we work together to achieve
our goal of making Mozilla/Gecko the premier browser on the
web?
Who can take on the responsibilities for managing and leading
the Tech Evangelism project?
Conclusion
This note outlines some of the ideas I have concerning Tech
Evangelism. I hope that you will reply and help refine these
ideas, volunteer to help implement them and get involved in
the Tech Evangelism project. Please reply to this email in
netscape.public.mozilla.general and come to #evangelism on
irc.mozilla.org if you wish to discuss this in real time.
Thanks,
Bob
b...@bclary.com
> 38,000 open bugs? Yes, I know there is a good explanation and argument
> to defend that stat. Still, what a negative impression that made. So,
> you might want to market your concepts a bit differently.
That is for all Products and Components and include Unconfirmed bugs,
requests for enhancements etc. Considering there are over 204,000 total
bugs and only 38000 open, I don't think it is a big deal. If someone
wants to mispresent the information they will do so regardless.
/bc
Ed Mullen
> Hello All,
>
> This note is intended to jump start a discussion of where
> Mozilla Tech Evangelism stands today, and what we can do to
> make it more effective in the future.
>
> Mozilla Tech Evangelism is an effort designed to help increase
> support for Mozilla and it's related browsers on the web and
> inside of corporations.
>
> The graphs at
> <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/status-graphs.html>
> show that while we have seen positive movement in terms of
> resolved issues with sites we continue to have an ever
> increasing number of Tech Evangelism bugs with a decreasing
> effort being applied to contacting sites. Today there are over
> 2500 open Tech Evangelism bugs out of almost 38000 open bugs in all
> of bugzilla.
>
> Thanks,
> Bob
>
38,000 open bugs?!!!
Good God! Aside from the laudable intent of your message, that single
statement leaped out at me above all else.
Simply from a credibility standpoint, I have doubts about any effort to
improve the public perception of Mozilla when site operators can easily
point to such a statistic. Yes, yes. I know. If we knew how many open
bugs Microsoft had running on Windows XP it might be even more
horrendous. But my point is public perception - marketing, if you will.
Which is why MS doesn't publish such figures.
And then the notion occurs that Mozilla isn't a "commercial product" so
we're comparing apples to avatars. But, still, perception is reality.
Especially to those who won't take the time to think the issue through,
and most especially to those who have vested interests to not do so -
most of the targets of the evangelism.
Honestly now. I think the evangelism effort is to be applauded. Still,
38,000 open bugs? Yes, I know there is a good explanation and argument
to defend that stat. Still, what a negative impression that made. So,
you might want to market your concepts a bit differently.
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
Just before someone gets nervous, do they experience
cocoons in their stomach?
Ed Mullen
I acknowledged in my post that the figure quoted, in and of itself, is
open to interpretation. You neatly edited my message to deliberately
not address my main point that /the perception/ of the original post is
what's important.
I think the perception IS a big deal. Assuming, of course, that the
objective is to cast Mozilla (the product and project) in a positive
light and to compete with like products in the marketplace. If not, of
course, the whole discussion is moot.
The thing that any company has going for it over an open-source effort
like this (no matter what the validity or advantages of the actual
product) is the ability (via dollars) to market it in a positive light.
Evangelism is a nifty (and seemingly lofty and benign) term for
marketing. I'd like to see the effort succeed but I doubt it will if,
in public venues (such as this), such poorly constructed messages are so
visibly promulgated.
But, of course, in such an egalitarian effort, no one is actually /in
charge of/ (meaning, it's their job) marketing the product. So, we all
just shoot messages to and fro on these news groups in the hopes that
the masses will somehow be enlightened. Lofty ideal, silly in practice.
This random, periodically silly, stuff is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's actually a major reason why I like Mozilla. I like contrary things
like this. And I take the time to try to reason through this stuff
because I really like Mozilla as a piece of software (I'm avoiding
calling it a /product/ for obvious reasons) and want it to continue its
existence.
But! If there is a marketplace objective to be achieved, someone needs
to be charged with achieving it, there needs to be a concerted,
carefully crafted, competitively produced effort to do so. Blasting out
a message noting that there are 38,000 open bugs is just plain
counterproductive. Perception is reality in the marketplace despite
whatever the rationale is that could explain away that statistic.
Eric
> III. Tech Evangelism Bugs
>
> Tech Evangelism Components are currently organized by
> language/region and are geared towards triaging reported
> issues, contacting sites and convincing them to update their
> content. Many of the original owners and qa assignees for Tech
> Evangelism bugs are no longer available to handle these bugs.
> The current situation is summarized in
> <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/components.html>.
>
> Is this organization appropriate? Should we combine
> components? Add new components? Who is available to take over
> the components in need of owners and qa assignees?
Hi Bob,
Good and very valid post.
To focus on one point only : I'm dutch and our Tech Evang bugs go into
Europe-West...as will the German bugs, the french, some english,
norwegian, swedish, english etc. Right now, all these
countries/languages share ONE QA contact and default assignee. From a
languague point of view it might be convenient to have language
-specific contacts. Lately i've been query'ing ".nl" Tech Evang bugs
and sorting those out. Perhaps more people can focus on Tech Evang
bugs in their own country? If you need someone for ".nl" i herewith
volunteer :)
In addition, perhaps a repository of Tech Evang contact letters to
web-site owners can be set-up containing translated letters.
Furthermore, quite often when contacting a site you hit a brick wall,
called "help desk" [there's an oxymoron if any ;)]
These people are instructed to kindly inform you that the DECISION was
made only to support IE and that if you want to use their site, you
have to switch browser and if necessary even OS.
Point being, contacting the web site via the web-site's contact
information, typically is not very succesful. Either because you don't
reach the actual site builders and most definitely won't reach the
people responsible for the decision to "optimize the site for Internet
Explorer".
One thing i can never understand is that companies seemingly try very
hard to keep their company accessible for all [making accomodations
for all sorts of inabilities etc. etc.] but can make a CONSCIOUS
DECISION to lose out on 2-5% of possible revenue by choosing to
support only a particular browser.
So much more than contacting companies through their web sites, these
organizational layers [builders, help desk] should be skipped and the
people who make these decisions should be contacted and re-educated.
--
Eric
cm
news:b9na8j$dm...@ripley.netscape.com...
> b...@bclary.com wrote:
> > Ed Mullen wrote:
> >
> >
> >>38,000 open bugs? Yes, I know there is a good explanation and argument
> >>to defend that stat. Still, what a negative impression that made. So,
> >>you might want to market your concepts a bit differently.
> >
> >
> > That is for all Products and Components and include Unconfirmed bugs,
> > requests for enhancements etc. Considering there are over 204,000 total
> > bugs and only 38000 open, I don't think it is a big deal. If someone
> > wants to mispresent the information they will do so regardless.
> >
> > /bc
> >
>
> I acknowledged in my post that the figure quoted, in and of itself, is
> open to interpretation. You neatly edited my message to deliberately
> not address my main point that /the perception/ of the original post is
> what's important.
>
I agree with you, Ed.
I think this is precisely why the Moz project isn't going any further that
it has. Attitudes of a lot of the Moz community turn "users" off. Did I say
Users? I forgot that Moz isn't FOR end Users. Wait. Bob Clary seems to be
making a call for getting Moz excepted AS an end User app? Well he'd better
tell all the Moz supporters that cut every request for help 'off at the
knees' by simple stating "it's NOT an end User app".
The current debate over at bugzilla over letting the "User" (there that word
is again) put the sig where they want is another good example. There are
many people blocking this bug's implementation due to their personal
distaste for the bug itself. Our business (as an example) with over 200
seats will not use an email client that won't post the sig in a
"business-centric" position. The Moz stalwarts stand behind supposed
standards and Moz usership continues to stagnate. The Moz comunity is going
to have to change its own attitude first.
Perception IS everything.
Oh, my suggestion for Tech Evangelism made-easy is to have something built
into Moz that will fire up the email client with all pertinent info from the
offending page and let the "User" enter the email of the site. Most people
don't know what to report, but if you had it automated to pop up a
ready-to-send email....
--
cristo morlan
Peter Lairo
> The current debate over at bugzilla over letting the "User" (there that word
> is again) put the sig where they want is another good example. There are
> many people blocking this bug's implementation due to their personal
> distaste for the bug itself. Our business (as an example) with over 200
> seats will not use an email client that won't post the sig in a
> "business-centric" position.
Here's the bug for anyone that would be gracious enough to submit a patch:
Replying with the "start my reply above the quoted text" pref on should
prepend the signature above the quote text. (top)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429#c74
--
Peter Lairo
--==--
A troll (and a terrorist) is similar to a dictator: Both excercise a
disproportionate amount of influence over the masses. One from the
"top", the other from the "bottom".
--==--
Stan Brown
Might I suggest that that attitude is part of the problem?
Evangelism doesn't sit up on its throne and pooh-pooh every
criticism; it takes every criticism seriously.
Evangelism doesn't throw cold water on users with trouble by
snarling "This is not a user newsgroup, and anyway Mozilla is not a
user product."
Evangelism _does_ welcome converts, and treat them nicely.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"If there's one thing I know, it's men. I ought to: it's
been my life work." -- Marie Dressler, in /Dinner at Eight/
Jacek Piskozub
> [...] drive the number of open Evangelism issues down to Zarro.
We never do that if we do not close (mark as WONTFIX?) bugs where the
webadmins never reacted to the tech evangelism letters. We should start
doing that. Maybe one year, or 6 months after the second letter was sent?
>
> Is this organization appropriate? Should we combine
> components? Add new components? Who is available to take over
> the components in need of owners and qa assignees?
I can speak only about my component. I vote for leaving Cental Europe as
it is. I can manage as much, but not more.
Regards,
Jacek
Bob Clary
> On 5/11/2003 11:45 PM, Bob Clary wrote:
>
> > [...] drive the number of open Evangelism issues down to Zarro.
>
> We never do that if we do not close (mark as WONTFIX?) bugs where the
> webadmins never reacted to the tech evangelism letters. We should start
> doing that. Maybe one year, or 6 months after the second letter was sent?
>
Right. Part of the reason we haven't been doing that is we (me too) have
not been triaging our bugs regularly and marking the non responsive
sites as wontfix. Hopefully we can change that.
> >
> > Is this organization appropriate? Should we combine
> > components? Add new components? Who is available to take over
> > the components in need of owners and qa assignees?
>
>
> I can speak only about my component. I vote for leaving Cental Europe as
> it is. I can manage as much, but not more.
Okay!
Bob Clary
>
> To focus on one point only : I'm dutch and our Tech Evang bugs go into
> Europe-West...as will the German bugs, the french, some english,
> norwegian, swedish, english etc. Right now, all these
> countries/languages share ONE QA contact and default assignee. From a
> languague point of view it might be convenient to have language
> -specific contacts. Lately i've been query'ing ".nl" Tech Evang bugs
> and sorting those out. Perhaps more people can focus on Tech Evang
> bugs in their own country? If you need someone for ".nl" i herewith
> volunteer :)
Great! I have added you to my "volunteer list". When we get a new
Europe: Central owner you can coordinate with them. I agree that people
with specific language skills should work the bugs where they can make
contact in the site's native language.
>
> In addition, perhaps a repository of Tech Evang contact letters to
> web-site owners can be set-up containing translated letters.
>
We have a beginning of translated "form" letters however they will
probably need to be updated soon. See
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/letters/
> Furthermore, quite often when contacting a site you hit a brick wall,
> called "help desk" [there's an oxymoron if any ;)]
>
> These people are instructed to kindly inform you that the DECISION was
> made only to support IE and that if you want to use their site, you
> have to switch browser and if necessary even OS.
>
> Point being, contacting the web site via the web-site's contact
> information, typically is not very succesful. Either because you don't
> reach the actual site builders and most definitely won't reach the
> people responsible for the decision to "optimize the site for Internet
> Explorer".
>
Right. I have seen this many times before which is why I think
encouraging our users to complain to sites directly will help more than
just one or two people contacting them. They will ignore 1 or 2 messages
but not 1000.
> One thing i can never understand is that companies seemingly try very
> hard to keep their company accessible for all [making accomodations
> for all sorts of inabilities etc. etc.] but can make a CONSCIOUS
> DECISION to lose out on 2-5% of possible revenue by choosing to
> support only a particular browser.
>
Stupid people do stupid things. Stupid businesses go out of business.
Let's raise our share to a level that they can not ignore.
> So much more than contacting companies through their web sites, these
> organizational layers [builders, help desk] should be skipped and the
> people who make these decisions should be contacted and re-educated.
>
It is difficult to find such contacts but yes I agree we should contact
the highest level person in the organization who can change the decision
to not support us.
Perhaps a contact database although I would not want to be the source of
email addresses for spammers. We need to keep high level contacts
private and confidential so that companies will feel free to discuss
issues with us.
James Graham
<lots of stuff>
A while ago, someone on Mozillazine suggested creating mozilla.com to
complement mozilla.org. I think this would be a good idea from the point
of view of an evengalism effort. In particular the Mozilla.org could
provide some or more of the following content:
* A list of Mozilla distributers (Netscape, Beonex, et al.)
* A directory of companies offering support for Mozilla or Mozilla based
products. One of the most frequent objections to open source software is
the percieved lack of support.
* Links to Mozilla stable releases (i.e. not nightly releases)
* Advocacy documents, particually those targetted at end users (of all
varities). There are already several of these scattered about
mozilla.org. At the moment, however, they're useless since they are
diffiult to find.
* Specifcations: what can Mozilla do? Things like NTLM authentication
and Midas are important here, so people don't feel that they're locked
into Microsoft products when in fact they aren't.
* End user documentation. There is plenty of this in existence, despite
the fact that Mozilla itself is not targetted at end users. It might be
good to clean some of this up and make it easy to find.
* Documentation for things like the CCK and other features / tools aimed
at business users. There was an 'ask slashdot' once about rolling
Mozilla out in an organisation, and the feeling form most people (true
or not), is that it's hard and badly supported.
* Web developer resources. Like the 'how to make a cross browser page'
documents.
* Links to already existing external resources such as David Tenser's
help pages, Mozillazine, Mozdev and so on.
That list isn't comprehensive, but the idea is to make a clean
seperation between the developer site mozilla.org and the
user/distributer site mozilla.com (obviously the domain name is subject
to change). That would benefit both groups of people, since their sites
would be more focussed and so finding relevant information would be easier.
james
Karsten Düsterloh
>> The current debate over at bugzilla over letting the "User" (there that word
>> is again) put the sig where they want is another good example. There are
>> many people blocking this bug's implementation due to their personal
>> distaste for the bug itself. Our business (as an example) with over 200
>> seats will not use an email client that won't post the sig in a
>> "business-centric" position.
If your "business" isn't willing to learn how to do things as it is
mostly regarded as "right", don't whine.
> Here's the bug for anyone that would be gracious enough to submit a patch:
...but hopefully it won't get approved anyway.
> Replying with the "start my reply above the quoted text" pref on should
> prepend the signature above the quote text. (top)
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429#c74
I "start my reply above the quoted text" and work my way down through
the text, adding remarks where useful, snipping what's useless in
context. And last but not least comes my signature (remember why it's
called so?).
Karsten,
near the the end of his tether ;-)
--
Freiheit stirbt | Fsayannes SF&F-Bibliothek:
Mit Sicherheit | http://fsayanne.tprac.de/
Bob Clary
>
> That list isn't comprehensive, but the idea is to make a clean
> seperation between the developer site mozilla.org and the
> user/distributer site mozilla.com (obviously the domain name is subject
> to change). That would benefit both groups of people, since their sites
> would be more focussed and so finding relevant information would be easier.
>
> james
>
That is a very interesting idea. To have the commercial related content
on a .com version of the site. Perhaps someone from mozilla staff would
comment on this?
Tom
finding a list of sites which could currently use some evangelism? I'd
be more than happy to write emails, make suggestions and help fix sites
if i only knew which sites to address.. Personally i only encounter one
or two incompatible sites a week (then most of the sites i visit
directly relate to Mozilla or W3C in some way or another) so i doubt i'm
having as much effect as i could.
Cheers, Tom.
Bob Clary
Tom wrote:
Try <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/> for an
introduction. You can get a bugzilla account and query for Product Tech
Evangelism and for specific components such as US General, etc to find
specific classes of bugs.
One thing we could definitely use is help in reviewing unconfirmed bugs.
Tom
>
> Try <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/> for an
> introduction. You can get a bugzilla account and query for Product Tech
> Evangelism and for specific components such as US General, etc to find
> specific classes of bugs.
>
> One thing we could definitely use is help in reviewing unconfirmed bugs.
>
This might sound a little childish but then a lot of things are.. but
how about some form of award or rollcall for sites that make the effort
to fixed their Mozilla bugs? I'm not talking anything big just a nice
PNG linking to a mention on mozilla.org. Similar to w3c's compliance
icons. This way developers could let people know they've put the effort
in to support Mozilla users and perhaps get something from it themselves.
An award system for evangilists might work.. a little like reviewer
ratings on shopping sites, WU counts on SETI, knowledge ratings on tech
support sites or seller ratings on eBay.. make it more fun to promote
Mozilla.. turn it into a game/competition. There are a lot of kids out
there with a lot of time on their hands we should be trying to get them
involved.
Kai Lahmann
> Simply from a credibility standpoint, I have doubts about any effort to
> improve the public perception of Mozilla when site operators can easily
> point to such a statistic. Yes, yes. I know. If we knew how many open
> bugs Microsoft had running on Windows XP it might be even more
> horrendous. But my point is public perception - marketing, if you will.
true - not to mention, that thousands of bugs every week end as an
"UNCO", nobody even LOOKS at, which doesn't motivate reporters to report
more problems.
Another problem are the so called "4xp" bugs - those very often prevent
people from updating from Netscape 4 to Mozilla. One of the most
important are news references and every kind of links directly to a news
message. Another is the performance or the so called "roaming".
--
Kai Lahmann
Geld aus geben für Software, wo man noch jeden Treiber einrichten muss?
Wofür gibt es Knoppix? Kostenlos. Schnell. Vorkonfiguriert.
Kai Lahmann
> I. Increase market share (and pressure) of Mozilla and other
> Gecko-based browsers.
I think this is the ONLY thing, which needs to be done (and can be done)
to solve the TE problems. We "only" need 20% (4times of what we have
now) and about every website will get updated faster as you can close
the TE bugs. Currently we have exactly no argument, why they should do
anything, even read the mails.
How to help increasing the marget share?
1. create pages, where you can see, that Mozilla is better than MSIE or
Netscape 4. This needs to be done on pages, many people visit! For
example netscape.com's Community pages must look way better in Moziulla
and must look broken in MSIE. For this web standards doesn't matter -
nice looking features only do.
2. fix bugs that matter - nice to see 500 new features, but until we
have around 500 crashers, 150 datalosses and unfixed bugs with hundreds
of votes this will have 0 effect
3. make Mozilla known to people out there - why do I never see "get
Netscape 7" or "get Mozilla" banners out there, as it was in old
browserwar days?
Kai Lahmann
> We never do that if we do not close (mark as WONTFIX?) bugs where the
> webadmins never reacted to the tech evangelism letters. We should start
> doing that. Maybe one year, or 6 months after the second letter was sent?
WONTFIX on TE bugs is imho a VERY bad idea. I would more like to see
"later" for that. WONTFIX sounds a bit like "boycot this page" or
towards the author "fuck off". I think we should NEVER stop to go on
some authors nerves.
Kai Lahmann
> Furthermore, quite often when contacting a site you hit a brick wall,
> called "help desk" [there's an oxymoron if any ;)]
>
> These people are instructed to kindly inform you that the DECISION was
> made only to support IE and that if you want to use their site, you
> have to switch browser and if necessary even OS.
I've started to send CCs to adresses, where you can be shure, that not
the webdesign company, but the company the pages was made for reads this
- very often they have no idea, that their page isn't usable for some
people.
David W. Fenton
>We need to ease the transition from content designed for
>fourth generation browsers.
Are you working with the Worldwide Web Artists Consortium?
I don't read the WWWAC list any more (dropped it about a year ago),
but they are your target audience, since they are doing the
planning and design of the websites you are trying to evangelize.
Looks to me like the Design and Development Special Interest Group
would be a place to start.
If the WWWAC had guidelines for web developers that included
standards support as a goal, then that could be used as ammunition
in wars with developers and sites that refuse to support
standards/Gecko.
Also, the WWWAC might be a good partner in trying to convince the
web stats programmers to calculate their stats differently.
Scott Bowling is a good guy, too.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
Pascal Chevrel
> Bob Clary schrieb:
>
>> I. Increase market share (and pressure) of Mozilla and other
>> Gecko-based browsers.
>
>
> I think this is the ONLY thing, which needs to be done (and can be done)
> to solve the TE problems. We "only" need 20% (4times of what we have
> now) and about every website will get updated faster as you can close
> the TE bugs. Currently we have exactly no argument, why they should do
> anything, even read the mails.
>
> How to help increasing the marget share?
> 1. create pages, where you can see, that Mozilla is better than MSIE or
> Netscape 4. This needs to be done on pages, many people visit! For
> example netscape.com's Community pages must look way better in Moziulla
> and must look broken in MSIE. For this web standards doesn't matter -
> nice looking features only do.
> 2. fix bugs that matter - nice to see 500 new features, but until we
> have around 500 crashers, 150 datalosses and unfixed bugs with hundreds
> of votes this will have 0 effect
> 3. make Mozilla known to people out there - why do I never see "get
> Netscape 7" or "get Mozilla" banners out there, as it was in old
> browserwar days?
>
I came to similar conclusions, I still file TE bugs and do a little
triaging, but now my Tech evangelism work is as follow:
- I created a Mozilla/Netscape 7 Faq as well as a Gecko-focused weblog
in my language (I get about 5000 visitors per month, among which 30% IE
users)
- I create web pages that always look better in Gecko (but they do not
look broken in IE), using gecko's better CSS/PNG support, alternate
stylesheets etc.
- I help beginners in web design forums and gently point them to Mozilla
as a good tool with lots of add-ons that will ease their design work
(which is absolutely true)
- I help people having mozilla/netscape problems or questions in the
fr.* and es.* hierarchy
- I even put two banners on my site with "get Mozilla/get Netscape"
icons ;-)
- I talk about mozilla around me and I start saying to the friends who
think that I am a computer Hotliner that I give free support on
Mozilla/netscape but that I don't know anything about IE/OE, curiously
some friends are starting to switch ;-)
Next steps this summer will be to translate my FAQ into Spanish and
perhaps write CSS tutorials that show Mozilla strong points.
Pascal
--
FAQ Mozilla/Netscape 7 en français : http://pascal.chevrel.free.fr/
There are 10 kinds of people; those who understand binary, and those who
don't.
Bob Clary
>
> WONTFIX on TE bugs is imho a VERY bad idea. I would more like to see
> "later" for that. WONTFIX sounds a bit like "boycot this page" or
> towards the author "fuck off". I think we should NEVER stop to go on
> some authors nerves.
>
Later has been deprecated in bugzilla and should not be used in general.
Wontfix is just a signal to evangelists that they should not continue to
harrass a site that has either not responded or responded negatively.
They are fodder for customer action and for a later stage of evangelism
when we have achieved larger share and support when we can return to
them, reopen and approach them from a position of higher share with more
resources etc...
Bill Mason
"Kai Lahmann" <mob...@3dots.de> wrote in message
news:b9os5b$fii$05$1...@news.t-online.com...
> WONTFIX on TE bugs is imho a VERY bad idea. I would more like to see
> "later" for that.
So if all those old bugs were tagged LATER tomorrow, what does that
accomplish?
> WONTFIX sounds a bit like "boycot this page" or
> towards the author "fuck off".
No,, it's a simple objective statement of resolution: the site has not been
fixed after the lapse of a reasonable amount of time, and is not expected to
be in the foreseeable future.
>I think we should NEVER stop to go on
> some authors nerves.
If that was to be the attitude of people doing TE bugs, I wouldn't care to
assist. Unless you can explain how 'working someone's nerves' is going to
get them to:
1) Consider Mozilla TE any sort of professionally conducted affair
2) Educate themselves on the issue as it applies to them
3) Spend their time and energy on correcting the issue at hand
I'd rather educate someone than piss them off, thx. WONTFIX acknowledges
that there will always be site owners who will not act in response to a TE
issue. That's their choice.
Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
http://www.accessibleinter.net/
Jacek Piskozub
>
> Great! I have added you to my "volunteer list". When we get a new
> Europe: Central owner you can coordinate with them.
Are you deposing me? You probably mean Europe: West.
Jacek
Jacek Piskozub
> Bob Clary wrote:
> <lots of stuff>
>
> A while ago, someone on Mozillazine suggested creating mozilla.com to
> complement mozilla.org.
One more thing. Part of the reason why web masters tend to ignore Tech
Evangelism letters is that we (at least not all of us) have no
respectable email addresses. By respectable I mean mozilla.org
netscape.com or anything clearly marking us as connected to the project.
Bob: could you think of adding us to mozilla.org? Some time ago Asa was
against, but thinks do change with time...
Jacek
Bob Clary
David W. Fenton wrote:
> Are you working with the Worldwide Web Artists Consortium?
>
> http://wwwac.org/
>
I have not been in contact with them. Great idea! Thanks.
Katsuhiko Momoi
suggest the following:
Most large organizations need support when time comes to deploy any
software system-wide. It would be great to have a volunteer support
organization in countries where such demand is strong. It may start as a
volunteer organization but it could easily turn into a paid support
organization.
In the end, we really do need a support/service organization that can
perform credible work for a fee. Apache/Linux is deployed in a large
percentage of organizations and you can find support business for it if
you need one.
- Kat
--
Katsuhiko Momoi <mo...@netscape.com>
Netscape Technology Evangelism/Developer Support
Jacek Piskozub
>
> WONTFIX on TE bugs is imho a VERY bad idea. I would more like to see
> "later" for that. WONTFIX sounds a bit like "boycot this page" or
> towards the author "fuck off". I think we should NEVER stop to go on
> some authors nerves.
>
"Later" is deprecated. We use "Future" at present, but this is exactly
the reason why we have so many open bugs.
Jacek
Katsuhiko Momoi
been doing this work for some time, Mozilla.org should honor that work
by at least providing relay service so that Jacek can use mozilla.org
address.
- Kat
Jacek Piskozub wrote:
--
Bob Clary
>
> I came to similar conclusions, I still file TE bugs and do a little
> triaging, but now my Tech evangelism work is as follow:
>
> - I created a Mozilla/Netscape 7 Faq as well as a Gecko-focused weblog
> in my language (I get about 5000 visitors per month, among which 30% IE
> users)
> - I create web pages that always look better in Gecko (but they do not
> look broken in IE), using gecko's better CSS/PNG support, alternate
> stylesheets etc.
> - I help beginners in web design forums and gently point them to Mozilla
> as a good tool with lots of add-ons that will ease their design work
> (which is absolutely true)
> - I help people having mozilla/netscape problems or questions in the
> fr.* and es.* hierarchy
> - I even put two banners on my site with "get Mozilla/get Netscape"
> icons ;-)
> - I talk about mozilla around me and I start saying to the friends who
> think that I am a computer Hotliner that I give free support on
> Mozilla/netscape but that I don't know anything about IE/OE, curiously
> some friends are starting to switch ;-)
>
> Next steps this summer will be to translate my FAQ into Spanish and
> perhaps write CSS tutorials that show Mozilla strong points.
I think these are all good ideas that we can all use on our own sites,
but the personal approach will only go so far I believe. However getting
commercial sites or web applications to provide a poorer experience for
the majority of their customers will not be a productive exercise I believe.
The FAQ is a resource we could use in evangelism as well. Would you
consider helping to develop such a FAQ for www.mozilla.org and sharing
development of the list with others in the community?
Bob Clary
Jacek Piskozub wrote:
yes. sorry. I plead to being an idiot.
Bob Clary
Jacek Piskozub wrote:
>
> One more thing. Part of the reason why web masters tend to ignore Tech
> Evangelism letters is that we (at least not all of us) have no
> respectable email addresses. By respectable I mean mozilla.org
> netscape.com or anything clearly marking us as connected to the project.
>
> Bob: could you think of adding us to mozilla.org? Some time ago Asa was
> against, but thinks do change with time...
>
That has been a problem but mozilla.org emails are only for staff. I,
for example, do not have one.
I still believe that the most effective approach is to convince
customers to complain to sites regarding Mozilla / Gecko support. One
possible idea is a Hall of Shame listing sites we have problems with
including public feedback urls/emails but I am not completely sure that
would be appreciated. Thoughts welcome.
Kai Lahmann
> If that was to be the attitude of people doing TE bugs, I wouldn't care to
> assist. Unless you can explain how 'working someone's nerves' is going to
> get them to:
>
> 1) Consider Mozilla TE any sort of professionally conducted affair
you don't need to get them to even know about Mozilla TE - you only need
them to think that supporting Mozilla is good for THEM. I guess 99% know
exactly how to fix this, but they just doesn't want to change anything,
because there's no reason to change anything for them.
Kai Lahmann
> However getting
> commercial sites or web applications to provide a poorer experience for
> the majority of their customers will not be a productive exercise I
> believe.
that's why I called Netscape.com as an example. If this isn't the page,
where you can start with such a think, which is it?
Pascal Chevrel
I don't block IE and the pages I create look nice in this browser, just
not AS nice ;-) Gecko/opera users get extras like alternate stylesheets,
form elements with focus effects, transparencies, fixed positionned
menus... On my Gecko pages that's a different issue though, the pages
remain accessible in IE but the very use of advanced CSS2 is meant as a
demonstration of Gecko's better standard support.
>
> The FAQ is a resource we could use in evangelism as well. Would you
> consider helping to develop such a FAQ for www.mozilla.org and sharing
> development of the list with others in the community?
>
I'd be glad to help. BTW, I already collaborate with Tristan Nitot with
French/Spanish TE bugs and the FAQ is presented on the French Devedge.
Katsuhiko Momoi
> Hello All,
>
> This note is intended to jump start a discussion of where
> Mozilla Tech Evangelism stands today, and what we can do to
> make it more effective in the future.
>
>
> III. Tech Evangelism Bugs
>
> Tech Evangelism Components are currently organized by
> language/region and are geared towards triaging reported
> issues, contacting sites and convincing them to update their
> content. Many of the original owners and qa assignees for Tech
> Evangelism bugs are no longer available to handle these bugs.
> The current situation is summarized in
> <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/components.html>.
>
> Is this organization appropriate? Should we combine
> components? Add new components? Who is available to take over
> the components in need of owners and qa assignees?
Overall I am for leaving the region based evangelism as is and
re-organize from time to time on as needed basis. Much of evangelism is
local and needs to be conducted in the local language as much as
possible. Now for a large region like Europe:West, it would make sense
to take someone's suggestion to have multiple owners if volunteers can
be found.
For Asian component, I would like to work with Gashu -- please assign
him as the default QA contact. Gashu and I talked about this when I was
attending the 4th Mozilla Japan Conference/Party last month in Tokyo.
- Kat
Owen T. Marshall
(specifically, the system administrator[among others]), I have ran into
these arguments against it.
1. It doesn't support our needs.
The state of Kentucky requires all public schools to have Micro$oft
Proxy. Up until recently, we didn't do NTLM. This is one myth that must
be removed
2. It isn't supported
The state helpdesk only provides support for a tiny subset -- you
guessed it, Windows and Microsoft programs only.
If we were able to evangelize just one state, and convince them to use
open-source solutions in government... just imagine the market share boost.
As far as end users, our campaign has to overcome one significant obstacle:
3. I already have IE... why switch?
I can rattle off the reasons, but does an end user honestly care if IE
doesn't support technical feature foo? Probably not. We need to make a
client friendly browser -- to go the way of Phoenix. This way, I can say:
"Mozilla takes up less disk space, less RAM, and crashes half the time."
...instead of launching a conversation about the magic of the W3C.
Another problem... Microsoft products cost money. The licensing fee for
Windows is leverage we can use to get money-consious groups into Linux.
Since IE costs nothing, however, we can't get people here. We need a
hard figure -- to be able to provide a quick reason in support of
Mozilla that proves it saves money... any ideas :)
Assorted ramblings are done for now...
Owen
Katsuhiko Momoi
recognized as good contributors to evangelism. That is, we use
na...@mozilla.org for sending mail using mozilla.org mail server. When
replies are sent to na...@mozilla.org, that message is forwarded to
another non Mozilla address.
This could be an alternative to requesting a full-fledged Mozilla.org
account.
- Kat
Owen T. Marshall
>
>
> Jacek Piskozub wrote:
>
>>
>> One more thing. Part of the reason why web masters tend to ignore Tech
>> Evangelism letters is that we (at least not all of us) have no
>> respectable email addresses. By respectable I mean mozilla.org
>> netscape.com or anything clearly marking us as connected to the project.
>>
>> Bob: could you think of adding us to mozilla.org? Some time ago Asa
>> was against, but thinks do change with time...
>>
Agreed. I can't count the number of times I have been asked what company
I was with. Noone takes us seriously because we lack a formal name to
back us up.
Perhaps evang could get their own domain name and assign email addresses
to evangelists
If things get worse I am just going to start saying I work for AOL/TW...
that should get em moving ;)
[Don't take above line seriously! --ED]
>
> That has been a problem but mozilla.org emails are only for staff. I,
> for example, do not have one.
>
> I still believe that the most effective approach is to convince
> customers to complain to sites regarding Mozilla / Gecko support. One
> possible idea is a Hall of Shame listing sites we have problems with
> including public feedback urls/emails but I am not completely sure that
> would be appreciated. Thoughts welcome.
Customer backlash would work... and, if we could show offenders that
customers consider this an issue, this campaign might work. We shouldn't
come across in an offensive manner, though... I might rethink "Hall of
Shame". Or just be sure to show the page in somewhat of a good humor.
Owen
Kai Lahmann
> The state of Kentucky requires all public schools to have Micro$oft
> Proxy. Up until recently, we didn't do NTLM. This is one myth that must
> be removed
most difficult task I think - many people still doen't even know, that
Mozilla isn't that buggy Netscape 4 any more!
> 3. I already have IE... why switch?
> "Mozilla takes up less disk space, less RAM, and crashes half the
> time."
Then you get "IE uses no disk space [as it's already there], uses less
RAM for me [as he only coults iexplore.exe] and never crashes for me [on
this problem we can "help" with <input type crash> *evilgrin*]".
What we need technically is:
Speed, Speed and uhm Speed. And maybe less RAM- and Disk-Usage
> ....instead of launching a conversation about the magic of the W3C.
W3C is an argument for authors, not for users
Pascal Chevrel
> Owen T. Marshall schrieb:
>
>> The state of Kentucky requires all public schools to have Micro$oft
>> Proxy. Up until recently, we didn't do NTLM. This is one myth that
>> must be removed
>
>
> most difficult task I think - many people still doen't even know, that
> Mozilla isn't that buggy Netscape 4 any more!
>
>> 3. I already have IE... why switch?
>> "Mozilla takes up less disk space, less RAM, and crashes half the
>> time."
>
>
> Then you get "IE uses no disk space [as it's already there], uses less
> RAM for me [as he only coults iexplore.exe] and never crashes for me [on
> this problem we can "help" with <input type crash> *evilgrin*]".
> What we need technically is:
> Speed, Speed and uhm Speed. And maybe less RAM- and Disk-Usage
>
>> ....instead of launching a conversation about the magic of the W3C.
>
>
> W3C is an argument for authors, not for users
>
For the end-user the only arguments that I found effective were :
- popup blocker
- tabs (with a demonstration)
- antispam filltering system
- security
- themes
- better text zoom
pascal
Owen T. Marshall
> What we need technically is:
> Speed, Speed and uhm Speed. And maybe less RAM- and Disk-Usage
>
>> ....instead of launching a conversation about the magic of the W3C.
>
>
> W3C is an argument for authors, not for users
That was, until the advent of Firebird, one of the few arguments I could
think of ;)
You are right -- we need a zippy browser. It must float in the air. One
thing I hated was how our browser was never an "end-user product". The
roadmap, docs... everything avoided the description of "end-user
product". 95% of users _can't_ build or debug a program, and we wonder
why we only get a 5% market share. [1] Sure, I love nothing more than
using the DOM inspector and making XUL code. But my friends tell me I am
a masochist. The smooth edges of IE are nice (so they say...)
More rambling -- we need a way to make and ship Mozilla CD's _at cost_
(a-la Debian). Then evangelizing Mozilla would be simple.
Lets get AOL/TW to stop making thousands of "AOL FREE" disks and help us
out some ;)
Owen
[1] Numbers and concepts blatantly fabricated. Deal with it ;)
Bill Mason
> Bill Mason schrieb:
> > If that was to be the attitude of people doing TE bugs, I wouldn't care
to
> > assist. Unless you can explain how 'working someone's nerves' is going
to
> > get them to:
> >
> > 1) Consider Mozilla TE any sort of professionally conducted affair
>
> you don't need to get them to even know about Mozilla TE - you only need
> them to think that supporting Mozilla is good for THEM.
I would restate the question: and how exactly do you think getting them
angry with you accomplishes that?
Kai Lahmann
> I would restate the question: and how exactly do you think getting them
> angry with you accomplishes that?
I they get tons of mails because their page doesn't work with Mozilla,
they start to think, that there are many blocked Mozilla users