IT News

about:mozilla - Impact Mozilla, FSOSS, Mobile Firefox, SFX, Public Relations, SUMO, Add-on survey results, and more…

In this issue…

Impact Mozilla: Community marketing challenge
Last week Mozilla’s marketing team launched a new community-focused marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla. The idea is to further open Mozilla’s marketing process to the community, and to see who can come up with the best ideas. This challenge is specifically focused on gathering and developing ideas that will help increase Firefox’s user retention rate — increasing the number of people who continue using Firefox after downloading and installing it.

“We’re looking for innovative ways to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users. Interested? Start by sending us a summary of your ideas and an oveview of how you and your team will carry them out. If your initial strategy makes the cut, we’ll ask for a complete plan detailing your solution. If your plan is selected as the winner, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a marketing campaign for one of the top brands in the technology world. We’ll give you the resources to enact your solution, plus $3,000 for the winning proposal.” For all the details, including how to get started and where to submit your plans, see the Impact Mozilla website.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS)
David Humphrey writes, “The Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is scheduled for Oct 23 and Oct 24, and online registration is open. There are various early bird rates, so register early. This year’s line-up includes many familiar Mozilla faces. The list of speakers is long and diverse, and represents the best of the web, the open source desktop, open source business, policy, law, etc. We’re also going to be running a track on Teaching Open Source, which will bring together professors, students, administrators, and community leaders to discuss the potential and challenges of taking students into open source projects.” For more information, check out David’s full blog post, and check out the FSOSS web site.

Mobile Firefox: User Experience developments
Mobile Firefox (code-named “Fennec”) recently hit its milestone 8 (M8) release. Mark Finkle blogged about the release at the time, and Madhava Enros has since blogged about the user-experience changes and additions to the mobile browser. “This is an exciting time from a user-experience perspective because, along with functionality and stability improvements, this milestone brings with it the beginnings of Fennec’s look and feel. In a sense, we have some UI worth playing with, evaluating, and improving.” Madhava’s post includes a bevy of screenshots that you can check out, and if you would like to take part in the discussion about the Mobile Firefox UI, you should do so over in the Mobile development group.

Spread Firefox Affiliates program
David Rolnitzky recently announced a number of improvements to the Spread Firefox Affiliates program. The Affiliates program is designed to make it easier for our community to spread the word about Firefox by providing website buttons and banners, as well as quarterly prizes for the top Firefox referrers. “Some of the improvements are user-facing and some of them are back-end improvements which, while not immediately obvious, will be of great benefit to the program. You can find the initial details for this improvement plan here.” Improvements include clearer information about how to get started and how the points system works, better organization of buttons and banners, a new selection of international buttons, the ability to create custom buttons, and a new incentive system. Read David’s blog post for full details, and then head over to the Affiliates program site to sign up and learn how you can help make Firefox even better.

Next steps for SpreadFirefox.com
A number of improvements have been made to SpreadFirefox.com (SFX) over the summer, and Alix Franquet has been closely involved with that work. Alix has now blogged about the next steps for SFX, outlining a three-part redesign that will be undertaken towards improving the homepage and overall site navigation. These three parts include: creating a simplified homepage that better explains what SFX is about and that includes a community spotlight and a call to action; a new page for SFX members to track activity so they can better see what’s happening on the site including events, new groups, and new posts; and updating the site navigation to improve overall usability. There are lots more details about the planned changes in Alix’s blog post, and you can read the full plan over on SFX itself. We’re always looking for more help with SFX, so this could be a great opportunity to dive in and get involved with Mozilla’s community marketing projects.

Mozilla Public Relations metrics
Mozilla’s Public Relations team has been working on opening up the PR process, making it more transparent and more in fitting with Mozilla’s open source DNA. Their most recent foray is a post written by Melissa Shapiro, in which she discusses PR metrics. “How do we know if we’re getting better if there’s no baseline indication of impact? The answer isn’t a pure science. True PR metrics are not just quantitative but qualitative as well. Quantitative analysis explores things like total number of articles, mentions in the press, coverage by country, etc. Qualitative analysis includes message penetration as well as audience and tone analysis. It turns out they are equally important in evaluating the success of Mozilla’s major PR initiatives.”

The article goes on to discuss the various types of quantitative and qualitative analysis we explore as part of our PR process at Mozilla, outlining use cases for each and giving examples comparing the public relations activities around the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 releases. If you’re interested in learning more about the normally opaque world of public relations, you should check out Melissa’s blog for this and other articles.

The vision for SUMO - Part 8: Live Chat
David Tenser has published an extensive series of blog posts where he has been discussing a comprehensive vision for the scope and role of the Support.mozilla.com (SUMO) project. He has recently published the eighth post in the series, this one focused on the innovative and incredibly useful “Live Chat” feature. “If a problem isn’t yet covered in the Knowledge Base, or if the instructions in the article are too hard to understand, Live Chat is a powerful way for users to get in touch with Firefox experts and get hands-on assistance in solving their problems. Live Chat can also be a very fun way for contributors to provide support. Contributors helping out with Live Chat don’t just help users, they talk to each other in the backchannel as well, providing assistance to other helpers whenever needed. This means that although you’re usually the only one interacting with the user you’re helping, you’re never alone.”

David further discusses some possible future improvements for the service, including a fully integrated chat client, a simple scheduling solution, support for languages other than English, and automatically saving chat logs and associated user happiness ratings, among other things. If you’re interested in the Live Chat feature of the SUMO project and would like to see how the team is thinking about improving it in the future, read the full post over at the Firefox Support Blog.

Add-on developers survey: raw results
The team responsible for the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site recently conducted a survey of the add-on developer community. A total of 265 people responded to the survey, and the initial results have been published. “The general summary is that most respondents were individual developers with 2 or more years of add-on development experience. Naturally they felt comfortable with JavaScript and XUL. They primarily built add-ons for Firefox and hosted them on their own.” The full results have been published, but they are simply the raw results. The team will be applying some correlation analysis to draw out more interesting findings and conclusions. To view and discuss these initial results, see the post on Basil’s weblog.

Two Mozillians make BusinessWeek’s “25 Most Influential”
It was recently announced that Mitchell Baker and Joi Ito were both included on BusinessWeek’s list of the 25 most influential people on the Web. “Each year, we turn to readers and BusinessWeek staff for the Best of the Web list, asking them to contribute names for a list of the Internet’s movers and shakers.” Watch the full slideshow, which includes all 25 honorees, over at BusinessWeek.

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

Subscribe to the email newsletter
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

Original Article from Mozilla

Filed under Mozilla

Ads

Latest Web Tools