Mozilla SUMO
Mozilla SuMo
Case Study
Purpose
Empower the Mozilla SUMO team with tools and practices to engage effectively with the next iteration of Mozilla’s product ecosystem.
Enable SUMO to maintain a high level of support quality in the faces of increasing demands for human-centered support.
Outcome
Explore 3 case studies that illustrate innovative and effective community-driven customer support ecosystems. Communicate and work with Mozilla to apply these studies via a facilitated workshop.
We interviewed 7 external contributors, managers, and experts across the three core case studies whose work manifests as community-driven support and creation.
We specifically focused on contributor experience, supporting systems, incentive structures, adjacent community involvement, and channels for communication.
We also interviewed several Mozilla SUMO contributors and employees, who were able to provide us insight into SUMO’s specific challenges, and provided context which directed our research efforts.
Our Case Studies
Sophisticated community management and incentives platform that is dramatically different from other examples
Leverages a variety of incentive structures to great effect
Large international community of users
Radically distributed community base using many channels and mediums to support users of the product
Similar volunteer community-support structure to Mozilla SUMO
Large international install base and support community
Wordpress.org Community Support
Summary
For Mozilla
Wordpress.org is a community around the development of the open source CRM, Wordpress. It exists separately from Automattic and Wordpress.com, which is a hosting solution built on top of the Wordpress platform created by the open source project’s founder.
Beyond the core development community, Wordpress.org has a community support forum provides support for the core platform, as well as a channel for theme and plugin developers to provide support for their users who might not understand how the plugin is separate from the core offering.
The wordpress.org community is a strong analog to the community structure that Mozilla follows for providing support.
It differs in that it retains a higher degree of control and centralization than Mozilla, and is aggressively independent from the Automattic influence.
Community
Technical Environment
The Wordpress.org community is spread across a few platforms.
We heard from a support lead that the active support contributor community is about 40-60 people, with a much wider number of secondary contributors. The Slack channel itself has close to 1500 members, but only a small core of active users.
The Wordpress community forum is hosted on wordpress itself and uses bbPress. They are building out a new platform called HelpHub which is another wordpress instance with custom plugins meant to replace their current forum.
The wordpress support forum meets weekly on slack to discuss changes and updates, and also hear from the community. These activities are led by a support lead, who is voted in by the community.
The community liaises with Internationalization and localization teams via these meetings, but otherwise keep fairly separate.
Additionally, the support teams keep track of issues and bugs via Trac, a bug tracking/issue tracker similar to bugzilla. It’s not developed by the Wordpress team, however, but appears to be selected for its integration with other tools.
Channels
Wordpress.org/Support
wordpress.slack.com
Wordpress Reddit
Wordpress.org
Support Forum
The Wordpress.org support forum is a wordpress site with bbPress forum software.
The wordpress support forum is a combination of a blog-leaning wiki and community support forum designed to deflect people towards help articles, and reduce community reliance on
Wordpress.org Support Forums
Troubleshooting Hierarchy
Support-specific functions
Limited Badges
The support forum tries to deflect users to blog posts before pushing to the forum. Their new HelpHub software intends to amplify this effect.
The forums have a variety of support-specific functions, like the ability to save and for contributors to flag posts for moderation.
“On the forum, we can flag them (to approve post), and then ppl can vent but their posts �aren’t visible.”�Former WP.org Support Lead
The wordpress community is militantly anti-gamification. They believe that automated badges incentivize the wrong type of contribution.
“We will never have badges, and never have achievements. Gamifying the forum promotes the wrong behaviour.”�WP.org Support Lead
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The wordpress support forum seems less sophisticated than any of the other forums we encountered (save for the arduino official forum), but because of its sophisticated community management working behind the scenes, it appears to be functioning quite effectively.
The big piece of feedback that contributors had to Wordpress on their forums was a desire to “flag” things for moderator attention without having to get involved themselves. Currently, to flag a post for moderation, you have to participate.
Wordpress.org
Slack Channel
The “Making Wordpress” slack is a contributor support channel, similar in spirit to the Mozilla slack channels. It’s not a place for Wordpress.org users to come seeking help, but rather a near real time communication medium for contributors to the Wordpress.org project.
It’s also where the community meetings take place, and where a automated messaging is deposited from various development tools (Trac, Github, etc).
Wordpress.org’s Slack
Channel-specific Slacks
Community Meetups
Just-enough Automation
Slack channels are focused around specific channels and functions. �#design is for design teams, #forum is for support forum contributors.
The support community checks in weekly with core contributors and liaisons from localization and Internationalization teams.
Part of the support experience is the human element. WP.org limits automation and gamification to try and emphasize a personal experience.
“On the forum, we can flag them (to approve post), and then ppl can vent but their posts aren’t visible.”�WP.org Support Lead
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The ability to appropriately escalate is something that Wordpress does more effectively than both Arduino and Kaggle.
Slack is the community channel where decisions and debates seem to occur most productively.
The Wordpress.org community appears to be starkly independent of the Automattic and Wordpress.com community, which forces certain the volunteer community to substantially manage their own plumbing. This has some benefits, including clear escalation paths if anything goes clearly off the rails.
Wordpress.org
Reddit Channel
As the primary unofficial support channel for Wordpress.org, the Wordpress subreddit is a place where support for the wordpress platform occurs on an ongoing basis.
With 48k subscribers and an active user base (200 users online at the time of writing), it exists as a lighter-touch way to get support help for a wordpress problem, albeit without the required professionalism of the wordpress.org support community.
/r/Wordpress (Unofficial Reddit)
Clear Forum Rules
Rerouting and Deflection
Community Voting
Reddit forum rules are upfront and present both during posting and browsing. Users will refer to them by number if violated.
Wordpress.org is a platform upon which many products are built. Forum members often deflect non-platform questions to specific product devs.
Reddit has an upvote/downvote mechanic that helps to filter out spam and poor responses. This serves to elevate effective support responses.
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The Wordpress subreddit is an effective unofficial support community. It runs as most reddits do, with a variety of moderators and topics. The reddit is more open about topics than the normal support forum, so users seem more free to use it as a tool in a broader problem-solving chain, vs. asking very pointed questions.
The community seems to substantially self-moderate, and also seems more willing to point to plugins, themes, and hacks as ways to approach problem solving.
Value Flow
The Wordpress.org community is a fully volunteer community providing customer support for the open source Wordpress platform (and adjacent products, eg. BBPress)
Wordpress.org is supported BY Automattic/Wordpress.com employees, who sometimes do rotations in the open source community. The .org community seems themselves as distinct from Automattic though.
The primary rewards and incentives within wordpress.org seem to be status and community-connection, and present a strong corollary to SUMO’s needs for that reason.
Technical Breakdown
| Wordpress.org |
Unified Help Desk System | Codex.Wordpress.com + Trac |
Realtime | IRC for users, Slack for team |
Forum | Wordpress forum (BBPress) |
Wiki | Wordpress CRM |
Ticket System | Trac |
Bug System | Trac |
Community Support | Support Forum Volunteers |
Distributed Content | Secondary sources, eg. wpbeginner.com and o’reilly |
Embedded Support in Product | WPAdmin has embedded docs + link to forum |
Social Media Support | None |
Flair/Kudos | Badges |
Arduino Support Community
Summary
For Mozilla
Arduino is an independent business which creates open source hardware and software for the maker community. The arduino platform is at the heart of countless electronics projects and products, and part of its success is in the community that developed around the open source toolkit.
The community is not substantially on an arduino-owned channel, however. It lives across a variety of different forums and platforms, and is primarily brought together by the arduino brand itself. This presents both a benefit and a challenge to community members providing support.
The arduino community is radically decentralized, and presents opportunities for observation that point to distributed community management, and a core human centered design principle of “Meet the user where they are.”
This decentralization partially came from some ownership struggles a few years ago of the Arduino trademark, which may have undermined opportunities to build a more centralized community.
Community
Technical Environment
The Arduino community is incredibly distributed, with some confusion about whether arduino is a product, a platform, or just a brand.
While in-person events draw a large number of volunteers, actual forum moderators seem to be quite limited: with about 12 volunteer moderators with tens of thousands of posts over the past decade. Conversely, Arduino “admins” (10 count) have low relative participation, only a few hundred over the past decade.
The Arduino community (as it is owned by the Arduino organization) is highly fragments, but unified by a single authentication point through create.arduino.cc.
They use a legacy forum software called SimpleMachines to run the arduino forum itself (tied to the unified auth), and the ProjectHub itself is a hosted instance of Hackster.io integrated into the create.arduino.cc platform.
The community itself is scattered across different platforms, so the level of expertise around the mechanics of any one platform is somewhat limited. There also seems to be a lot of migration towards more establish platforms, such as StackExchange given the limitations of the arduino hosted one.
Channels
Arduino Community Forums
Arduino StackExchange
Arduino.cc Project Hub
Arduino Community Forum
Arduino.cc hosts a forum on their servers, using SimpleMachine Forum software. The server is manage by an arduino employee, but Arduino employees appear to do little in terms of direct community management within the form or outside. Enhancements to the forum are often requested by community members in a separate
Arduino Community Forum
Simple Badges
Inmates Running the Asylum
Lack of Structure
The arduino community has slowly incorporated badges and karma systems to reward contributors and indicate long-time membership.
While a few arduino employees use the forum, the community is primarily run and moderated by community members themselves.
The arduino community forum has topic areas where certain mods focus, but is not dogmatic about topics. As a result, it is more welcoming.
“We don’t really have a structure. The mods’ job is not to answer question. A mod needs to understand human nature, not the technical”�Arduino Forum Moderator
“I have the impression that the Arduino employees aren’t that interested in the forum. Rarely post there.”�Arduino Forum Moderator
Key Learnings For Mozilla
Ultimately, the fact that the Arduino forum has fallen to the wayside in favor of forums like Stack Exchange and Instructable-like wikis is an interesting note to what happens when there is not a conscious effort to organize community support offers.
The arduino community forum comes off as an afterthought. Most likely it was used by core Arduino contributors in the early days, but with Arduino’s success it has become more of a convening place for fans and users of the Arduino platform.
The forum serves as an interesting case study for showing evolving community demands and needs though. Especially where there are long term contributors, the need for recognition and status appears to be an important motivator.
Arduino
StackExchange
StackExchange (SE) is a crowd-sourced platform for technical problem solving around questions and code samples. The community asks questions and answers questions in return. SE has a sophisticated reputation system that encourages the community to self-manage, and incentives contribution through gradated access based on past performance and community assessment of your contributions.
Because of the volume of interaction and requests for an arduino-focused stack exchange, it was created as a unique community alongside the traditional StackOverflow one.
Arduino StackExchange
Reputation System
Earned Access
Mods supporting Mods
StackExchange has a long established peer-driven reputation system for sorting content and community judging of contributions.
Access and privileges are earned by contributions that the rest of the community judges as being of value or not. In effect, mods are voted in.
The moderation team has access to a special channel specifically for mods. It’s a place to unwind and also ask for help from others.
“What they do is try to relieve the workload of the mods by making the community do it. Sometimes abused, but basically a good mechanism.”�Arduino Forum Moderator
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The StackExchange points system seems to be a good match to the type of question asked by those seeking Arduino project support, and in many ways appears to be a better alternative to the official Arduino forum.
The Arduino stack exchange is an excellent example of applying StackOverflow style ranking and points systems to a narrow topic area. It’s also a lesson in how a certain threshold of use is needed before such a system can be applied.
The Arduino StackExchange went through an extended beta period before the demand for it was recognized by the StackExchange community, and even after that, it is substantially the efforts of a few core moderators which keep the community vibrant.
Arduino
ProjectHub
Instructable-style platform for sharing projects, getting accolades, and similar. Integrated with the core user auth (id.arduino.cc) that is tied to the forum.
Interestingly, you can’t access the forum directly from the HUB page. Instead, you have to go to profile, and then link into the forum itself. This might indicate that Arduino as a platform is either outgrowing the forum community, or is intentionally boxing it out as feared by some of the community members.
“The Forum has too much anonymity and fluidity. We needed something more complete like a Project Hub.”�Arduino Designer
Arduino ProjectHub
Project-focused Content
Contest-driven Contribution
Community Inclusivity
The ProjectHub focuses all content creation around projects, and forces communication and feedback to orient around that construct.
Like Kaggle, the project hub tries to incentivize quality content on the platform by offering contests and tangible rewards to contributors.
The ProjectHub uses language and interactions that encourage a positive and inclusive community approach, as well as a code of conduct.
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The ProjectHub is a commercial initiative by Arduino to extend the visibility of arduino’s role in major projects. It provides the stage that arduino aficionados can use for displaying their work.
Importantly, it gives small incentives and clues for how to provide quality content: both by elevating quality work and also by providing a clear template for what a good project description needs.
Value Flow
Arduino’s business structure is complicated but increasingly consolidated, cutting across LLCs, their 501(c)(6), and other entities from a conflict with the founders in the early 2010s. For our purposes, BCMI Labs SA is effectively arduino.cc
The community is fragmented, and doesn’t have a centralized support group, instead relying on the Arduino forum, Stack Overflow, google groups, instructables, github, blog comments, and elsewhere for support.
Active community support members AND arduino employees cut across many different communities as a consequence, but nonetheless hold their “identity” as Arduino support volunteers.
Technical Breakdown
| Arduino |
Unified Help Desk System | N/A |
Realtime | IRC |
Forum | Google Groups, Simple Machines forum |
Wiki | |
Ticket System | Github Issues |
Bug System | Github Issues |
Community Support | Distributed (Arduino Forum, Github Issues, Stack Overflow, etc) |
Distributed Content | Massively distributed across communities |
Embedded Support in Product | Examples in IDE, Troubleshooting |
Social Media Support | Twitter community manager |
Flair/Kudos |
Kaggle Support Community
Summary
For Mozilla
The Kaggle community platform is very sophisticated, primarily because the forum participants are Kaggle’s product and business model. The survival of the Kaggle platform hinged on a productive, collaborative, and engaged community, and so their focus on sophisticated platform and community engineering can serve as a “best practices” example �to Mozilla.
Kaggle is a data science learning, exploration, and competition platform with a rich community forum. It was recently purchased by Google, and runs regular commercial competitions where data scientists leverage machine learning techniques to model accurate predictions from a data set. It is seen by many as on the bleeding edge of data science technique.
The community itself is amazingly wholesome for a competitive community. New learners have a clear pathway to success and edification, and experts are incentivized to remain in the community to both mentor and compete. Many competitors ultimately compete because their scores and experiences can contribute to future employment.
Community
Technical Environment
We did learn of an instance where a competitor’s teammate had cheated, and the Kaggle employee team was able to quite quickly identify and disqualify the user’s account. Kaggle takes the “rule” aspect of their work quite seriously, and as a result invests much more in community than the more laissez-faire ecosystem we saw with Arduino.
For more details on their technology setup, I recommend looking at:�https://builtwith.com/kaggle.com
The Kaggle Community lacks a core support forum, but has a strong and constructive peer support network for both aspiring data scientists and experienced experts.
The community seems to be motivated by intrinsic passion in the practice underlying data science, and the external motivators of developing experience that an serve as a professional currency.
Kaggle is a hodge-podge of different technologies and platforms. It does a lot of its rendering via React and a variety of open-source libraries, eg. the ACE code editor, MathJax for rendering formula, etc.
It’s possible that the custom nature of the forum is not just to create an environment that’s optimized to the challenge at hand, but also to protect against any kind of cheating that less-scrupulous participants might try.
Channels
Kaggle Platform
Non-Kaggle Forums
Kaggle Platform
Kaggle is an integrated platform of discussion, competition, and sharing of content related to data science. The community is able to create discussions around the competition and kernals (scripts that share the methods to get to an outcome), which serve to focus discussion around interactive content.
Kaggle is a platform for educating people in data science, but also elevating the practice of data science by providing for competitions with both monetary rewards and community “kudos.”
“Machine Learning is a practice, and just taking course in it– �you can have the impression that you mastered it. �And you’re dangerous.” �- Kaggle Discussion Master and Competitor
Kaggle Platform
Behaviour-specific Badges
Contest-driven Contribution
Contextual Conversations
Kaggle provides point-based incentives across competitions, scripts (kernals), and community involvement.
Kaggle is about leveraging competition to incentivise quality contributions from the whole community, to provide their clients better outcomes.
Kaggle uses contextual communication and wiki-like content around the the primary objects of discussion: kernals and competitions.
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The Kaggle platform is an integrated and well considered system that focuses community members on the core functions of the Kaggle community: contests, building kernal �demos, and discussion around data �science technique.
By having a focus around a well defined and constrained set of activities, the quality of the community platform and participation by contributors appears to be on a higher level.
It is important to acknowledge that this focus is likely to have been sharpened over time as Kaggle moved towards its successful acquisition by Google, and it remains to be seen whether it will retain this focus and community participation levels given the changed product ownership.
Non-Kaggle Forums
Kaggle users are active in a variety of adjacent community channels, similar to our other case studies. Significantly, the discussion on these adjacent communities is often around competitions and elevating the level modeling on the Kaggle platform. These communities include the /r/DataScience subreddit, ODS.ai (a Russian data science forum), and the KaggleNoobs Slack channel.
These channels become spaces for communities to have “off topic” discussions which feed back into the quality of answered and competition on the Kaggle platform.
“The Russian have a disproportionate number of top performers compared to other countries… �Substantially because of �this slack forum.”�Kaggle Competitor
Non-Kaggle Forums
Kaggle as a Means
Existing Communities
Real World Impact
Kaggle competitions are a nucleus around which projects and teams form, but also a mechanism for people to remake themselves.
Contest Photo
“SUPPORT” and “Respect”
Kaggle is considered a means to the end of maintaining practice and being competitive as a professional data scientist or academic.
Kaggle discussions have inserted themselves into many existing communities, which in turn have often built up around events/conferences.
“I made it part of my job. As a Machine Learning technical lead, Kaggle keeps me up on the state of the art”�Kaggle Competitor
Key Learnings For Mozilla
The corona of related communities around Kaggle is a fascinating offshoot of its focus as a platform. By providing a specific and competitive set of functions and incentives, Kaggle is able to maintain a unique place in the Data Science education and practice ecosystem, while co-existing alongside multiple other communities.
For Mozilla, this has implications for the role that SUMO and other volunteer contributor teams play when there might be multiple places to go for help or support.
Value Flow
Kaggle users join teams to compete on financial and status rewards on the Kaggle platform.
Expert users are rewarded by financially by winning awards, but also by increasing their job prospects for businesses recruiting on Kaggle.
Kaggle provides community and platform support to cultivate the high quality of participants, as their profits centers are around managing successful competitions and curating a high quality job board.
Community experts also provide support, with the primary incentive being status and team participation.
Technical Breakdown
| Kaggle |
Unified Help Desk System | Zendesk |
Realtime | Slack |
Forum | Kaggle Forum |
Wiki | Kaggle Kernals |
Ticket System | https://www.kaggle.com/product-feedback |
Bug System | Standard forum |
Community Support | Standard Forum members helping each other |
Distributed Content | Not really |
Embedded Support in Product | Help attached to challenges |
Social Media Support | |
Flair/Kudos | Social proofs (Github style commit viz, involvement), badges, financial rewards |
Insights and Observations
Approach
Our approach to developing these insights was to consider community-level observations that apply to SUMO, but also speak to broader truths about how online communities organize and get things done.
Insights are grounded in our interviews with different subjects, but are contextualized by our experiences exploring, participating in, and deconstructing the different communities.
How to use these insights
Mozilla and SUMO in particular implements its community management functions effectively. We try to offer incremental steps that might be useful to SUMO, but don’t reflect something that SUMO is failing at.
The ideas and provocations at the end of each insight are ideas that should serve as fodder for Mozilla teams to brainstorm and work around.
Open Platform
Closed Platform
Punitive Enforcement
Positive
Enforcement
SUMO
Wordpress.org
Arduino
Kaggle
Centralized
Decentralized
Rule-based
Consensus
SUMO
Wordpress.org
Arduino
Kaggle
Structured Communities Always Leak
Consider creating dedicated community spaces for specific tasks, while encouraging and allowing space for bottom-up organizing
“We have to find ways to engage with the ‘stealth communities’ that grow up around our core channels.”�Crowdsourcing platform manager
What We Heard
“We have a 20-30% known overlap between the forum and reddit contributors”�Wordpress Support Lead
“None of our mods are on reddit”�Former Wordpress Support Lead
“People help where they already have accounts and status’”�Wordpress Support Lead
“We have a big cloud of options to communicate. So now, I just throw a message into that cloud and hope it gets through’”�Sumo Support Lead
Questions for Mozilla
How do you distribute the knowledge from a centralized platform across different platforms? Potentially using scrapers and bots to automatically look at other known channels, and point them towards existing knowledge sources. Proactively reach out to other communities where support is happening and figure out ways to design for the user’s context.
Eg. Create a reddit bot that ties into the searchable Mozilla database
Gamed Incentives are valves, �not pipes
Gamification and incentive structures should be applied as modifiers to existing interactions with a platform or community, not as attempts to generate new ones.
“A few weeks ago, before I had the high score, people didn’t value what I wrote. But now that I do have a high score, they listen”�Kaggle Competitor and forum contributor
What We Heard
“When you gamify, people just used pre-prepared replies to get points. The quality drops.”�Wordpress.org �Support Lead
“You hear a lot of ‘if I volunteer, can I get a free ticket?’”�Arduino makerfaire organizer
Questions for Mozilla
How might we incentivize quality contributions to the network, or use lighter touch interactions to elevate the quality of content developed across the community?
Contributors have ownership without agency
Support contributors, unlike core product contributors, lack agency over the product direction. Paradoxically, they are the front-line when hearing feedback about �a product.
“We are the customer facing front line, but don’t have any influence to affect the product.” �Former volunteer Wordpress.org support lead
What We Heard
“People volunteer their time because your values reflect their values”�Open Innovation Community Manager
“If you commit yourself to one particular forum and go too deep, you run the risk of getting used up, and you’ll leave”�Arduino Moderator
“We would love for core devs to pop into the forum on major releases. It would give them a sense of the community response.”�Wordpress.org �Support Lead
Questions for Mozilla
How might we better connect support tools to impact?
Example of the Healthcare.gov style leaderboard, which showed how health insurance signups translated into lives saved.
How could we take the current support forum leaderboard to the next level?
Contributors aren’t born–
They’re made
Many contributors join from a positive support experience, AND a clear and sticky mechanism to “pay it forward.”
“I posted a question, and while I was waiting, answered a few questions that I’d just had experience with.” �Senior Wordpress.org support contributor
What We Heard
“We always create mailing lists and give beta access after events to volunteers. They’re arduino ambassadors now.”�Arduino Community Manager
“There’s no single incentive when people join. Some are working on a site, others are pensioners. Others see support as the best way to learn.”�Former Wordpress.org �Support Lead
Questions for Mozilla
“After asking, Contribute” �Could we develop a quick pay it forward system, such as a clear prompt after asking a question to complete a positive �feedback cycle?
Support the Supporters
Healthy contributor communities have both functional support in the form of escalation paths, and “soft” emotional support from the community and their leads.
“Moderators need to vent, need to have a chuckle at some of the posts in a private, safe space”�Arduino Volunteer Community Lead (Multiple forums)
What We Heard
“In the support community, you always have someone to back you up. The key is remembering that.”�Former Wordpress.org �Support Lead
“Your support volunteers keep users using the software”�Wordpress.org �Support Lead
“Those volunteers are arduino ambassadors now. Keep in touch, send gifts, and say thank you.”�Arduino Community Manager
Questions for Mozilla
Could we create a training for Support contributors similar to the Incident Command System? ICS gives the base-line of understanding to engage with an incident at a given level, and importantly work with others at both the same and different levels.
�Making sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to providing support, but also knowing where to go to when things go sideways. Never feel like you’re alone.
Leverage the properties of each channel
The communication channels themselves present opportunities and liabilities to their goals. Defining and protecting that role helps the community deliver on its goals.
“It is a forum. It should remain a forum”�Wordpress.org community lead
“If someone is getting too worked up on the forum, we invite them to slack.”�Former Wordpress.org support lead
What We Heard
“Our Slack is a watercooler channel for support contributors.”�Former Wordpress.org �Support Lead
“When you get a quick response, you feel valued. But not all forums really make a quick response easy.”�Arduino Moderator
“If things are getting heated on the forum, we invite people to slack to discuss. Can almost always resolve it there.”�Wordpress.org �Support Lead
Questions for Mozilla
How might we effectively leverage each and every tool to the maximum of its capacity?
For example, create a tool available only to contributors and mods that allow them to converse around questions. Real time communication that allows contributors to act as a team in resolving a specific asynchronous problem.
Workshop Outcomes
SuMo Workshop Summary
The workshop output was a series of project ideas designed to inform the broader SuMo strategy.
These provocations are made to both support the current efforts to elevate support for Firefox, and also to design for a world where there is community support for a multi product ecosystem.
SuMo Workshop Summary
Members of the Mozilla SuMo and Open Innovation teams came together with CIID and Analyses & Tal for a two-day presentation and workshop.
The two days included a review of community support practices and platforms outside of Mozilla, a deep dive into the analytics SuMo had collected about its community for the past few years, and a collaborative synthesis workshop.
SuMo Workshop Summary
A lot of ideas were generated in a short period of time. �From these ideas, we narrowed in on three project ideas.
Project SuMo Propaganda
Near term:�Creating a series of social interventions in the SuMo community as people onboard, as well as extending opportunity to others.
Future:�Sharing impact metrics in the Mozilla wide tl;dr publications, building awareness and bridges into other Mozilla teams.
Project Switchboard Operator
Near term:�Develop a data-driven understanding of where conversations are happening about Firefox support.
Future:�Proactively activate and dispatch the right community member to the right community to provide support to Mozilla product users wherever they are.
Project Alchemist’s Journey
Near term:�Deepen understanding and engagement by exploring learning tools for the SuMo contributor community.
Future:�Deep integration of continuous learning and improvement tools into the contributor experience, to build a continuously learning, current, and aware volunteer community.
Next Steps
The Mozilla SuMo and OI teams are going to be incorporating these project ideas into the broader strategy for the team, and sharing these out for the Mozilla All-Hands in June.
Analyses & Tal will be delivering a final report later in the month to help guide and ground these future-facing ideas in the current usage patterns.
CIID will continue to support Mozilla Open Innovation initiatives through future partnerships and collaboration.
Mozilla SUMO
Thank you!
alb@ciid.dk | g.jonsdatter@ciid.dk