Matjaž with his excellent taste

Matjaž Horvat is a perfect example: I’ve seen the guy at various Mozilla events such as MozCamp Barcelona, MozCamp Prague, and the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, and I’ve always admired his great taste of fashion.

But it wasn’t until today during a chat with him about how we could kickstart Slovenian SUMO localization that I finally realized it: this guy with the same unbelievably stylish Diesel sneakers as I was wearing in Barcelona actually worked with me on Firebird Help way back in 2003! Indeed, Matjaž was the Slovenian translator of the site, and his excellent work is still up for public viewing in the Internet Archive — only with a little bit less style.

Just for the record, Matjaž reminded me today that we actually talked about this in Whistler, and I apparently managed to completely forget that… Not sure what to say in defense other than the fact that I’ve never met as many new faces before as I did in Whistler.

Sometimes the Mozilla community is just so cool. Or as Matjaž said during our chat: “it’s amazing how good this community feels!”

I can’t wait to work with you on Firefox support again, Matjaž!

This event was extra special from a SUMO point of view, because for the first time, we were able to invite a number of non-localization contributors of SUMO. I was very pleased to finally meet European Live Chat experts Tobbi and mzz in real life (to be fair, we did invite many more SUMO community members, but unfortunately most of them were unable to join). You can chat with both Tobbi and mzz in the #sumo channel of irc.mozilla.org.

Another SUMO contributor I had never met before is Milos from Mozilla Serbia. He is an incredibly multi-talented contributor helping out with things like Serbian localization, QA of new SUMO features, web QA, market share analysis and many other things. As always during events like this, time really flies and I wish I had more time to hang out with Tobbi, mzz, and Milos.

Of course, it was also great to meet long-time SUMO contributors Simone from Mozilla Italia, and Thomas from Mozilla Germany again. I had really productive chats with them about which things to improve with SUMO l10n and I’m hoping we can get these fixes in early in 2010. More on that soon.

My photos from the event can be found on Flickr. Some random things I liked about MozCamp 2009 in Prague:

• Iacopo Benesperi from Mozilla Italia talking about how to be a nice person if you represent Mozilla at public conferences – couldn’t agree more!
• My brand new Firefox amulet from ArtZilla superstar Tobias Leingruber
• Robert Nyman’s beard
• Discussing Internet history with Glyn Moody
• Celebrating my fellow Eskilstunian Patrick’s birthday

One of the absolute highlights of the event was something I had been fantasizing about for almost two years. The idea actually formed at FOSDEM 2008, when Seth and I had a brief moment of genius (or just a strong hangover) and started to play with the idea of having Chris Hofmann come up on stage and do the Ballmer dance, Mozilla-style. When I blogged last year about the almost painful laughs during the Sunday dinner with Seth, Mark Finkle, Mic and  Zbigniew, this idea of “I love this community” was the primary reason for the pain.

So it was with pure joy, pride and excitement that I finally got to experience it for real — it felt like giving birth to a child (or not even close; what do I know?). Thanks Seth and chofmann for making it happen!

I really do love this community.

Update: A blog post about MozCamp 2009 without acknowledging the incredible work by the people who organized it is not cool. William, Irina and the track leaders Patrick Finch, Marcia Knous, Paul Rouget, Gandalf and Brian King all did an amazing job. Thank you!

Illustration: Grow by Amy.Ng

Abdulkadir Topal from the German community also blogged about getting help for localization work on the European Mozilla Community Blog and reached an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.

Kadir uses Thomas from the German localization team as a good example of this theory: Thomas is a relatively new community member (“only” two years worth of contributions so far!), yet he is one of the most active members on SUMO today. The key factor for why this happened, according to Kadir, is that Thomas was given full responsibility for the SUMO component within the German localization team.

As Kadir concludes, it’s “one thing to contribute little bits and pieces to a [project], but it’s a completely different thing to own it.”

I find this theory interesting. Maybe it is not a universal law that can be applied to everyone or every type of project/responsibility, but looking back at my initial involvement with Mozilla, ownership was definitely part of what motivated me — but not all of it, as I will explain below.

Kadir mentions in his blog post that it was something as trivial as a product logo that made me discover the Mozilla project in the first place. To me, the little Gecko logo — featured in an article about the planned Netscape 6 browser based on the previously open-sourced Netscape 4.x codebase — communicated “lean and mean,” and the article went on explaining how this new Gecko HTML rendering engine would be modern, compatible, portable, and small enough to be used even in future handsets (and guess what; about nine years later it turns out that they were right!).

Just a few days later, I learned that Netscape 6.x was just a branded and slightly outdated version of something called “Mozilla,” which apparently was the open source project behind the well known Netscape browser. I immediately switched to Mozilla instead, since it was more bleeding edge and therefore more fun for a geek like me.

That’s how it started for me. However, that wasn’t the reason why I sticked. Why did I turn from just interested in Mozilla to a deeply involved contributor? I will try to explain this and get back to Kadir’s theory, but I can say right now that there is a lot more than one reason why I’m still an active Mozilla community member.

It started around year 2000 with the realization that I could actually affect the project by submitting bug reports and providing feedback. Although open source as a concept wasn’t new to me, I had never actually gotten involved myself before. This, combined with the fact that I got to know other people with similar interests, made reading the newsgroup daily a pleasure.

However, I always felt that the original Mozilla suite represented something from the past, and that the way of the future was something lean and mean (yes, that Gecko logo that got originally got my attention!). The word “monolithic” was often used to describe the Mozilla suite, and even the word itself felt big, old and unmanageable to me. When the Phoenix project was announced on MozillaZine, I immediately turned my focus to that instead, and never looked back.

Because the project was still small and new, it was also a good opportunity to get more deeply involved because the signal to noise ratio was higher. Many people in the Mozilla community were still skeptical about Phoenix and preferred the tried and true Mozilla suite. This made the feedback I provided to the Phoenix project much more visible than it had been for the suite, making it a lot more rewarding for me to contribute.

As the project started to shape up with the release of Phoenix 0.3, I found myself heavily involved with things like filing bugs and RFEs, discussing feature implementations with developers, and, most often, answering questions from the growing number of users of Phoenix. As this consumed more and more of my time, I realized that there wasn’t a centralized place for people to get help with Phoenix. I viewed this as my opportunity to finally give something meaningful back to the project, and spent a couple of afternoons creating a small site called Phoenix Help. It was also a more meaningful way to develop my HTML/CSS coding skills compared to creating a website for, say, a Brood War clan (let’s call it UU).

Phoenix Help was very small and seemingly insignificant, but it was quickly noticed and appreciated by fellow community members in the MozillaZine forums. I especially remember getting my first personal e-mail from Asa Dotzler thanking me for doing what I did and encouraging me to continue the great work. This meant a lot for my motivation, because it was a confirmation that what I was doing was appreciated.

Before I knew it, people were linking to my site from all sorts of places (starting with Phoenix 0.5, even the release notes linked to it!), which made it even more important for me to ensure that the site looked good, was easy to use, and that the content was up to date. I was, in fact, responsible for the support site of Phoenix — I “owned” that part of the Phoenix project!

To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community:

• A belief in the mission of the project — to create a web browser that supports and promotes the use of open standards
• An interest in the technology — initially with the Gecko logo as my hook
• The feeling of belonging in a community of people with similar interests
• The desire to give something back to a project that gave (and still gives) me the best browser in the world for free
• The experiences gained by managing a website — HTML, CSS, server configurations, and perhaps most importantly, the English language
• The recognition and respect from Mozilla project members for my contributions
• The pride of being responsible for an important piece of the project

When I look at this list, I realize that it’s impossible to point to one particular motivator for community members, and that everyone probably has their own unique list. More personally, I also note that my motivation model today is the exact same as it was when I got involved seven years ago.

Despite the fact that the list is based on my personal experience, I think that all of the motivators could be taken into consideration for anyone trying to build or grow a community. Depending on the project, some things might be more important than others, but they all affect your community:

Tree Climbing Cat by mokwai

• Does your project add value to people using it? Do people feel like they are making a difference by contributing?
• Is your technology cutting-edge? Is it solving a unique problem? Is your project making people feel “wow, I want to be part of that!” or “I’d love to learn more about that”?
• Is your existing community friendly, welcoming and collaborative? Are tasks and discussions communicated in the open? Do people in your community have fun together?
• What kinds of contributions are welcomed? Does your project offer different ways to get involved?
• What’s in it for the contributors? Aside from the positive feeling of making a difference, do they gain relevant experiences by contributing to your project?
• Do you reach out personally to community members and make them know that their contributions are appreciated? Do you have automated systems in place to show the impact contributors make (e.g. a karma system)?
• Is your project modularized enough to allow people to take ownership of parts of the project?

There you have it — my first attempt to unwrap the mystery of building and growing communities. Is this helpful? Do you have similar experiences? I would love to hear what you think!

The discussion started with Mozilla Italia sharing their experiences with community support, where they explained why they recently decided to switch entirely to SUMO. It was really insightful to hear their main reasons for using SUMO today. Among other things, they said that:

• Outdated content is worse than lack of content
• If your documentation isn’t easy to find or badly structured, there’s no point in having it
• Good documentation requires consistency, quality, and precision

This is absolutely true and we are constantly working on those three points on SUMO, so I was glad to see that these values were shared with Mozilla Italia. I was very impressed that they took the time and energy to share these experiences with the other communities, who are all handling community support in different ways.

After the presentation, the floor was open for questions and discussions, after which Simone, Francesco and Giuliano passed on the torch to me to hold a discussion/presentation combo about SUMO in general. Among other things, I showed the many new features in SUMO — both implemented and still in the works. In total, the SUMO discussions went on for over an hour, and many interesting ideas came out of it.

For example, we were discussing the best way to indicate in the search results that some of the content is only available in English. Should these English results be mixed together with the localized content, or should it be separated? Should we add labels specifying the language of the article? Should the behavior differ depending on locale? For example, in Germany, mixing English and German content isn’t as common as mixing Swedish and English content is in Sweden. Kadir pointed out that in Germany, the existence of English content on a German website can even lead to mistrust of the quality of the website.

After almost nine hours of discussions and presentations, it was time for us to explore Geneva and have dinner. I have to say that I fell in love with Geneva. It wasn’t just the nice weather or the beautiful buildings — there was something with the atmosphere that made walking around in the old town at night taking photos together with fellow Mozillians really, really enjoyable. I think everyone felt extra proud of being part of the Mozilla community that night.

In retrospect, I think that this inter-community meetup was one of the most successful Mozilla events I’ve attended to so far. The focus was on exchanging experiences and discussing, rather than passively watching other people’s presentations. It really worked very well to have a smaller group of people, as that made discussing various topics much easier. Also, William’s “no laptop rule” helped everyone stay focused on the purpose of the day rather than escaping into the wonderful world of bug filing, blogging, tweeting, and coding.

A huge thanks has to go to William for ensuring that the day was a true success. Big thumbs up from me, William! I would also like to thank Simone Lando, Giuliano Masseroni, and Francesco Lodolo from Mozilla Italia, for so openly sharing their experiences, pros, and cons about SUMO. It was incredibly helpful!

The communities attending are:

• Mozilla Danmark (MozDK) represented by Hansen, Henrik Gemal and Jesper Kristensen
• Mozilla France (MozFR) represented by Cedric Corazza, Goofy and Omnisilver
• Mozilla Germany represented by Kadir Topal, Thomas Schwecherl and Michael Köhler
• Mozilla Hispano represented by Nukeador, Francisco Picolini and Willyaranda
• Mozilla Italia represented by Giuliano “jooliaan” Masseroni, Francesco “flod” Lodolo and Simone “Underpass” Lando

I’ll be leading a discussion about SUMO and community support in order to figure out how support is handled today, how these local support communities look like and differ from each other, and if and how SUMO is part of their solution.

My hope is that this meetup will allow us to learn from each other and improve our communication and collaboration. I’m sure we’ll also have time to discuss specifics in SUMO itself — for example, maybe there are things in SUMO that could be improved to make support easier?

Of course, I’m also looking forward to meeting many of the fellow European Mozillians again and have a good time together.

Postcard from Luxembourg by snaiwedu.