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When I first proposed a plan for what we’re now calling the Community Tools & Platforms initiative, there were a lot of issues that we needed to solve in the Mozilla community. Contributors couldn’t easily find ways to get involved in our community. The organization and community didn’t know who or how many Mozillians were in our community and what they did within it. Though, as we got deeper into analyzing the situation, it was worse than that. We simply couldn’t get bootstrapped into determining how to set strategy. The priorities were fuzzy. A few times the priority was contributor-focused to allow social networks to be created; other times an all-in-one Community CRM solution. Yet, none of these were ever finalized; our Community Managers were left with little help build their programs. In my opinion, the biggest problem to solve for a an initial Phonebook release was to simply just get bootstrapped.

A product goal like getting to a “.1″ or prototype stage is generally an odd one; especially for those with such an extensive history. You can’t really call it a product because it’s in such an infant stage of what it will become. Time and communication are far from perfect. Very useful features need to be ruthlessly cut and the “product” ends up not as useful as users expect it to be.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubt in my mind that the community phonebook helped Mozilla, as an organization, get a lot of necessary data about our community (specifically our core and active contributors). On the other hand, we ended up delivering a webapp that was rather confusing to a large set out of userbase (e.g. non-vouched users), lacked features and was rather buggy. We’re getting past the haze now and look to fix a lot of these issues very soon and I’m freaking excited about its prospects of what we have planned. Mozillians are going to start seeing the application get a whole lot better in a hurry.

So, how? To do this, we’ve stripped our understanding of the Phonebook’s current strategy (i.e. one focused more internally and towards active/core contributors). It’s being re-jigged towards one that is more new/potential contributor focused and about growing our community from where it is now. This will mean a lot of changes on the app front. Namely:

1. Completely Overhauling the User Experience on the Phonebook: We’re starting from scratch for the user experience of the site and building from new/potential contributor focused and up. The biggest change will include a easier flow for new/potential contributors connecting Mozilla Stewards and Reps with new/potential contributors signing up to the site and in a non-vouched state. The other big change will be moving to connect.mozilla.org and away from Mozillians.org.
2. Contributor Web Services: We’re planning to build web services that help mozilla.org properties and contributors alike. We’ll allow for simpler authentication/authorization of contributors (with the help of BrowserId). Further, we want to make it simple to auto-populate Mozillian Phonebook profile data onto any mozilla.org site account. The ultimate goal is to be insanely easy to get around the community with as little work as possible.
3. Recognition for your Contributions and Involvement: The one cool we’re looking to do by the end of 2012 is to show the amount of contributions you’ve performed around the Mozilla project (and find partners such as LinkedIn to plug-in to with that data). Display recommendations made by other Mozillians! Link to your Linkedin profile.
4. Public Profiles: Phonebook users are going to get a whole lot of control over the publicity of their profile. Our end goal is going to be allowing folks to show their profiles publicly and show off their contributions to Mozilla.
5. More Ways to Find and Contact Mozillians: Expect additions to profiles such as Location & timezones, Multiple e-mail addresses on profiles and many other things!

I seriously can’t wait for these changes to land during the course of the year. There’s going to rainbows, unicorns and nyan cats and everyone should be ecstatic for those possibilities on what this means. We’re going to kill it in 2012.

Hello, Mozilla Community!

I am proud to announce Mozillians.org has re-worked it’s login and registration flow using BrowserId. You’ll need to register an account with the new service Browserid.org and add your primary e-mail address used for Mozillians.org onto the account there. for more details and a step-by-step walkthrough of how to sign-in and/or register, make sure to read through BrowserId’s about page.

For those users who aren’t sure why we did it, here’s some context on why we did it and what its been replaced with:

Mozillians.org, a community directory, required a login and password in order to register and log-in to the site. That’s not really a problem, right? Actually, not true. One of the things you learn after use using more than a single site in our community is that we’re pretty bad at identity management in general. We end up using different services not knowing how each is connected to the other and end up many different username and passwords for a lot of services that all should be tied to a single identity (i.e. you, as a Mozillian).

That’s terrible. Mozillians shouldn’t have to accidentally manage their way into multiple identity hell when its unnecessary. It becomes painful to move around the community as a contributor. What’s the benefit of having multiple accounts, each with a different password, yet all within the same public-benefit organization?

Thankfully, Mozilla is already working on fixing a superset of this problem; of which can be applied here using their first solution called BrowserId. Rather than have too many accounts with different Mozilla web sites, users need only one BrowserID account, which will let them partake in any site they choose at Mozilla. This helps the phonebook’s aims as we’re looking to develop web services and APIs that help make it as easy and simple as possible for contributors to move around and help contribute around the project too.

So, without further ado, please take go to Mozilla’s favorite community directory and log-in using BrowserId!

For a list of bugs fixed in this release, please take a look at our Bugzilla query.

A big thank you to tofumatt, ozten, ednapiranha, cbeasley, davedash, badida, lloyd, Jason, Jabba, mbrandt, rbillings and Milos for their fantastic contributions and making this release a success!

P.S. I know location was mentioned as a feature for this release, but we’re holding off on it due to the holidays. It will be out shortly.

Hello there, Mozilla Community!

When Mozillians.org (i.e. Phonebook 1.0) went live last month, we offered a way for Mozillians find each other through a simple directory application. It had a minimal set of features and what we were looking for was a way to determine how many Mozillians were in our overall community as well as how to make it easy to find anyone in the community. One of the major problems we face is that its still hard to find Mozillians within specific sub-communities and groups. Well, Mozillians.org 1.1 aims to fix that particular problem.

The team has landed a new major feature called “Groups” where Mozillians can list themselves as part of specific sub-communities such as “Quality Assurance” or “Firefox”. Here’s an example of my profile:

Also, vouched Mozillians will be able to search for who and how many contributors list themselves as a part of specific groups [1]. So, what can do you with this new feature? Well, here’s a small list of useful use cases:

• Find the contact e-mails for Mozillians within a specific group for closer communications within other active/core set of contributors.
• Put a face and name to a IRC handle to all the folks that seem to hang around your team or project’s channel.
• Get to know a little more about the details of each contributor within your sub-community in their bios!

For you Mozillians out there who want to host a Testday in the QA community, a SUMO day in Support or even mix and match contributors from separate sub-communities (but not spam everyone), this’ll will help save a lot of time and effort to get that information! So, go to the “Edit Profile” page after logging-in to Mozillians.org and help yourself and the Mozilla project to better communicate with each other!

Major Features

• Tag Yourself to Groups – Mozillians can now add themselves and search for other Mozillians within groups/sub-communities that are known and unknown. To use it, simply go to the “Edit Profile” and add/remove groups on the bottom left of the edit panel.
• Search via Firefox – Ever met a Mozillian at an Event or on a Mozilla IRC channel, but didn’t know who they were or what they worked on? Well, we made the act of searching for a Mozillian even easier with a Firefox Search plugin! To find it, go to Mozillians.org and add it via the Firefox search plugin drop down list. A special thank you to Antoine Turmel and Leslie Orchard for this completely contributor-made feature!

For a list of bugs fixed in this release, please take a look at our Bugzilla query.

A big thank you to tofumatt, malexis, ednapiranha, lorchard, davedash, Andrew Findlay, Tobbi, stephend, mbrandt, Jason and Milos for their fantastic contributions and making this release a success!

We’re looking to add in Location information to Mozillian profiles and have BrowserID hooked up with Mozillians.org next. There’s plenty more things we want to do after that though. So, if you’re interested in following what the team is planning to work on, take a look at our roadmap, planned releases and how to contact us (or get involved!).

[1] There are two caveats in this release: Phonebook users can only perform a search for a single group per search in this release. Also, searches within groups with more than 20 Mozillians will only show the first 20 Mozillians in that group.

Firefox Input currently offers a set of feedback options that have a very low-bar to submission, anonymity and constraints that help frame feedback into actionable items. One of the drawbacks of such an approach is the loss of detailed information (ala a bug report) and a point of contact to further investigate the issue. Well, we’ve seen this in the wild: we have seen our Nightly and Aurora users, who comprise of early adopters, submit bug reports disguised as feedback submission even though they should be filing a bug.

To fix this issue, the Input team is building a method to supplement the sad feedback form with an option for Firefox Nightly and Aurora users to submit a bug report into Mozilla’s bug tracking system. We believe the lasting benefits of such a tool will garner greater contributor participation in the project and Bugzilla as well as improve efforts to find Firefox bugs before they get into the Beta and Release channels.

How will it Work?

Firefox users on Nightly and Aurora builds who go to submit a piece of sad feedback on input.mozilla.com will be able to click a button on the form that will direct them to a simplified bug reporting form. On completion of that form, the service will file a bug onto bugzilla.mozilla.org after a simple e-mail validation step.

How will this change things in Bugzilla?

• Bugzilla user accounts will be created, if not found in Bugzilla, after their e-mail address is verified.
• Bugs filed into a new Product called “Un-Triaged Bugs” with Component, “Firefox”.

Some of you may have seen Mozilla QA contributor Tyler Downer’s blog post on the current state of the triage system and we’ve been chatting to see how efforts could be better. We hope this will lead to a cleaner triage system in Bugzilla and will closely view the component when this app does release to ensure that happens.

How can you Help?

We’ll need eyes on these bugs in order to triage into their proper products and components. If you’d like to learn more on how you can help, please visit #qa or #input on irc.mozilla.org and chat with the folks there in regards to bug triage (#qa) or delivering this app (#input).

When can you expect it out?

We are looking to release this by the end of the 2011 calendar year. If you feel you can help with this effort in terms of code contribution to help release this earlier, feel free to head over to #input on irc.mozilla.org and mention so!

Hello Mozilla Community!

I am incredibly happy and proud to announce that the Mozilla Community Directory is now live. This is a critical element of the Contributor Engagement team’s strategy to inspire more people to participate in Mozilla and make our community feel much smaller. This project has been a long-time coming and something our community has desperately needed. So, please, if you are a current contributor to Mozilla, have been in the past and want to be one in the future, go and register an account and get vouched by another contributor!

On this first 1.0 release, you’ll be able to create a profile with information about yourself, search for Mozillians and vouch those contributors.

Features

• Profile Registration: Anyone who goes to Mozillians.org can register accounts onto the site and add in information such as their E-mail Address, Full name, IRC Nickname, a short Bio and Profile Photo. They’ll need to confirm their account via e-mail after registration.
• Vouching System: Once a person is registered, they’ll need to find a Mozillian to vouch for them to go from a “Non-Vouched” state to a “Mozillian” state. The other Mozillian will need to be vouched beforehand. If the registered person is a part of the staff at Mozilla or the Mozilla Foundation, their account will be pre-vouched on registration. As a person with a Non-Vouched state will NOT be able to view other profiles in Mozillians.org, invite others to register nor search for other Mozillians within the application in this release.
• Invitations: If they’re a vouched Mozillian in the directory, they can invite other contributors into the directory as an already-vouched Mozillian.
• Search: If they’re a vouched Mozillian in the directory, they can search for other Mozillians by their name and e-mail address.

What are our Next Steps?

This is a first step for the team and we want this site to grow by leaps and bounds over the next year. Right now, contributors and staff can only do a few things on the site that are helpful in finding and contacting Mozillians. Over the next coming weeks, we’ll be implementing features such as “Groups”, Location, Log-in through Browser ID, Linking Phonebook accounts to as many mozilla.org services as possible and better user flows onto the site. So, stay tuned for blog posts and tweets from the team to find out about future improvements!

I would also like to mention what’s in store for the long-term. The Phonebook is the beginning of a set of tools we’re looking to build into a platform for contributors to get more easily involved into the Mozilla community. Over the next year, we’re planning on ways to let contributors know about and sign-up for Mozilla and Mozilla Community-hosted events, introducing bite-sized tasks that comprise of translating strings, testing our products, promoting Mozilla and helping submit patches to our products and projects.

How Can You Get Involved?

There’s three very helpful ways you can get involved:

1. Register and invite other Mozillians who you know in the community!
2. If you run into problems using the site, find an issue, or have ideas for making the site better, please file a bug (make sure to look for duplicates first, please!).
3. If you’d like to get involved with making this community resource even better, take a look at our code repository and contact tofumatt or davedash in #mozillians on irc.mozilla.org.

Finally, I’d like to thank Gerv, David, ozten, tofumatt, retornam, rforbes, mgoodwin, malexis, Andrew, Corey, Tobbi, jabba, Monique, Stas, Jason, Jay, Seth, Mary and everyone else who worked on this (as well as earlier phonebook efforts).

For a list of bugs fixed in this release, please take a look at our Bugzilla query.