Contributor News & Resources

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  • Creator: AliceWyman
  • Comment: What's new at SUMO: updated paragraph about weekly meetings
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  • Reviewed:
  • Reviewed by: AliceWyman
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Thanks for contributing to the support. mozilla. org (SUMO) website! It's through your efforts that we are able to provide help to so many users.

What's new at SUMO

Visit the SUMO Community Discussions forum, the other discussion forums, and check out the SUMO blog to see what's happening at Mozilla Support.

Join our weekly meetings, view the meeting video recordings or read the meeting notes. You can find the details here.

Contributor Help Wanted

Refer to the Help Other Users page for a quick start or browse the complete set of How to contribute articles.

As a public good organization, our work results are made public, and you can watch as we improve our services.

  • SUMO Roadmap tells you what we are planning on working on for the end of the year.

As usual at Mozilla, we use Bugzilla to track bugs and enhancement requests. If there is anything wrong on SUMO, please file a bug report so we can fix it. You can browse a list of recently opened and recently closed bug reports to see what types of issues we track:

Besides our production servers at support.mozilla.org, we have a staging server available for testing:

  • support.allizom.org - AKA "stage" - Updates constantly from our 'master' branch, so it is running the latest code. Please attempt to reproduce bugs here before reporting. If they've been fixed already, they'll be fixed here. If you want to make a change and are unsure how it works, you can test it on this server first.

There is also an editable etherpad, useful-links-SUMO-contributors, containing additional links added by contributors.

Staying updated

If you want to watch changes to articles, go to the KB dashboard, click the link on the top that says Subscribe… and select the appropriate checkboxes.

Weekly meetings: We have a weekly community meeting where the latest SUMO community developments are discussed, on Wednesday at 9 am PT. We also have a weekly meeting about the platform that powers SUMO, on Thursday at 9 am PT. For more information, please read How To Participate In SUMO Contributor Meetings.

Communication channels

We use the Contributor forums to discuss everything about Firefox Help. You can find many of us on the IRC (via Mibbit) channel for a chat. Logs for the #sumo IRC channel are available here: http://logs.glob.uno/?c=sumo

We also use the private message link on each user profile to message individuals using SUMO.

Contributor and group directories

Attracting (and keeping) new collaborators has always been via a personal contact and coaching.

We have several ways you can get into personal contact with SUMO leaders and contributors for coaching. In addition to our user profiles, we have a forum thread for contributor introductions. We encourage you to register on Mozillians.org and add the SUMO tag to your profile.

The following table includes links to the groups in the SUMO project where you will find the group leaders and contributors.

Support Forum Moderators Forum Helpers
Localization Index of all locale information (forum post)
Administration SUMO Admins
Quality Assurance QA Contributors
Knowledge Base KB Editors KB Reviewers


Contributor Commitments

We consider everyone who helps a user to be a contributor and we ask you to make a greater commitment if you are able.

  • Have fun and do new things!
  • Help users as described in the How to contribute articles
  • Commitment of one year
  • Click Email me article changes on this page and read the News updates
  • Let your group leader know if you have a change in circumstances that is impeding your ability to contribute

We ask for two additional commitments from group leaders.

  • Update the SUMO status report for your group each week
  • Attend one Mozilla-sponsored in-person event every two years

What if I am having trouble meeting my commitments?

Most of the contributors to SUMO are volunteers with other obligations that could unexpectedly make it hard for them to meet their obligations. If this happens to you, we have recommendations on how to handle it:

  • Remember, you are not alone. Many contributors have been in this situation. No one will be surprised or disappointed to hear that you are having a hard time keeping up.
  • Raise your hand and communicate. The more the rest of your group understands what you are going through, the easier it is for everyone. SUMO is very supportive, you may get more help than you imagined, just by letting people know. If you have to resign, it will be much easier on everyone if you let your group know sooner rather than later.
  • Changes in status aren't permanent. If you need to lighten your load for a few months, that is usually manageable. When you are ready to take on more, we'll be happy to work with you. If you need to resign now, it doesn't mean that you can't rejoin the contributor group when circumstances change.
  • Don't go silent. Disappearing is the worst response for everyone. Your group won't know whether to recruit a replacement or not. It doesn't matter what the reason is, just let us know, so we can help.