Contributor News & Resources

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  • Creator: Andrew
  • Comment: changes on top of previous
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  • Reviewed by: feer56
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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 Firefox users.

Big things this week

  • Notes and video from this meeting.
  • It was a short meeting but a lot of celebration!
  • Everyone: please help us in testing Persona
  • We have a list with the top contributors of all time, check the etherpad or watch the video to see it! We had a nice celebration!
  • Update on the buddy program and on our Summit planned to unite all SUMO warriors!
  • Contributors of the week: AlicyWyman, philipp, john99, italian team
  • Current SUMO development sprint – 2013.18.
  • Next SUMO meeting - Monday, Sept. 30th - (call in details & meeting notes) at 9:00 am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the etherpad. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.

Contributor Help Wanted

Refer to the Superheroes Wanted! 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.

  • Our 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.

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

  • support-dev.allizom.org - AKA "-dev" - Updates constantly from our 'master' branch, so is running the latest code. Please attempt to reproduce bugs here before reporting. If they've been fixed already, they'll be fixed here.
  • support.allizom.org - AKA "stage" - This typically updates on Wednesdays around 12pm ET/9am PT, though it may pick up updates more frequently. It runs our 'next' branch, and is the code that's planned for the next production push. If you want to make a change and are unsure how it works, you can test it on this server first.

Staying updated

If you want to watch changes to articles, go the KB dashboard, click the link on the left that says Email me when revisions are... and select the appropriate checkboxes.

If you would like to take part in a meeting, please read this article - How To Participate In SUMO Contributor Meetings.

Weekly Meeting: We have a weekly meeting where the team discusses the latest developments. The meeting is held on Monday at 9am PT. This page lists the call in information and meeting notes. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting.

Weekly Platform Meeting: A weekly meeting about the platform that powers SUMO is also held on Thursday at 9am PT. This page lists the call in information and meeting notes. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting.

Mobile Meetings: A mobile meeting is held every Wednesday at 10:30 am PT. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting.

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. We also use the private message link on each 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 Bengali Brazilian Portuguese Chinese Dutch French Fulah
German Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese
Korean Malayalam Polish Portuguese Russian Slovak
Slovenian Spanish Swedish Traditional Chinese Turkish
SUMO Development SUMO Developers SUMO Admins
Army of Awesome Army of Awesome Contributors
Quality Assurance Quality Assurance 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 Get emailed when this 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.