| Authors: | Michael Verdi |
|---|---|
| Time: | 9:40 |
| Session: | http://docs.writethedocs.org/en/2013/conference/talks.html#michael-verdi |
| Link: | http://mzl.la/wtd |
Verdi is the content manager on the Sumo project: support.mozilla.org. Sumo supports Firefox, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS to 450 million people around the world, on every continent (including Antarctica). These users speak 80 different languages. There are thirteen paid staff and three developers working on the support team, up for four only a few years ago. The project works by (spoilers!) writing a lot of documentation, putting it on the web, and then localizing it into all the languages. At any given time there are around 200 people contributing in some fashion. They have a posse. These are superheroes, but not like Superman, like Batman: tech, not powers.
They start with proactive support: user advocacy and education. The UA team advocates for fixing things that they know will be user impacting they become pain points that need to be documented. The also advocate for things like the “Reset Firefox” button, which makes it easier to write troubleshooting documentation. The education team builds up videos and support documentation that gets included in the marketing pitch to news sites when a new release goes up. That results in more views, more exposure.
If education and advocacy doesn’t work, Mozilla employs reactive support using Kitsune, their support software. This includes the knowledge base, a Q&A style support forum, Twitter client, internal communication, and metrics. The knowledge base is wiki based and supports localization, multiple products (and versions), and multiple operating systems. It has support for templates for frequently repeated tasks, and a review system for content review.
When it comes to supporting multiple operating systems and Firefox versions, Kitsune allows them to include the instructions in a single document, and when the visitor comes to the site they’ll see the sections/content that’s appropriate for their operating system and software version (if applicable).
The review system allows them to review diffs to documentation, provide feedback to authors, and mark content as ready for localization. It also supports putting together a document level to do list.
If you visit a wiki document that hasn’t been localized (ie, you’re browsing from France and visit an unlocalized English document), they show a link above the text that links to the localization documentation. If you’re already logged in, there’s a link in the sidebar to “Translate this Article”, that shows a side by side editor. And because a large majority of the traffic focuses on the top 100 documents, the dashboards can highlight the things that contributors should work on (the highest traffic). When you’re updating a document that was previously localized, you’ll see a red/green diff in the English text.