Support/SUMODayMay23

Goodbye old page.

This page is all about Support Firefox Day.

Here's the philosophy I'm going to go by: If we make this a BIG event and invest heavily in it, people will feel motivated to come. If people are thusly motivated, we'll get publicity. Publicity is good.

So the goal of the planning breaks down into four sections:

1. Making the event something awesome and newsworthy.
2. Getting people who hear about it early to stick around and people who do come to stay afterwards.
3. Getting the word out.
4. Making sure people who do show are well prepped.

Awesomifying the event

Yeah, that's the word. Awesomifying. Live with it :) Here's the plan: pack the day full of events, not just stuff to do, but real events.

So here are some ideas... add to them:

Video contest

This one is easy, make videos, add them to the KB, get shirts. Yay. Fill out details here:

Workshops

How awesome would it be if we had a few workshops during the day about Firefox? The kind of thing that would appeal to the user who wants to trick out Firefox and knows it pretty darn well but may not be so technical as to know how to get started on CODING. These are exactly the people we want to take part in Sumoday and maybe a workshop will be what they need. Here are some workshop ideas:

1. Using DOMi and userChrome/userContent.css files to make Firefox look like what you want. This would include a barebones 10 minute css tutorial.
2. Getting started writing your own extension... end with having everyone with a custom about: page or maybe end with a cool bookmark-manipulating extension.
3. Fixing, tweaking Firefox 101. (A glorified helper training session.)
4. Theming Firefox

more ideas (these are more in the scope of browser features):

1. Making the most of your awesomebar + bookmarks
2. 15 awesome things you can do in Firefox 3... that you could also do in Firefox 2!
3. Go ahead void that warranty: The ten most used about:config preference changes.
4. Turbocharge your browsing: using all keyboard or all mouse navigation. (This is one of my favorite sets of Firefox features.)

A workshop would be either all IRC with a moderator to vet the questions and a workshop leader. As the leader, you prep a few materials ahead of time and basically guide people through them, taking questions, cracking jokes etc. Better would be a video feed with a text component again moderated. Or something. We need people to sign up to lead workshops... come up with an idea of a workshop you want to lead, work with someone else...

Q/A/F sessions

Simpler than workshops but essentially the same thing. A panel or one person with a topic and a moderator to vet questions. Q/A/F stands for Questions, Answers, Feedback. These have to be big-name people but it's only an hour or so so hopefully we can pull it off. Some possible topics:

1. About:Mozilla. How did it start, what's the difference between MoCo and MoFo?
2. Art. Can we get the art people in a panel? Talk about what drives their design ideas, who came up with the logo... stuff like that.
3. Software design at Mozilla. How is it organized, I don't know... maybe that will be interesting to the really geeky people :P
4. Firefox 3. Yeah, this will be a popular one. Yak and yak and yak on about Firefox 3.
5. General. Funny story time. Random important people can be in a panel just to talk about the FUN side of being a Firefox junkie. Best memory, what they do in their free time... ha! free time, no free time for you! stuff like that. Maybe what it's like to intern at mozilla? I dunno.

Of course we won't take all these ideas, but maybe 4 total between workshops and QAF sessions.

In progress: get speakers! Maybe shorten time to 30 minutes depending.

Support sessions

Rather than have LiveChat open all day, alternate workshop/QA and help session with sessions no more than 2 hours. That way people who show up for the workshop will be all gungho about Mozilla (hopefully) and stick around for the help session. Ideally, they'd all have spark installed so the transition is seamless but we'll see. What would be really needed is a way to close Livechat without begging everyone to close. I know Lucy can do it from the control panel. Hopefully she'll be around.

Retention

The first part of the retention idea is to have people register with Sumo to take part in Support Firefox Day. That means we have their e-mail address on file but it also means they're more likely to stay for the day since they've already committed. But if we have early registration, we'll need some kind of way for them to stick around and stay engaged.

So the proposal here is to have a forum community (maybe a subforum of the contributors forum) where we have just small fun threads... like "tell us about yourself" and "what's your best support moment (not just Firefox related)." and totally random fun threads: "post a crazy photo". Also a nice google maps mashup showing the other contributors and geoIPs of people whom we're helping right now. A nice rolling ticker: support.mozilla.com, over 4931 people served. Stuff like that.

Before Sumoday, we'll also take ideas for workshops and stuff like that so people who register early can feel like they're actively part of the action. After sumoday, the community center will be in place so this will encourage sticking around.

To do: look into what ticker/stats options are available.

Get the word out

Sure, the last sumoday wasn't really well publicized, but that doesn't mean this one will suffer the same fate. Here are some ideas:

Banner ads

May require a lot of time and money from marketing or PR. But hey, it's guaranteed to be put up on the major sites.

Video

Can we be funny, silly and creative enough to have the top YouTube video? Want to try?

Reporters/Bloggers

Invite them to the event. Seriously, you have no idea how much a personal invite means to people. "I know you wrote about Livechat when it first came out, but here's an unprecedented chance to see behind the scenes a little, ask questions of the Mozilla head honchos as well as meet other people working with the support project. We've matured a lot since December, come see! And hey, you may learn some stuff too: There's a special Q&A session about Firefox 3!" These bloggers, especially the middle-range ones, will certainly mention the event whether they come or not.

In progress: djst looking into getting a list of blogs that link us a lot.

Training

This one is a toughie since the above is already a lot of work. But the idea is to take any preregisterees and offer to give them one-on-one training so they'll be approved and ready to take chats as soon as sumoday starts. We'll be too busy on the day just running it to be training as well so training in advance is really the best way. Yeah, it means EVEN MORE work before the event and I'm not really looking forward to it either. But otherwise, zzxc and I will go up in flames on the day.