Engagement/Developer Engagement/AddonSDK

Jetpack Engagement Plan (DRAFT)

The plan to raise awareness of the Add-on SDK is a relatively straightforward set of complimentary initiatives in support activity, blogging, other social media, developer events and direct contact with key add-ons groups. One particular focus for these activities should be that they all produce data that can be easily accessed and compared.

Support Activity

People ask questions about the SDK in a few different places, but the top three seem to be ( in order of frequency ):

• the Jetpack google group
• the SDK forum on AMO
• Stack Overflow
• IRC

A goal here is to strike the delicate balance of being able to ensure that user questions get answered correctly, and not dominating what would otherwise be a natural, organic discussion. This concern is more targeted at interactions on the mailing list and SOF than the forums, as the forums are generally not monitored otherwise. Currently myself, Will and Wes are doing a decent job of this, but an interesting goal to hit would be that we a) continue to identify places on the internet where the SDK is discussed, and b) we attempt a 'zero unanswered questions' policy, particularly for the forum.

A possible long-term goal might be to take the route of MDN wrt forums:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/discussion

It's worth noting on that page that MDN points Addons development discussion to the AMO forums.

Blogging

Weekly blog posts on add ons.mozilla.org involving SDK-related content. The intent here is to pick up on the efforts Will has already started and dramatically increase the number of posts about the SDK on the AMO blog.

Other social media

The goal for SDK engagement is to ensure that any other activity produced by our activities as a team that might be useful is promoting effectively through Social Media to maximize it's effect. Some initiatives that will help this:

• build followers for the @mozillajetpack account
• ability re-tweet posts to @remoz or other accounts
• establish and promote a hashtag and pattern for extending that hashtag

Events

Christian Heilmann is leading an effort to identify all the events Mozilla is involved with. My intention is to contribute to this effort and leverage it in order to identify events of interest to us. The magic formula for identifying a potential event is something like this:

• is the event targeted at web developers?
• does the event have a strong Open Web or FOSS focus?
• do we have a speaker who a) speaks the language and b) is located reasonably near to the event?

An ongoing task will be to build and maintain lists of upcoming events and communicate out to the team events that make sense for the SDK.

Current status:

• I've identified 2 likely events with CFP deadlines coming up that would be ideal venues for SDK-oriented talks
• I've submitted a talk proposal to 1 of those ( FSOSS in Toronto )
• I've researched potential online resources for sites that aggregate conference info ( lanyard, WikiCFP, etc. ) and al have their uses.

Eventual goal:

• ( ongoing ) monitor sources for conference announcements with the help of devengage, do some reasonable filtering and communicate CFPs and interesting events to the SDK community.
• working with the ( as yet to be hired ) devengage events manager, facilitate event participation for the team.

Who goes to events?

We can encourage team members who are interested in speaking to get them out to events either as participants or speakers. As an evangelist I have limited and tenuous credibility with developers speaking to them on their own terms. Additionally, I only speak one language fluently; if we have team or community members that are either geographically or linguistically better placed for a particular event, I can then act as a support resource for them.

3. Topics?

The Add-on SDK is an open-source project being managed primarily by Mozilla itself. I assume we have outside contributors, but at this point it feels like there are very few. As I see it talks around the SDK can be tailored to several different audiences, including:

• existing Add-on developers
• web developers with some interest in browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome
• web-oriented entrepreneurs / start-ups looking to leverage their web skills and the Firefox / Chrome user base to grow their product or service

Leverage

All event participation should be heralded by social media waves. If we do not blog and tweet about upcoming, current and past events we participate we lose perhaps the greater part of the benefit we can derive in participation. In devengage we follow a pattern:

1. acknowledge participation
   1. blog post promoting the conference, tweeted etc.
   2. added to 'where is mozilla'
2. ( optional ) twitter posts / blogging from the conference
3. post conference re-cap, including posting of the slides and any media created online
4. Sponsorship and Administrivia

MDN Hack Days

• Partner with Labs, MDN & Devtools to promote Mozilla products and technology initiatives around MozCamp events and at Mozilla Spaces worldwide.
• develop the events series as a 'world tour' with specific branding, tour shirts, indie rock feel, etc.

Planning for this is described in much more detail on the MDN Events Page

AMO Fast Track Queue

The Fast track queue is a review queue on AMO that contains only SDK-based addons that do not access chrome privileges. The idea is that these addons should be relatively quick to review and that low wait times on this queue will promote the use of the SDK.

• stage a series of fast track queue burn-downs to get the queue close to at zero.
• establish and maintain an inbox zero policy for the fast track queue
• publish this stat in weekly updates

Data

We should gather some data, and expose in a console / reporting tool / dashboard for easy consumption. There should be a dashboard. It should be public.