Like yesterday.
But yeah, today I'm going to walk you through the 17th, probably.
I need to add Sweet there.
So it's like Sweet 17 years journey of the Mozilla support platform and its community.
And today I'm not alone.
I will be with Smith from the platform team and also Tasos will also join us to answer
some of the questions that you have around the platform.
So without further ado, I think I'm going to just start with the agenda that we're going
through today.
So I will be first, walk you through the inception, like the story of how the Mozilla
support came about.
And then I'll talk more about the community.
And last but not least, but Smith will walk you through the platform and what are the
tech stuff that we're using and how you can contribute to the platform, to the code.
So with that, I'm going to start with the first.
Section over here.
I'm pretty nervous because I know that there are, I saw a lot of like older Mozilla folks
over here.
So I'm afraid that I'm not telling the right story about how it came about.
But I need to dig into our archive, like our blog archive to kind of like find out what
exactly the start of the Mozilla support platform at that time.
But before the Mozilla support, there were already some kind of like platforms that community
based, like those are like the community initiated those efforts, like Mozilla Zine, Mozilla
Polish and Gecko Zone.
I've never heard of Gecko Zone, but it's actually something back then.
But yeah, those are like community based and none of them are official.
So and it's scattered, right?
Like across different sites.
So there's no like official effort from the Mozilla site.
So just before the launch of Firefox 3, I found actually the first Google conversation
in the Google group that I found was from May 8, 2007.
And then after that, like five months after that, the first version of Mozilla support
in Tikiwiki was launched.
Tikiwiki is an old CMS.
I was, I've never heard of it before, but it's actually a thing.
So after that in 2010, we moved to Kitsune, which is a in-house platform that we built
from the start because we realized that Tikiwiki doesn't really meet our criteria or like a
requirement.
So we moved to Kitsune.
And there was a gap in there.
But it's like the days where we actually lack resources.
So you only have very few developers like maintaining the platform.
And because it's an in-house platform, we cannot struggle at that time.
But around like 2019 or 2020, there was a moment where we merged our team, like the
customer support, sorry, at that time, I think the support team from Mozilla side with the
bucket side of things.
Pocket is another company that we acquired.
And then we merged the customer support team together as a customer experience at that
time.
And that was probably the start also where we kind of like, you know, like trying to
build another muscle of a support team because at that time, we need to support like premium
products with the plan of like launching Mozilla VPN and stuff like that.
So we're trying to build a support operation team at a time for the premium products.
And now fast forward to 2024, we're actually planning another migration, although it's very,
I've limited like information to share with you about that.
So that we're planning to, you know, like migrate our CMS to a new CMS called Week Hill.
But the plan is still going on.
So maybe Smith will explain some more about it.
So the community, as I mentioned at the beginning of the timeline that you saw just earlier,
there was a Google group that I found from the first blog post that I like, you know,
like find out.
In that Google group, there were lots of people like, you know, like bunching ideas.
And I can't even tell who's are like the staff members, who's are the volunteers.
So it's just like, embodied the community spirit, like the relationship of Mozilla and
contributors.
So community definitely part of like Sumo since the beginning, even like, you know, from
the first part of like the inception.
And it's still true after today because most of our, most of our product, like free products,
are supported by community contributors across different parts of the world.
And they've been contributing for a very, very long time.
The last time we did a contributor survey, we find out that actually 50% of our contributors
have been contributing more than five years.
And even some of them are contributing since the beginning, since 2007.
And they're still contributing until now.
So they're very passionate about their work, about their contribution.
And they're pretty much self-sustained.
I think even if I die today, I think they'll still be able to run the community on their
own.
And because of their experience with the product and because they have been involved since
the beginning, they have very deep understanding of the product.
I think even more than like staff members, they're in the company right now.
And one of the things that the community provides like huge value is also on the accessibility
part where they enable our content to be accessible in, you know, like languages that we otherwise
won't be able to support because it's also part of like contribution areas that we offer
in the Mozilla support.
So yeah.
I'm going to show you a few contributors that the picture doesn't show.
But there's this contributor.
He's Jefferson, his intellectual property attorney by day.
But he's been contributing to this small platform since 2007, so since the beginning.
And he is mostly contributing to the forum, to our support forum.
And he's really knowledgeable in the customization part of it.
So like doing CSS configuration to tweak your browser appearance, stuff like that.
So he's very knowledgeable in that area.
And then there's also Wenxi, who is our contributor based in China.
He's contributing to the translation, localization of our support articles into Chinese.
He's been translating like more than 50 hundred articles already.
So he's really, yeah, he's really big on this effort.
He's also part of like the proponent of like open source movement.
I think he's involved with the Free Software Foundation at some point.
So, so he's definitely a big open source supporter.
And the last is Bitya.
She's pretty new in the community.
She just joined in 2021.
But I'm really excited because she just shared this news with me that she got hired as a content writer.
And in fact, it's actually one of the things that she contributed in support,
in the Mozilla support platform.
So I'm super proud and excited for her accomplishment.
Okay.
So before I walk you through like our struggle as a community that has been run for like 17 years old,
I'm going to talk about like some of the things that influence the growth of the community, right?
Because there are multiple factors that come in the equation of like how our community can grow.
For example, like there are external factors like industry competition, for example.
I mean like the domination of Chrome is out of my hands.
So, but at some point it's also like constrain our growth as a community.
So that also, you know, like that's also something that we shouldn't forget.
There's also internal factor like product market share, for example,
the leadership support and stuff like that.
So that's also another stuff that, you know, like makes in the growth of our community.
And there's things that we can control at the right side of it, like the community experience part,
the onboarding, the documentation, the governance of our community, and the community platform as well.
Those are like the things that we can actually control to improve.
Although we may not be able to kind of like improve some of the other things,
but those are like, you know, like where we're going to focus more on, because we have more control in that area.
So, I'm pretty sure there are a few kind of like community builders in this room right now.
So if you're just starting out in like community building or community, you know, industry,
you may want to take note on some of the things that we learn as a challenge as a 17-year-old community.
I feel like given the age of our community, there are like multiple people who have contributed for a very long time.
So the knowledge is kind of like concentrated on some people, and that has been a problem,
because we want to make it more accessible for newcomers, right?
So how the problem is like, how do we share this knowledge from the, you know, the other contributors
to the relatively new folks who are joining our community recently.
And then there's this community help part about how do we keep the morale of our contributors high
when the circumstances and the dynamic of the organization has changed over time.
And last but not least, we also have to think about how do we quantify our value as a community team.
How do we show up internally to our leadership?
So that's also something that we struggle with right now.
But what do we do about it, right?
So the first one, split the community.
It turns out that when we're too big, we probably need to split the groups into smaller pieces.
So the concentration is kind of like divided into different areas.
That way we can make newcomers feel like they can have influence over the community,
because otherwise if it's, you know, like if it's already established, if the community is already big enough,
like it's hard to believe for newcomers to think that they still have a place in that community,
because it's already established, right? Everybody have their own role.
So the strategy there is to split the community into smaller group focus groups
to make room for those newcomers that are joining the community.
And then the second one that we're planning to do is the proactive outreach.
So things that we're doing right now in FOSTA.
We haven't been doing much of this after the pandemic,
but you know now that the world is kind of like recovering, there is a chance that we can,
we want to be more proactive in meeting like potential contributors.
So that's what we're planning to do more.
And then last but not least, this is really important is building our data capability internally.
You know, like thinking about what value that we want to show to our leadership
to convey that how valuable contributors are, because it's easy to take those for granted,
because it's already there since the beginning, but you know, like we need to have some kind of like quantify,
we need to be able to quantify our value in order to show up to our leadership.
So with that, I didn't speak much about how people actually contribute in Mozilla support,
but there are actually lots of like ways to contribute.
So the first one is the support platform, sorry, the foreign support.
So people can answer support questions in our platform.
And then the second one is to improve foreign health articles.
Is it still working?
Right, it's good.
The second one is to write and improve our health articles in English.
And then the next one is to localize our articles into another locales.
Last ones are providing supports to our users in social channels like Twitter, mostly Twitter,
and responding to reviews, people reviews on Google Play Store.
So we have a tool that we, like the third party tool that we use to accommodate the last two contribution area that we have over there.
And if you're interested in contributing, there's a link to learn more about what we're doing with Mozilla support.
It's support.mozilla.org.
I also have a few flyers that I'm pretty sure I bring here that I can just, you know, like give to you after this.
So yeah, we're also at the booth in the same building, in the same floor.
So if you're curious to know more about Mozilla support in general, or, you know, like the Mozilla organization, what we're doing recently,
you can just come to our booth.
I also have lots of like contributors, like community members over here, here and there, you know, like I see Danny over here, team, Paul is there, you know.
Somewhere. So yeah, definitely talk to those people, they know a lot.
Okay, let me try.
Oh, good.
Yeah, so definitely come to us and talk more after this.
We're going to be at the booth anyway.
Also, I'm looking for Spanish-speaking contributors, because we're kind of like straddled there right now.
We don't have anyone who's in charge of the local group in Sumo for Spanish.
So if you can speak Spanish and if you're interested in helping us, let's talk after this.
With that, I think I'm going to give it to Smith to talk more about the platform.
Hello.
Thank you, Kiki.
Sure.
So I want to get the robot voice thing going, if we can do that.
So I'm going to tell you a little bit about our platform.
Our platform itself is the architecture is containerized Python app using the Django web framework.
We use Postgres working along with Redis for storage and caching.
Our assets are packaged through Webpack.
And we're using vanilla.js, jQuery, SAS, Svelte.
We use Elastic for search.
And we're running in Kubernetes.
Our inference is maintained through Terraform.
So the kind of support that you just heard that we provide on the site, we have very community focused support that goes through Kitsune.
And then we have paid support as well for the paid product support where those tickets turn into tickets for support staff.
Our support journey goal, you know, we want to make sure that the site lets people find the help that they need quickly and that it's very usable.
And we want to continuously improve using data and information and make the platform better.
So, hey, it's just a Django project.
You know, why is it complicated?
So it's a very rigid monolithic architecture.
So it's been around for a while.
Changes in our platform can have a larger impact than you might anticipate.
So there's a bit of an avalanche of things that maybe you don't seem connected but are very connected.
It's a large project.
We have custom parsers for our Wiki syntax.
In the knowledge base, there's a lot of tight product integration, very custom CMS.
And then, of course, technical debt.
So, you know, as a product ages and comes in and out of being well supported and low supported and very well supported and medium supported, people touch it many hands.
So there's some debt there.
So I guess, you know, I can speak to that.
I keep saying I'm new, but I guess I've been here a little too long to be new anymore.
But when I started, you know, there were some barriers to entry, I think, for me, like learning the language, like, you know, A-A-Q, Kitsune, Sumo, you know, understanding that the apps inside of our larger Django application are, some are more complicated than others.
So each piece, you know, we did very large upgrades.
It was some of the early work that I was on for Django upgrades, jQuery upgrades, and I got to experience sort of the depth of peeling back the onion of our platform a little bit.
And it goes on and on.
The good news is we've already changed some things since I started.
I'd like to say, like, I personally changed all these things, but that's not true.
Ta-Sos is looking at me.
We've improved the developer experience.
Our documentation is a lot better now.
So you're using MK docs.
You know, it's a lot easier to navigate.
It's correct.
So if you wanted to get started contributing to Dev, you could take a look there and you should be able to get going.
We've improved our coding standards.
We do a lot of in-house quality checks.
We do code reviews now.
And we're trying to behave better with our repos and organize better, have better ergonomics automation.
Excuse me.
And so, yeah, we've, like I mentioned earlier, we've already updated many of our, you know, the core bits and pieces of the platform.
So Django, jQuery, many other packages were updated.
We've altered our data storage, our cloud provider, and we've started supporting additional products.
So like Pocket, as new products come on board, we are now able to add them in and support them.
We do content and data audits of the site.
So we're getting better at keeping the content clean and we're finding new ways to organize it and keep everything meaningful.
And so what do we want to do next?
You know, we have some plans to merge our different tools for localization into, like, a more singular process.
We want to build and automate pipelines to leverage different ways that we can get localization done.
You know, some of those things could include machine translation.
You know, just getting the need to the right place as quickly as possible so that we have something.
We're changing user flows to make things a little bit easier for people to navigate the site.
And so that would include, you know, not just people stopping by for help, but also people who are contributing,
making it a little easier for everybody to get around,
breaking apart sort of the monoliths of our site into the core functionality and being able to address those in a more standalone way.
And then dropping our custom wiki syntax or altering how we're handling wiki syntax.
As again, you heard earlier, we're trying to integrate Wagtail CMS,
which is going to bring some hopefully improved usage in how we handle our text
and make things a little bit easier for creating and managing documents.
So hopefully we'll get away from the wiki syntax a little bit.
And then some work has also been going on to inform our information architecture and taxonomy,
so that things are arranged and accessible in the more easy to use, easy to understand model.
So probably more to come on that as we get there, but we're getting there.
So we have, you know, a lot of helpful links here in the stock.
I don't know if this will be shared out. I assume it will be shared out.
And then please feel free to come, you know, if you have an interest in contributing as a developer.
Great. Please come check out these links.
If you have an interest in contributing as anything, that's fantastic.
Please come check out the links in the prior slides.
And that's it.
We're going to have a few minutes of Q&A.
If you have questions, I'm going to...
We don't have enough microphones to run with the microphone, but please voice out your question.
And I'll have the speaker to repeat it for the recording.
So yeah.
Also, for those of you who just come, there's more space over here.
You may want to come to the front to get your seat.
So any questions?
Any questions?
Okay. Thank you.
Well, can find them at the booth.
Yep.
That's side a few meters down.
Thank you.
There's actually a question.
Thank you.
As Kiki mentioned, there are a lot of empty seats on this side and everyone enters this side.
So either try to come on this side or people please move a bit in the middle.
Leave the sides more open as people will come in more now.
Thank you.
Bonjour.
Ready?
Let me get that.
Okay.
Who speaks first?
And Mark, I think you're going to have the portable microphone.