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

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.

Status: we've already published two posts, with a third in the queue awaiting review.

Future plans

 * whenever a new API lands on the SDK development branch, we should create a blog post about it, including runnable examples hosted on builder.
 * consider a weekly 'Jetpack Update' newsletter / link farm post with links to interesting happenings in and around SDK development and the community. Some examples of content are:
    * popular bugs resolved
    * events related to the tree, e.g. a new branch or beta build released
    * noteworthy add-ons released that week using the SDK
    * events we attended
    * any SDK-related blog posts from the wider community
    * etc.
 * identify FAQs from the community and address them in a blog post.

Blogging vs screencasts.

Having spent some time considering it, I don't think screencasts as a format are very effective for communicating about SDK features for the most part. I suggest that blog posts that point to working examples on Builder are a far better medium. There is 1 exception to that, and that is in describing to users how to initially get started with the SDK, e.g. download, unzip, activate, plus dependencies.

I intend to produce & maintain 3 short screencasts: How to install and get started with the Add-on SDK on Linux, Windows and OS X. of particular importance is the Windows version, due to the lack of Python on Windows systems by default, and the large numbers of Windows users in the community. Additionally, I need to investigate and document best practices for mobile add-on development, including a blog post and possibly a screencast.

Other social media:

Developer-centric social interactions tend to happen on twitter and stack overflow these days, with Google+ being a potential new forum, as well as possibly Quora ( although it tends to be more meta in nature ).

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:

 * ability re-tweet posts to @remoz or other accounts
 * consider an SDK-specific twitter account, or alternatively an AMO-ish twitter account
 * establish and promote a hashtag and pattern for extending that hashtag

Events

There are a few initiatives I plan to undertake in order to leverage developer events and conferences in promoting the SDK.

1. Which 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.

2. 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

4. 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

5. Sponsorship and Administrivia

On the devengage team we have a strong opinion that travel & expenses for Mozillians speaking at or attending a conference should be covered by Mozilla, in all cases. The reasoning for this covers two cases:

1. if the event is a non-profit / community produced event, Mozilla's contribution allows conference organizers to spend those resources on something else in order to make the event more successful. If possible, we can leverage this to gain increased exposure for Mozilla, e.g. sponsorship status of some type.
2. if the event is a commercial conference ( consider O'Reilly's OSCON as an example ) paying our own way and declining honorariums etc allows us to demonstrate independence from the organizers; we don't feel obligated to support the conference in ways we aren't comfortable with.
3. any additional proposed sponsorship by Mozilla of an event should be handled by the engagement team

Add-on Focused events

Currently all efforts around events focused specifically on add-ons and the SDK are our workshops in London and SFO-area. Add-on Con is so far not announced this year. What makes to me is to delay further workshop planning based on the results and feedback of these first two.

Another angle / experiment for promoting the SDK via events is 2-fold:

1. partner with labs to wrap up the SDK as part of a package of Mozilla initiatives ( along with BrowserId, WebFWD, Open Web Apps, WebAPI ) as a distinct Mozilla toolkit of emerging tech.
2. target larger / influential barcamp / unconference events or tracks inside larger events to promote the above.

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.

Projects

The previous initiatives describe the sorts of ongoing activities and approaches I propose to help promote the SDK product and project. There are some specific time-sensitive projects I also think we need to tackle in the next few months:

1. Electrolysis messaging and fallout management. It is clear that the introduction of E10S support in Firefox will break lots of existing extensions. Mozilla is taking a many-headed and somewhat disjointed approach to managing this so far. People in AMO that I have talked to have varying degrees of confidence in the transition, and I have heard rumours of efforts in the platform group to provide workarounds, but without any messaging.
2. Jetpack-Slides-Add-on meta project. The goal of this project is to create actually software that is a) an presentation that introduces jetpack and b) a website / add-on interaction that demonstrates the features of jetpack being discussed.
3. Website / add-on integration patterns. Build demos for integrating a given specific website, possibly involving other tech such as BrowserId or OWA:
   1. build Node chat app that hooks into notifications
   2. build best practices demo that implements add-on installed detection / update detection workflow for the user.
4. Jetpack as part of the Labs ecosystem of initiatives:
   1. examples of sites that include use of BrowserId, OWA and the SDK (?) e.g. tie it all together

Feedback from dcm

goals:

   X many blog posts, uptick on hits
   events represented at / talks given
   create intro to SDK slides / script / post