We’re still hoping for a few more responses on the Planet Mozilla Survey, linked below. The survey will be closing on Friday afternoon, so please take a few minutes to give us your thoughts before then. We’ve had a lot of fantastic input so far, but would like to make sure everyone who wants to respond has an opportunity to do so. Thanks!

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Reposting this because we need more people to give us feedback — if you have a few minutes this afternoon, please let us know what you think. Thanks!

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with the whole concept of professional feedback because, done well, it’s the fastest way to learn and grow and advance. A lot of this is sparked by playing around with Rypple and trying to figure out how to make the best use of that system — but the basic idea of soliciting regular, lightweight, specific, and concrete feedback strikes me as a fundamentally solid idea. It’s sort of the personal development version of “release early, release often,” in a way, with a dash of “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow” thrown in for good measure. Um, to possibly stretch the metaphor.

Anyhow, the problem is that it turns out that asking for and giving feedback can be difficult. Asking a good question is a lot harder than I thought, and giving useful and constructive feedback is complicated by a whole variety of factors. I generally learn by reading, so I’ve started digging around and reading as much as I can about feedback. I figured I’d start linking to the interesting stuff I find, in case other people might find it useful as well.

A bunch of this first batch are from the Rypple weblog, which is a good place to poke around — there’s lots of interesting stuff over there.

• Good vs. Bad Questions (Rypple)
• How to avoid dead-end questions (Rypple)
• How will I be perceived if I ask for feedback? (Rypple)
• Good feedback, bad feedback (Rypple)
• The double meaning of ‘feedback’ (HBR)
• Find the gold in toxic feedback (HBR)

Promotion and growth

Recently, Alix Franquet arranged for the about:mozilla newsletter to be featured as one of the Firefox Start Page snippets. Prior to this, the newsletter had plateaued at around 2800 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of readers via the web and feeds), increasing by maybe 10-20 subs per week. Since being added to the start page, however, the number of email subscribers has exploded to 6800, and the number continues to grow by 300-500 subscribers every week. A million, million thanks to Alix for helping promote the newsletter like this.

Content and length

The newsletter has also been getting longer as the Mozilla Project continues to grow both in the sheer number of contributors and the number of projects being undertaken. I’m going to experiment with slightly increasing the number of stories mentioned while paring down a little on the number of words I write per piece, to see how that works.

Experimental source feed

I’ve also started an experimental “Source feed” of sorts. Each week, while I read through the various Mozilla-related news sources, I flag possible items for newsletter inclusion by starring them in Google Reader. A few weeks ago I also started “sharing” those items, so you can now see a raw feed of Mozilla news stories, mentions, and blog posts that I’m thinking about including in the newsletter. I’m not sure whether it will be useful or not, but someone asked if I could put it together, so here it is.

That’s about it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions about the newsletter, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com.

Rob tagged me in an interesting — and very Mozilla-centric — meme, asking that I answer a handful of questions about how I deal with the massive amount of information generated by the Mozilla project, staying on top of it and staying sane. These are my answers (work-related reading only — non-work stuff is off-topic, I think). I tag 4 more folks at the bottom!

1. What is your reading schedule? Do you have a schedule?

When I first get up in the morning, I start reading through email while the coffee brews. Once I get a coffee, I finish email (flagging stuff for later response, not responding as I go), then move on to read Twitter scrollback (rarely all of it), then forums, then finally moving on to feeds.

Feeds are the bulk of incoming stuff, and I have them cordoned off into folders that are ordered by general relevance. High priority stuff (work-related, generally, and friends/smart people) I check in on several times a day, Mid priority stuff is once a day or once every couple of days, and Low priority is once/wk at best. Low priority stuff often gets dumped unread when I declare a “Mark All Read” day :)

I don’t have a formal schedule — I’m online more or less all day, every day (except for the gym and the pub) and I just dive in and out of various communications streams randomly.

2. What do you read daily, and how often?

• Email: many times/day, usually flipping to that tab once or twice per hour.
• IRC: Constantly. I realized the other day that except for vacations and whatnot, I’ve been on IRC more or less every day since sometime in 1993. And I’m OK with that. IRC is like Twitter — profoundly simple, and so much more than the sum of its parts.
• Twitter: I am utterly fascinated by Twitter and I love it and I’m not sure why. Its immediacy and continual flow creates a sense of connectedness that strikes me as somewhat magical. I’ve been feeling these wires for a long time, and Twitter is something brand new that feels oldskool and important. The ambient awareness it enables is quite something. Very interested to see what develops there. Anyhow, I’m on Twitter all the damned time. Even out and about (but not at the gym).
• IM: When they come in. IM is real time, and I wish people used it more. It’s basically private IRC.
• Planet Mozilla + other Mozilla-related feeds: 4-5 times/day. I flag items for inclusion in the weekly about:mozilla newsletter throughout the week as I do this, compiling the final selection and writing it up every Monday.
• “Friends”, “People”, “Smart”, and “Work stuff” folders: once or twice/day. “Friends” stuff I generally read then and there (and has a pretty deep overlap between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’), but other stuff I’ll flag for later reading in bulk. (“People” and “Smart” is stuff that isn’t directly work related, but that is peripherally so; “Work stuff” is non-Mozilla stuff that is relevant to my specific job.)
• “Fun” folder: I’ll flip through my “Fun” folder if I have 5 mins to kill or need a break. It’s full of internet awesomeness like Cute Overload, I Can Has Cheeseburger, Overheard in NY, Passive-aggressive notes, etc. Pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh at least a few times/day, which is more valuable than gold.

3. What do you read more than once / week? How often?

• Stuff I’ve flagged for later reading when skimming through feeds.
• “Tech”, “Tech blogs”, “Web”, and “News” folders. There is way too damned much traffic in these to try to stay on top of them daily, but I usually skim through them a couple of times/wk. I skim pretty brutally, tho, and probably flag maybe 1 or 2 posts for every 50-100 that come in.

4. What blogs, feeds, and newsgroups do you read?
Blogs + feeds + newsgroups are all basically feeds for me, and I’m currently subscribed to over 200. My “Mozilla” folder contains:

• Above the Fold
• Foxkeh’s Blog
• Metrics Blog
• Mozilla Dot Org
• Mozilla Foundation Futures
• Mozilla Links
• Planet Mozilla
• QMO – quality.mozilla.org
• The irc.mozilla.org QDB
• The Mozilla Blog
• Web Tech Blog
• …and a handful of other personal blogs by Mozillians

Yes, I know it contains duplicates, I do that on purpose.

5. Lastly, name a guilty pleasure in your feedreader.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. She’s insanely awesome.

Bonus question: What do you use to read feeds?
Google reader, although I’d kill for something that would help me organize things better and deal gracefully with significantly more volume. I have to keep my feeds down to around 200, which is really a pain in the butt, since I’d like to follow hundreds (thousands?) more.

Taggees!

• Johnath Nightingale
• Gavin Sharp
• Mike Shaver
• Ben Hearsum

I set up a Planet Mozilla twitter feed a while back that does nothing more complicated than twitter every time a new post hits Planet. Having been following it for a while, I find that I have a more comprehensive and up-to-date ambient awareness of what’s going on around the project. Where I used to have to take the time to look at and read through a long list of feeds in my feed reader, I now just get quick infoblips through the twitter feed. I like it quite a bit, and it seems to be working well. You can follow it here, if you’re interested:

http://twitter.com/planetmozilla

For those of you who are as addicted to Twitter as I am, I’ve cobbled together an experimental Twitter feed that tweets every new item that appears in the Planet Mozilla web feed in (close to) real time.

Follow along @planetmozilla.

Ever miss an issue of the about:mozilla newsletter and find yourself cursing my name because you couldn’t find the archives? Curse no more! I finally dug around the Mailchimp knowledge base and figured out how to auto-generate a full list of every issue of about:mozilla ever published.

I’ve added the archives to the about:mozilla weblog, on their very own Newsletters archives page. The blog itself hasn’t been in use for quite some time, but I’m re-evaluating that now and there will likely be activity there again soon.

The about:mozilla newsletter needs to evolve. It launched about 14 months ago and hasn’t changed at all in that time while the Mozilla project has continued to grow and expand. Based on the feedback I’ve received from a few people, I’m proposing that the newsletter morph from a “light and quick overview of a handful of interesting items” to a “full-blown newspaper for Mozilla project contributors”.

This is going to involve a lot more research and editorial work, and it could end up being longer, but it will have better structure and organization making it easier to skim and digest. As something targeted at project contributors, I think it will be more useful overall.

The following static sections were suggested:

Firefox
* Feature development, major changes, demos, etc.

Labs and add-ons
* Labs, labs projects, AMO, add-on news (Firebug, etc)

Other products and projects
* Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.

Upcoming releases
* Shortform list of all known/announced upcoming releases

Security notes
* Quicklist of recent security issues and information

Infrastructure and IT
* All project-infrastructure related news – upcoming planned outages, upgrades, changes, etc. Bugzilla, tinderbox, graphserver, etc.

Project coordination
* Upcoming bugdays, testdays, l10n events/deadlines, community marketing events, etc.

Events and conferences
* Devdays, barcamps, meetups, labs nights, Mozilla-involved conferences, etc. Bullet-pointy.

Meetings and meeting notes
* Standard reminder about the Community Calendar and all the goodness that resides there. Link to meeting notes blog + rss feed.

In the media
* Recent important media mentions or other PR-related things of interest

Mozilla
* MoCo/MoFo/MoMo related news. EC stuff, goals setting, education program, governance, awards, etc.

Etcetera/Miscellaneous
* Anything else that’s interesting enough to include.

What do you think? Good idea? Terrible idea? Do the proposed sections cover everything? Are there other things that would be useful in a weekly project newsletter? What else could/should be included?

I really want this newsletter to be as useful as possible for our project contributors, so your feedback is really important. Please leave your comments here or email me privately at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com. Thanks!