Devrel/Minutes/2015-02-02

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Attendees

  • Dan
  • Jason
  • Potch
  • Dietrich
  • Lisa Brewster (:Adora from AMO)

Standing Agenda Items

Brief Team Status

Jason

  • Wrote BroadcastAPI post
  • Working on IOT program
  • Speaking online to Codementors
  • Developer feedback with Jonas

Dan

  • Proposals submitted to JSConf (Calling Rust from Node), OpenWest (Valence + Perf / Rust / Web Components / FxOS), CSSConfAU (Valence + Perf)
  • Initial Valence Topic in a Box basically finished
  • Learned a lot of Rust
  • Persona EOL statement / politics ongoing
  • IRC Logging now turned on: https://botbot.me/mozilla/devrel/
  • This week: Continue prepping for FluentConf workshop and upcoming talks

Dietrich

  • Product owner list
    • Bad case of Redundancia
  • Lots of Hacks author wrangling
  • Local IoT meetups, going to sign up to talk

Havi

  • 4 Hacks posts last week: Thanks all for recruiting, reviewing, discussing - Canvas2D, Wifi Direct, Silk, Functional JS.
  • Firefox Apps & Hacks Newsletter shipped on Tues Jan 27
    • good open and ctr #s. +50K subscribers. No archive.
  • Tech Community Speakers Pilot - planning process begun

Potch

  • GDC!
    • Added Gamepad support to playcanvas tank demo
    • Working with cvan

Sole

Hacks Posts

Add Hacks ideas at https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevRel/Hacks

Planned for this week:

  • BroadcastAPI (thanks Jason!)
  • OpenWebApps User Voice is closing announcement (AOverholt)
  • CSS Counters Level 3 (TBD)

Please consult the Hacks blog editorial calendar: and update with your own - https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mozilla.com_h1vjme6vi1m7o3f05vv32qa2a4%40group.calendar.google.com

Upcoming CFPs

Closed

  • JSConf (May 27-29) CFP closed Jan 30 @ 9 AM Pacific
    • Callahad, Potch submitted
  • CSSConf.au (March 26-27) CFP closed Jan 31
    • Callahad submitted, RFKelly unavailable

Closing imminently

  • OSCON (July 20-24) CFP closes Feb 2 @ Midnight Pacific
    • http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/cfp/360
    • Anyone submitting? Do we want to submit? Nope
      • Success with metrics on OSCON from last year, but... submit if you want to. No pressure either way.
      • Sandra was asking. Let's encourage community folks to submit. Havi to drop reminder in IRC. "If you're a Mozillian and you speak, we'll fund you."
      • Often a Mozilla Birds-of-a-Feather session, and we usually get 2-3 MoCo employees there regardless.

Other Topics

What can we do to improve Fx vs Chrome addon availability?

Background

TL;DR: Some add-on devs don't see Firefox users as a relevant market. Those that do are often frustrated by our documentation and APIs. Others, by our marketplace policies and review process. How do we fix Firefox audience perception and developer experience?

Per Pascal's post on the MoCo Yammer, addons like the Blackfire Companion are only available for Chrome, and Firefox users aren't a priority.

Our APIs and docs are painful for devs coming from Chrome. The author of the Hackbook extension attempted to port it to Firefox, but found that "energy and optimism quickly gave way to frustration as I tried to do even the most basic things." I'm forwarding his report to the devrel list, but the summary is that the tooling is byzantine (old python + cfx?), that docs are undated, and that deprecated docs aren't prominently flagged as such, especially when you follow a deep link from a Google search. (E.g., looking for how to create a toolbar button lands you in XUL docs, which are no longer the preferred method now that we have the Add-on SDK).

Tom Dale recently wrote "Mozilla’s Add-on Policy is Hostile to Open Source" in which he brought up serious concerns regarding month-long delays and inappropriate rejections of the Ember Inspector . Last month, TrackIf experienced similar problems with AMO's human-driven review process. While we do allow self-hosting of xpi's, our preferred method of distributing add-ons should be lower friction. Especially compared to the Chrome store, which has automated approvals of updates to existing add-ons.

Discussion

SDK is nice... until you try to do anything meaningful, then the abstraction "leaks like a sieve" and you have to leave HTML and go into XUL land. Chrome's stuff starts as a familiar web context (invisible HTML page) with superpowers.

Question: Who owns the Addon SDK roadmap? Big things happening this year: requiring cryptographic signatures for externally hosted XPIs (cut down on search hijacking), e10s (addon compat issues).

Irakli Gozalishvili (:gozala) is the Addon SDK owner. Dietrich is a peer. AMO perception: Jetpack development is dead. Is it?

IE is rumored to be implementing Chrome API. is that the new table stakes? baseline?

Our role isn't to re-architect this stuff -- it's to figure out how to get that feedback to the right people.

Next Steps

  • Documentation issues: MDN (Will Bamberg, been sdk documentor for years)
  • Architectural: Jeff Griffiths owns DevTools, which includes Addon SDK. Possibly bleeds over to Fx Desktop.
  • Process: Working on lowering burden for trusted add-on developers with track record / etc in Q1 and Q2.
  • Perception issues: That's our job. And everyone's at MoCo. We have a good story for frontend devs (DevEdition, UserVoice, etc.), but what's our story for backend folks (Rails, Django, Node, etc.) who use Chrome because it's faster / sandboxed / works better with Google / works with WhatsApp / etc.

Product Owner List

  • first stab brought up a lot of questions
  • lots of lists, don't want yet another list
    • Basically re-implementing the Phonebook. Good use of our time?
  • brings back to the purpose
    • What we really want are product owners coming to us, proactively.
    • But the goal of this list is to help us until that starts happening. This is a list of people for us to poll for updates.
  • architect? pm? manager? pjm?
  • how deep into the topic hierarchy?

CFPs

  • we talked previously about managing this
  • spreadsheet or database or something
  • communication about cfps internally and elsewhere?

Problem: 24h isn't enough lead time. This is a place we can scale our team. Communication plan? How do we notify good speakers within Mozilla?

Highlight where we are in Project meeting? (Duplicates Where is Mozilla?)

Raise visibility of DevRel as a resource (review proposals, coach presentation, etc.) - how and where? Should we write that up somewhere? (eg, the "services" we offer) Probably -- wiki? Occasional speaking appearance in the Project meeting?

Need something really lightweight, smallest amount of process possible. (AMEN!!)

Not trying to be an All Seeing Eye or gate; but we want to be aware of where Mozilla is, and how their experience went. Things like Bugzilla forms ("Where is Mozilla?", etc.) are too heavy and not getting used.

CFPBot - tweet CFPs 24hrs prior to close

Next Steps

Ruminate. We'll look at it again next week / discuss async on list.

Research

  • reached out to dcamp about any UX/UR done with dev tools
  • will forward to the group
  • anyone else have resources around this?
  • Might want to ping Bill Maggs and Brad Lassey
  • survey results from add-ons group?

Workday Goals

  • We haven't put anything into Workday yet, as we've been focused on rebuilding the team.
  • Want to get Goals in by end of next week. 2-3 per person, one being a "stretch" goal. (Friday Feb 13)
  • Log into WorkDay via SSO portal: https://mozilla.okta.com/

Anything Else?

  • Jason wants to know how to best get feedback from evangelists to engineers. Think about that.
  • Kudos to Dietrich for using WikiText in the Etherpad, and helping keep notes
  • Kudos to Havi for filling in her update ahead of time and Sole for emailing her update to the list

Deferred Topics

(We ran out of time to discuss these)

Communication to evangelism contributors and community members

Discussed on the internal list. Conclusion: In progress. Jason's preference is to focus on getting some tangible results out the door in Q1 and introduce ourselves by way of our work, potentially with something more explicit later in Q1 or Q2.

Feedback from MDN is that we should introduce ourselves to evangelism volunteer contributors who have not heard from the new team. We should also share our goals on the Wiki when 2015 goals go public.

What channel should we use? Who owns the communication?

Also: There are some great community evangelists already some highlighted in a update Stormy gave last year (WHERE?). We should support these individuals and make sure they have resources and the support they need.

Hacks RFC Period?

Discussed on the internal list. Conclusion: Currently process seems to be working well enough; no need to explicitly shake things up for now.

Dietrich asked: " do we want to have a "request for comments" period before a post goes public? [...] a lightweight way for the group to give feedback on upcoming posts."

Havi responded: "The Hacks blog editorial calendar is maintained & up to date, also viewable and editable by everyone on this team, so there shouldn't be any need to receive notification emails from me [...] I think having designated reviewers will be more productive all around than an adhoc process with multiple reviewers and me as the messenger. I don't think that will scale for me."

Do we need to discuss further?

Evangelist Swag

Discussed on the internal list. Conclusion: We're going to start by requisitioning a bunch of stickers from the GearStore and buy smaller batches of interesting, custom gear as needed.

What do we want and how do we get it?

At the very least, MoCo staff evangelists should have a few thousand stickers (Firefox and DevEdition) on hand. Sticker Mule will do 3" die cut stickers for $2000 per 10,000, or https://www.stickermule.com/products/circle-stickers 3" round stickers] for $1600 per 10,000.

Community Evangelism in light of MoFo's Radical Participation Document

Discussion of https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/document/d/1NdR3ODkvBHBfv3V36uASBhvrY1dcA_D0h5QW6jGI8Wk

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