Archive for November, 2009

TITLE OF THE TALK: “The Mozilla project and its communities: how communities are key to the project”.

ABSTRACT:
With more than 300 million users gained in less 5 years, the Mozilla project is today one of the most improtant open source project in the world. Based on a worldwide community of developers, translators, promoters, beta testers and enthusiasts, Mozilla has one of the most efficient and passionate community backing the creation of its software products and promoting innovation and the open web. This talk will explain how the various mozilla communities are organized into a global project and what is motivating a large variety of people in the world to collaborate in an open source project like Mozilla.

SPEAKER’S SHORT BIO:
Mozilla Europe co-founder and board member, Pascal Chevrel manages Web localization (worldwide) for the Mozilla project and community growth in Europe.
Mozilla press spokesperson for the Spanish market, Pascal is also a contributor in the French and Spanish communities as member of the Mozilla Hispano and MozFR projects.

Have a look at the thefuntheory.com. The Website is dedicated to the thought that fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.

Making the glass recycling, taking stairs instead of elevator or throwing rubbish fun to do, increases the amount of participants enourmously (see the videos on thefunttheory.com).

Giving people some fun in return motivates them for doing the right thing such as hand washing or red light respecting.

Microsoft released in July, 2009 a game called “Page Hunt” that investigates users’ search behavior and gathers their search habits. The game shows some Web pages to the users and wants them to “hunt this page down”, in other words, to guess the search queries, by which this page would be placed within the first five Bing’s search results. It is a single-player game, where the human gets points, if the page takes one of the first five places within search results, and additional bonus if he avoids frequent queries.

The game was developed by Microsoft’s researchers Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was presented to the public at the conference “SIGIR 2009” in Boston. More information about the game you can find on this page:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23898/

It is stated that the researchers have already got some interesting results. One of them – they found the correlation between the number of characters in URL and the difficulty to match this page with the appropriate search queries.

The “Page Hunt” game exploits “human computation” and is interesting from this point of view to our INSEMTIVES project, where we try to develop funny and entertaining “games with a purpose” (in the style of Luis von Ahn)  for developing the Semantic Web.

We were inspired by the Mozilla’s “Blog of metrics”. And we want to share some information about it here.
The Blog is focused on collecting, analyzing, and sharing various metrics about Mozilla’s products and enlightens the quantitative aspects of marketing and strategy. The Blog aims at improving of Mozilla’s performance on the Web.
The world of Mozilla includes many Firefox related feedback mechanisms. Crash reporting, Bugzilla and spreadfirefox.com represent some of them. Furthermore, the Mozilla team carries out the surveys about updates of Flash Player, updates of Firefox, as well as about Firefox uninstalling. The received feedbacks help Mozilla’s team to improve the Firefox and to contribute to its adoption.
The metrics help to investigate what incentives motivate the user to participate in the surveys, what design of the feedback forms provokes the most feedback, or what prevents the users from upgrading the Firefox. The upgrading of Firefox and reporting about crash on the Web pages help the Mozilla team to improve the Firefox technology. When the user updates Firefox, he receives the better version of the Web browser. The same evidence functions for the Flash update. Many sites can’t be downloaded appropriately if the users don’t have Flash or have non-updated version of Flash that doesn’t work properly.
By giving feedback about crashed sites, the user helps unconsciously to improve the Firefox. So the users contribute to the development of their Web browser and thus get the profit of their contribution later by Web surfing with the new and more powerful versions of Firefox.
The same model functions by INSEMTIVES: The project aims at developing the technology that motivates the users to solve the tasks for the creation of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will make the Web the better place, where the user can faster find the needed information and enjoy the using of the better product.

We find the survey results of Mozilla’s team about the participatory design quite interesting for our project. Here are some of them:
1) The implementation of the pop-up in the middle of the window with the offer to take part in 5 minutes survey (instead of having the feedback button at the bottom of the screen) increased the amount of participants enormously. Moreover (and that is really important!!!), only one or two people out of 700 total comments said something negative about the pop-up itself. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/08/18/cats-love-firefox-support/
2) The Mozilla team runs the tests where they investigate what color of Firefox download button causes more clicks. With a 1% lift the winning color was green and 1% translates to nearly 2 million downloads annually that is, 2 million more potential Firefox users. Such optimization testings are run quite often by Mozilla team and the colors are optimized according to the survey results.
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06/19/firefox-is-green/