1. Freedom
On January 14th , 2010 there was a massive protest around the Parliament building in Sofia under the slogan “Bulgaria is not Big Brother, 2010 is not 1984”. The protest unites citizens, political parties and many organizations around their demand against the latest change in the data retention legislation.

Here I am:

2. Family
Daddy, could you walk faster, please. Mammy, please keep us on focus

3. The fucking weather

Last week, the weather surprise us all. -21 C is a temperature level for Scandinavia, not for Bulgaria:

I am thinking how to improve SUMO project and how to get more members into the community using this website:

The entry point

First of all, we MUST have our start page localized in all world languages. This is not a big deal, because I think, the start page should look like this:

Why? Because this is the user’s entry point to the Mozilla SUMO project.
How? No more than 100 strings for localization. Cool !

Meet and greet

Why not greet people on their own language when joining the SUMO website. If I am from Germany or other German speaking country or community (or even if I am using a German localization) or I am entering this website from Germany, based on my location (shared), why don’t I see the German website instead of English one :

Missing in action

So, we are having users on SUMO website, but we still don’t have the KB translated.

Let’s ask them for help and point them to “How to contribute” information:

Coming next: SUMO: Improving the user experience

If I were a SUMO Community Manager I would have 2 main directions to work on:

Internal – strengthen the existing community and external – to get more people to the community. I think SUMO community is one of the most dynamic ones in the World and there is a lot of passion inside.

Maybe is a cliche, but we are now in the age of participation, we must give the chance for all users to participate.

OUT

I think the external priorities should be something like:

• Teaching users what is the difference between website and a browser.
• Better communication with them – after asking a question, for example, they can be asked to help other people if their area of expertise is good enough.
• Get more members for the communities using existing platforms. We can communicate with people using their own language to educate them HOW and WHY to join the community. There are A LOT of people helping the users on Twitter, Facebook and different non-community forums – we must reach them and integrate them into community.
• Better integration between crash-stats and SUMO. People expect to see more information and help when is available about:crashes info.
• Why not greet people on their own language when joining the SUMO website.
• SUMO welcoming parties – once a month, new members will be invited to a “virtual” welcoming party.
• Integration between social network tools and TikiWiki.

and IN

If we are talking about internal community, we can find a way to reach every member of the community with:

• Put a member to be responsible for a task. For example : Please make a report for latest 100 non answered questions from SUMO forum.
• Line up areas of expertise and expect people to give feedback on that. For example if I belong to the group responsible for answering questions about UI, I can give better feedback on that issue, than other who is responsible about malware, for example.
• We have to improve our existing web tools and we need more feedback on that. I am ok with Spark, but it is not user friendly for non-technical community members.
• I know we have a lot of members, but the active members are not so many. So, we have to activate them with more personal and local tasks. We need something more stimulating than ‘Carma’.

How do I know such things?

I am dealing with communities since 2004 when I started organizing a Web technology conference. I t was important back then as it is now to find proper approach to reach the different community layers. The Combination between on and offline methods helps strengthening its integrity.

Currently I am managing several communities, one of them is based on our digital rights and freedoms and includes working with social network and services like FB, Twitter, Linkedin and so on, different types of people and politicians and organizing different actions such as protests, flashmobs and various topics discussions, concerning our digital rights.

I am participating in the Mozilla project since 2004. I started developing some search plugins and toolbars for Firefox, then I started to evangelize along with my open source and open standards activities in Bulgaria. I have participated in a number of meetings for Open source adoption in our government.

I am a member of an international group of organizations which work directly with the EP to stop software patents (again), the data retention directive and other violations of our digital and human rights. I ran for European Parliament in 2009.

Now I am working on building and stabilizing the Mozilla community in Bulgaria. I can communicate in English, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian

1. Europe is different than the rest of the world. Here we have a huge diversity of nations and different ways of thinking mainly due to the political processes during the last 80 years, the different cultures and the fact that we are now trying to build a different kind of society through the European Union.

2. Drumbeat’s idea is leadership. We must understand that we are taking up this immense management and workload resource, because Mozilla’s Mission encompasses the free culture (CC), open source, open standards, open content, new technologies, sharing, future web development and many other things, which makes us not the next bunch of people with ideas how to develop web, but makes us the people who WILL develop the web from now on. On the other hand, Internet access and training must be promoted to all the Internet users.

3. First of all we have to have Web in order to have an open web. We must focus our efforts also in the struggle for neutrality of the World Wide Web, against data retention, against the violation of our private lives through DPI and other spying technologies and so on.

4. Another important task is to create the notion in everybody that WE are the community dealing with this. We must also create ourselves a new image, because 90% of the people believe that Mozilla is Firefox only, another 9% add Thunderbird in the equation, and only 1% actually know Mozilla’s Mission and that it is the most valuable thing in our project. That is why we must not fail and we should weigh our capacities accurately.

5. Drumbeat is not only about promoting Mozilla’s mission, but to create a new way for WEB development – the Open Web.

The project proposal – Privacy Beat

Why do our digital rights fall among our civil rights

Short Description

The project shall form a working group to create a common platform for sharing of information concerning our digital rights and personal space in the Internet.

The point is the users to be informed of their digital rights, of what is happening with them in different countries, how the users can protect them from violation and to have answers to different questions.

On the other hand, the website must create a community around itself, which community should share information, help developing the idea and participate together with different NGOs in the process of law-making and other legislative changes in different countries, so the Internet could stay in a way that could help the Open Web.

How will your idea make the web better?

he Internet is an open system, unfortunately many people are trying to turn it into a closed one these days and they are succeeding step by step.

That is why this project will be something like a global monitoring system for what is going on in the Internet, it will create projects and it will inform the users in order to bring back the Internet’s neutrality, where it had been lost, to protect the citizens form the different surveillance mechanisms through the Internet, where there are any, and to protect the freedom of speech.

This will be a small step to a better Internet from this point of view, as a basic component of the Open Web.

You can read more from here.