If I were a SUMO Community Manager …

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