This is the transcript of the chat with Asa Dotzler, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

(David Tenser: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Mozilla!)

I’ve had many roles at Mozilla over the last decade or so. I started as a volunteer trying to figure out how to get involved as a non-coder (not even a very technical person). After banging my head against the wall for a while, I found a couple of people that were hosting developer builds on their FTP servers (back then, Mozilla didn’t make binaries), so I started testing and reporting bugs.

I learned a lot from the developers about what they needed from bug reporters before they got overwhelmed by so many testers, so I became sort of a buffer -a teacher for newbies to help them adjust to bugzilla before interfacing with the developers directly that led to my role as Mozilla Community QA guy and a job with Netscape(/AOL) in 2000.

Then I moved into project management with Drivers@Mozilla and from there into Firefox project management. Then the Mozilla Foundation, and now I’m doing evangelism.

What do you think are the key things to keeping community members motivated? I know that’s a hard question, given that motivations vary.

Absolutely, motivations vary. That’s why it’s important to develop personal relationships. As you get to know people, you learn what drives them and you can help them find the right spot in Mozilla to have the most impact in an area that matters to them the most. For some that’s solving technical problems; for others, it’s helping users; for me, it was building communities, and I was fortunate enough to have a few wonderful people encouraging me on that: Mitchell Baker, Seth Spitzer, and a couple of others were really important early personal relationships.

Do you use Firefox 3 for your day to day browsing? And, what do you like most about it? Is there anything you dislike?

I’ve been using the latest nightly build since Mozilla first started making nightly builds back in 1999. :)
I love Firefox 3. It’s just so easy to get around the web with great features like the Awesomebar and the new bookmarking system. I do dislike a few things but they’re always getting better. We can always be faster and lighter and more streamlined in UI, so I’m never satisfied, but I sure do love Firefox 3.

(David Tenser: Really, Firefox is the kind of browser that is so good you stop thinking about it. Just my added opinion.)

You seem to have been around the project as long as anyone else at Mozilla. How has it changed? For better or for worse.

Yeah. mitchell, brendan, dmose, shaver, a couple others, we’re the old timers. It’s definitely grown in many ways. We’ve grown in full-time contributors so much that I don’t even know the names of everyone working full time any more. We’ve grown the community so large that I can’t list all the teams and efforts any more. It’s huge and that feels a bit strange to me — to not know everyone and have personal contact with everyone.

But our impact is so much greater than it ever was beforeand so I’m happy giving up some of the personal connections to make sure the world has a better Web experience.

Do you get many direct support requests from users? If so, how many, and what do you do with them?

I still get a number of support requests in my inbox every week. Occasionally I get the cellphone call too. I’ve even had people show up at the door here at the Mountain View office asking for support. I try to answer them directly in email with the answer to their problem and then tell them “next time, please see support.mozilla.com”

When they call my cell (less often these days) I ask them to visit the website. (I used to have my cell number public so people could call me for release emergencies, etc. I don’t any more)

How has the user support needs changed for Firefox since 2004?”

At the beginning of 2004, we had Firefox 0.8 and probably about a million users. Most of those million users were pretty web savvy, and so they were comfortable with forums and IRC or just figuring it out themselves. Today we have over 170 million users and most of them are not “geeks” and “early adopters”. So we have two big challenges there:  1) support more people, and 2) support less technical people.

I think SUMO’s doing some awesome work to address those challenges and David, who was there in the early days of Phoenix helping our users back in the day, is doing an awesome job scaling and leveraging to be able to do something that’s never been done before. I mean that. It’s really amazing to watch…

(David Tenser: Thank you!! :))

There’s no other consumer product in the world with 170 million users and a serious support sytem run by volunteers.

What day in past 10 years do you like the most and why? Launch Firefox 1.0? What surprise you most last time?

There have been too many to narrow it down to just one. The day I got invited out to the first Mozilla developer day in 2000 and a month later when I got offered a full-time job were pretty amazing. Mozilla 1.0 shipped on my birthday. That was awesome.

Phoenix 0.1, 0.5 and Firefox 1.0 were all days I’ll never forget. But there are so many more.

(David Tenser: For your previous question, I just want to insert that I blame SUMO’s success on the SUMO team and the amazing community. This could not be possible without all the folks in the community.)

Absolutely right and I blame you for inciting them to such efforts ;-)

Many people love Firefox and would love to get involved with the Mozilla project. What is Mozilla doing to reach out to these people, and what is the best way for people to get involved?”

This is a great question and one I’ve asked myself often going all the way back to the beginning of the Mozilla project. The answer I keep coming back to is that every time we lower the barriers to participation, we strengthen the project. So, finding those hurdles to getting involved with existing areas (code, qa, marketing, support, l10n, etc. etc.) and removing or weakening them, those kinds of structural changes…. along with a very positive attitude and a big smile has been my approach :-)

What do you think is the best way to spread Firefox amongst people that always used Internet Explorer and don’t know how Firefox could be better?

I think there are a lot of ways and that no one way is best for everyone. I like to ask people what’s painful about going online and then figure out how Firefox can help that pain point. Most people find the Web really uncomfortable. They’re not like a lot of us who love it and can deal with its problems. The web is a series of flaming hoops they have to jump through to get something done. So I try to show them how Firefox removes those flaming hoops so they can just go online, get done what they want to get done, and get back to the rest of their lives.

Is your role as Mozilla community liaison limited to Firefox now (as a Mozilla Corporation employee) or extends to Mozilla Messaging? What work is being done for community building for Thunderbird?

My role has never been restricted because of my employer so it’s what I want it to be and what the community needs it to be. For the first few years, I was focused on SeaMonkey. Then I moved my focus to Firefox and a bit to Thunderbird. Lately, it’s been mostly focused on Firefox and the Open Web, but I offer help to anyone who needs it and I’ve certainly been involved with Moz Messaging, Mobile, Labs, SeaMonkey, etc. I go where I’m useful :-)

(David Tenser: So you’re everywhere!)

Heh. Trying not to be too scattered.

(David Tenser: Really interesting session. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this!)

Yeah. It was a blast! Thanks for making this happen David!

(David Tenser: Thanks for joining! It’s been lots of fun :))