—————————————-

Over the weekend of Sept. 18-20, Seth Bindernagel and I traveled to Manila to begin to understand the Philippines as a growing community of Mozilla users.  We met various people in order to begin to understand the Philippines as an Internet market including domain registrars, network operators, social network service operators, web developers, a group of Spread Firefox Campus Representatives from a few of the schools local to Manila, and the attendees of the 2009 WordCamp Philippines event.

Dinner with the Mozilla Spread Firefox Campus Reps:

Seth has covered a lot of the information we learned from our trip but I wanted to share a few other pieces of information as well as some photos of the places and the people we met.

Chin Wong, who writes the Digital Life column in the Manila Standard met with us and provided a good overview in his article of what we are trying to understand with regards to web usage in the Philippines.

Digital Life by Chin Wong — Filipino Firefox
DO we need a Filipino-language version of Firefox? Mozilla, maker of the world’s most downloaded browser, wants to know.

Chin provided a thoughtful response in the column wherein the first response was that most Filipinos use the Internet in English, all software in English, so a localized (Filipino) version of Firefox is not necessary. But he went on to note that:

On the other hand, I realize there might be a lot of interest in a localized browser, and that there are many more end-users out there [in the Philippines] for whom English is not their first language. After all, the most widely viewed TV shows are all in Filipino, and the most widely read newspapers aren’t the English-language broadsheets but Filipino tabloids. Certainly, folks who fit this media profile would benefit from a Filipino browser.

The majority of people we met with in the few days we were in Manila were more than happy with the English Firefox, which makes sense. These are Internet professionals, web developers, bloggers, people who’s entire academic education was in English. For people like this, an English language Firefox is most natural. But considering the nature of the Philippines, where there are multiple languages in use across the over 7000 islands, where a majority of the population has yet to get online in the first place, and considering how common it is for people to use Filipino (or Taglish) in daily conversation, Seth and I came away convinced that there is a need for a more localized version of Firefox. Exactly what that will look like should be up to the Filipinos who will make that happen, but we’re looking forward to what that may be.

In the coming days, we will be launching a Filipino community mailing list and hopefully from there a website with perhaps a forum so that Filipino users and developers can start collaborating and sharing and planning what to do with Mozilla or Firefox in the Philippines.  If you’d like more information on this new Mozilla community in the Philippines, please leave a comment and I’ll email you the details once they are running.

I am also hoping to be back in Manila for the Philippine Blog Awards, which Mozilla is co-sponsoring this year.  I look forward to meeting bloggers and Firefox users at the Blog Awards event in Manila.

Here are some photos from Seth & my trip to Manila:

Makati at dusk

The infamous traffic of Manila (on a Friday night in rush hour no less)

Beau Lebens, Automattic

Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla

2009 WordCamp Philippines speakers on stage

Please Don’t Hurt the Web, Use Open Standards

Seth & Beau providing entertainment as they eat Balut. (I didn’t partake.)

Even many of the Filipinos at dinner that night don’t eat balut…

Seth and I are hosting an informal evening with some of our volunteer university campus representatives on the evening of Friday, September 18th.  We are meeting at the Food Court of Gateway Mall, Cubao, Quezon City at 19:30 on Sept. 18th.  Please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you would like to join us. (Campus reps who we are already in touch over email, no need to RSVP again here.)

If you are coming to WordCamp here in Manila, we’ll see you at the event.

Seth and I will be sharing more information about what we are learning here at our respective blogs and hope to meet more Mozilla and Firefox fans here in the Philippines.

If you cannot join us this week, I will be back in early October for the Philippine Blog Awards and hope to see you there!

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

See more photos at Facebook | Sumardi Shukor’s Photos – MSCOSCONF2009 – Conference Day 1

For some background on this event, Yoon Kit has a good overview of how far the Malaysian government has come but also has some good constructive criticism for the organizers of the event. I highly recommend his blog post at Open Malaysia Blog – MSCOSCONF.

In the morning of the first day, I gave a presentation in the Community Track. I was scheduled to talk about Firefox 3.5, Fennec and Bespin, but at the last minute I decided to change my presentation to focus on HTML 5 and web standards. I did not want to come off as just focusing on Mozilla software so I decided to re-do my presentation to this:

Open Source Powers the Open Web: HTML 5, JavaScript, and the importance of open web standards (download in OpenOffice Impress format or pdf format.)

In the afternoon, I was on a panel discussion about open source and innovation.

Can Open Source bring about your next Innovation Breakthrough ?

Panel Speakers
1.Dato’ Dr. Kamaljit Singh, GIRC
2. Tengku Farith Rithaudeen, SKALI
3. Gen Kanai, Mozilla Corp
4. Ang Chin Han, Bytecraft

MODERATOR: Dr. Raslan Ahmad, MOSTI

Download my presentation in OpenOffice Impress and pdf.

I sometimes use Slideshare, and if that’s what folks would prefer, I can upload the presentations to Slideshare but I spent a portion of my presentation slagging Flash so it seemed a bit strange to then go use Slideshare (which is all Flash.)

I’m happy to take questions via email or via comments to my blog.  Unfortunately the network connection at the conference was not as stable as I needed it to be to demonstrate some of the heavier open video demos, so if you came to my presentations, please download them to see the links to the demos I wanted to show.

Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s localizer for Bahasa Indonesia, led an afternoon of presentations on Add-ons for Mozilla at ITS Surabaya, a university in the second-largest city in Indonesia. Romi has a great write-up of the event, Mozilla Day at ITS, at the brand new Mozilla Indonesia blog.

A photo of the students

HΛniF: Hadits, Now in Firefox

Photos from the event are available at Romi’s Flickr, Aini-san’s Picasa and Kiki’s Facebook.

I would like to take a moment to thank Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s tireless Bahasa Indonesia localizer for Firefox who, in addition to localizing Firefox for Indonesians, is also working to spread Firefox farther in Indonesia. Thank you Romi!

This event would also not have happened without the support and coordination of Nur’ Aini Rakhmawati of ITS Surabaya who hosted the event. Thank you Aini-san!

Thank you also goes to Mary Colvig who provided support from Marketing/Events.

Since there has been so much interest in Add-ons in Indonesia, we would like to explore the possibility of doing a similar or related Mozilla-focused event in Jakarta later this year, after the launch of Firefox 3.5.  If you would like to have a Mozilla event in Jakarta, please feel free to comment and leave your email so we can contact you.  We are looking for people in Jakarta who would volunteer to help us with some of the organizational work to create such an event.

Here is Romi Hardiyanto’s presentation on Add-ons (in Bahasa Indonesia, not English.)

Here is Kiki Ahmadi’s presentation on the PureZilla add-on.

Thank you Romi and Aini-san and everyone who made Mozilla’s first event in Indonesia a success!

Chin Wong, a columnist at the Philippine national daily newspaper, the Manila Standard Today, has a blog covering technology trends called Digital Life where he recently asked,

Do we need our own Linux?

Chin wrote about Bayanihan Linux, which is a Philippine government-funded Linux distribution based on Debian. The term ‘bayanihan’ itself, “refers to a spirit of communal unity or effort to achieve a particular objective.” Chin tried installing Bayanihan 3 times and failed with the comment:

All this was unfortunate, because Bayanihan 5 looks like a promising and modern operating system, that like Ubuntu, is based on Debian Linux. Like other modern Linux distributions, Bayanihan 5 also comes with a complete set of free and open source applications, including an office productivity suite, a powerful image-editing application, a media player and a CD burner. The interface, based on KDE , is a little busy for my taste, but is slick and easy enough to navigate. But do we really need bouncing icons attached to the mouse pointer while an application loads?

There is some effort at localization. Bayanihan’s OpenOffice, for example, is packed with templates of commonly used government forms. Firefox is set up with bookmarks to government and local news sites. But are such localized touches worth the effort of developing our own Linux distribution?

Chin also mentions that Bayanihan Linux version 5 came out in 2007 and that there has been no news about any updates. The website for the OS lists a forum for users but that is closed, which is ominous. He closes the post by asking whether there is a need for a Philippine Linux distribution. I’d love to know more about the customizations of Firefox that were made and how those decisions were made.

Indonesia Mozilla Add-ons development talk – Spread Firefox

UPDATE: the maximum capacity for the event is 150 attendees.

UPDATE: the HΛniF project and PureZilla will be presented

This event is open to non-ITS students. If you would like to attend, please contact me via email (see link at Spread Firefox) or please leave a comment on this blog with your email and I will forward your names to the professor.

I would like to take this moment to thank Professor Nur Aini Rakhmawati Gunawan of the IT faculty of the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember for hosting this event and making this event happen.

KhmerOS is based on Open Suse Linux and also ships with a Gecko-based browser called Mekhala and a Gecko-based mail client called Moyura.

Via Chantra, the KhmerOS team is considering whether they might be willing to help Mozilla with a Khmer localization for Firefox and Thunderbird as well. This would be for post 3.5. More information when I have more to share.

For those who might be considering joining the existing process, please take a moment to look at a number of pages on Mozilla’s wiki regarding our localization processes including, L10n:Localization Process, L10n:Home Page, L10n:Web parts, and Firefox web services guidelines, as well as the excellent blog post from my colleague Seth’s blog: Helpful Mozilla localization documentation.

The relatively new Mozilla community in Thailand is a great example of a committed localization team who came together over the Internet, pooled their strengths to work on the localization effort over a number of months, which resulted in strong demand for Firefox in Thailand. While there are any number of ways that Firefox is localized, and many amazing individuals and teams across the globe, the Mozilla Thai community is an example of a new Mozilla l10n team in South East Asia who I have personally seen in action.

If you will be at BarCamp KL this weekend, please do not hesitate to say hello or ask me about anything related to Mozilla or Firefox.