Mozilla in Asia

I’m attending the 2009 MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference.

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.

If you’re going to BarCamp KL this weekend, (April 4-5, 2009) please feel free to leave a note and say hello if you see me. This will be my first trip to Malaysia so I’m very excited to meet everyone and learn about the Internet in Malaysia.

As I head towards Kuala Lumpur this weekend for BarCamp Kuala Lumpur 2009, it is a good time to note that we are looking for additional contributors to help finish the Bahasa Malaysia Mozilla Firefox. We want to thank the Malaysian localizers who have contributed to date (Malay blog) but with less than half of the strings localized (look for “ms” on the dashboard), we are looking for additional devoted volunteers to step in to finish this locale. I should note that due to the queue of locales scheduled to date, we cannot promise that this locale can ship with the up coming Firefox 3.5 release but will be scheduled for some time after the 3.5 launch.

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.