Community Giving and Tools for the L10n Process

Some time ago, Shaver and I had a discussion about adding a new focus to our community giving/empowerment efforts.  (n.b. To be clear, this was in addition to the new community loan program I mentioned in an earlier post.)  In this post, I’d like to take some time to describe just where we are headed with this facet of the program, starting with where I focused last quater to now.  The theme will extend over the next series of posts, relating mostly to the development of tools for the l10n community.

Leading up to the point when I joined Shaver on the Evangelism team, I operated the Community Giving/Empowerment program by searching for individuals who had shown long-standing contribution and commitment to Mozilla.  These individuals had done a lot of work on various projects, and had the promise of continuing to be a contributing member of the community.  I used this as a screen to find contributors and then ask them who might need new resources.  However, the process seemed a bit restrictive, not allowing us to be experimental or take a chance on various ideas from individuals.  (That’s one reason why the community loan program recently took shape.)  Additionally, the process did not seem to maximize the limited resources we had (or have) to offer.  (Same old leverage concept…I know I’ve mentioned this a lot lately, but it is the driving force behind the program.)

Our new idea adds to this approach.  I pointed Shaver to a few examples where our support provided a tool to the community that could be used by many people, e.g. a new server for the Bugzilla community, and a new server for the l10n community.  Immediately, we saw that tens to possibly hundreds of people benefited from a single resource, rather than a one-to-one setup.  From this came a new paradigm for the program, focusing on providing resources to focus areas of the community where several would benefit rather than just one.  I began to think of areas where we could focus:  localization tools, accessibility, potentially QA…really, it’s where we saw a need or learned of a need and knew that the community could benefit if we stepped in somehow.

For Q4, 2007, I chose to focus on one area where we might help.  Having participated in some community building efforts in Taiwan, Japan, and India, I started to pay much closer attention to localization at Mozilla.  I also started participating in l10n team calls and email distribution lists.  I quickly learned that there is an ongoing discussion centered around creation of tools for the localization process.  I set a Q4 2007 goal to learn about the l10n and tools development, solicit proposals from those with ideas, and (as a stretch goal) fund one of the ideas.

I’ll split this post into a series of upcoming posts to describe what we did next.  We actually did not get to funding tools development for the l10n community in Q4 2007, but I did create an illustration of the l10n process, highlighting some of the “stopping points” where better tools might help.  After the flow diagram was complete, I sent it to several different individuals who I knew were, or had heard of them, developing tools.  We solicited at least three different ideas in the form of proposals (some much more detailed than others).  We also learned about new tools that specific localization teams had developed.

In my next set of entries, I’ll post the diagrams I drew with an explanation of each one and where we might envision tools being developed.  When you see the diagrams, please comment on them.  It’s an open process and I’d like to see critique or questions about what I did.  I’ll also talk about some of the proposals we have received, without going into too much detail yet.  Finally, I will summarize where we are in the process, what we think we’ll define as success, and what others might expect to see.  Our hope is that we fund (perhaps a few) tool development proposals that will make life easier for more and more localizers (both new and old).

In the future, it would be nice to steer some focus to other areas like QA/Testing, accessibility, community building, user-to-user product support, and pretty much anything that might be a leveraged way to support something this is being done by the community.  It would be helpful for people to discuss different focus areas where the Community Giving and Empowerment program might provide resources or fund projects that would result in helping many members of our community.

Sorry for just hitting the tip of this iceberg, but this post would have become horribly long and one entry would not do it justice.  More to come soon.