• Community Giving update

    March 26th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    In the past few weeks, we’ve helped a few different Mozilla contributors who have been doing more great work for Mozilla.  Here’s the summary:

    • Les Neste will participate in the Community Loan Program.  We sent him a Mac Mini to use for the next six months so he can continue to do some great work running up to the release of Firefox 3.  After six months, we’ll reassess to see if he’d like to keep it for another few months to work on other projects, or send that Mac Mini to another contributor who might need it.  Les will be working on the following:
      1. development of the evolving Firefox user interface
      2. support Firefox 3 general theme development community by communicating changes in the Firefox UI
      3. continue to develop and maintain customized themes
    • Mozilla Italia needs better web hosting as we close in on the release of Firefox 3.  The user community has been growing in Italy and we are going to pay for hosting costs to make sure that there is enough bandwidth and service available to support the upcoming release (and increased traffic due to downloads).
    •  SeaMonkey Project requested 2 VMs (1 linux, 1 win32) to setup unit/mochi/crash/reftest buildbot slaves.   We partitioned a small part of the l10n server in Amsterdam, which was being woefully underused, to help out SeaMonkey.

    The good news about this last month of activity (and the past few months) is that requests are coming in unsolicited.  I’m not prodding people to try to find ways to help, which I have to admit, feels good.  Perhaps it’s also a sign that the Mozilla community thinks this program is useful and is something that should persist…not that it’s been a question as to whether or not it should cease existence.

  • Localization of addons.mozilla.org: What tools do we have and what are needed?

    March 24th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    In the world of Mozilla localization, anyone interested can localize Firefox or other Mozilla applications.  Aside from that, there are other web properties that need translation and one of those is the addons.mozilla.org web interface.  I’ve been working with Wil Clouser and others to make sure that we address the AMO needs as we push forward with l10n tools.

    Many of you may know about the tools available to translate addons.mozilla.org’s interface from English into another language.  I know Wil has posted a lot of this information in the l10n newsgroup, but it’s worth shining a light on his (and others’) work again as we get closer and closer to supporting and promoting translation software for our l10n community to use if they like.

    The first piece of helpful information is the wiki that provides a comprehensive list of steps to completely localize addons.mozilla.org’s interface.  Follow this link to go to that Mozilla wiki page.  I went through this wiki page item-by-item and it very clearly defined what to do and how to become involved.  This type of detail was very helpful for me, someone who is not a localizer, but is craving more infomation to learn about our proces.

    Another great site to visit to learn more about the localization tools available to localize addons.mozilla.org is http://remora.stage.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

    If you login with “nobody at mozilla dot org”, with password “test”, you can click on the localization tools link on the right side of the page and see the fairly intuitive translation tools available for localizers.  At this site, I can change the settings to a language that I’d like to translate and begin the process of localizing addons.mozilla.org.  Intuitive indeed…  The menu items on the left navigation area take you through each section that is ready for translating.  In that menu, there are also a couple sections that give translation progress and status.  Please log in and play around a bit.

    So what is needed?  From the wiki:

    “AMO supports localized metadata about the extensions (like their titles and descriptions) but offers no way for localizers to directly edit them. The responsibility for translation lies solely with the authors. We’re looking at more usable ways to implement the system and still keep a good level of quality and accuracy. In the mean time, add-on authors are given this brief summary on how to get help.”

    Any toolset that we endorse and support for localizers to use (stressing again: if the localizer chooses to use a tool) will have to be flexible enough to work with our Addons site.  It will also have to be very secure and integrate well with our process.  Wil has been a great help to me in understanding this stuff.  If you want to contribute, let me know or ping Wil.  I can connect you if you can’t reach Wil.

    Our next step:  Wil and I and others are going to be meeting with a few members of our community who are working on projects that might integrate well and solve some of the issues.  I’ve mentioned the Narro project.  Wil has been communicating with Alexandru to see if it is flexible enough to server some of the AMO needs.   A few other developers from the community are out there and we’ve started to set up meetings to look at their code and see what is possible.

    Lots of fun going on here…ping me if you have ideas.

  • Learning from Interviewing

    March 14th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Recently, I’ve been interviewing candidates for a community/marketing role that will work directly with the Mozilla community in Europe. It’s been a really interesting process that I think is worth discussing.

    The biggest challenge that I have had when interviewing these candidates is trying to find out how the potential hire will interact with our community and fit into Mozilla.

    I remember my first few months working with the Mozilla community (I still feel so new!), trying to figure out just how it operated and what were “the rules”. I had a lot of ideas, but was really, really tentative because I didn’t want to be a disruptive force with bad ideas. So, I proceeded with caution.

    I’ve been trying to tap into candidates’ understanding of Mozilla and how they’ll move forward when hired. What are their ideas? And, how do they plan to pull off those ideas? What do these candidates know about the Mozilla community? What tools are necessary for success? Finally, how do they plan to empower others to feel like leaders?

    The questions are so open ended, I’ve realized I’m more exploring ideas, rather than looking for a perfect answer. But, I’ve learned some good things.

    ...on empowerment: Candidates I’ve interviewed have said some interesting things on how to empower others – like having really transparent and open communication, but making sure to follow-up. People who are empowered will probably look for some sort of endorsement of their ideas, even if they are charging forward with something on their own. Providing meaningful and timely responses to others who feel empowered is really important. Complete agree! And, I don’t think I could ever stop trying to become better at this.

    …on tools needed for success: Talking about tools can get dangerously high-level and the conversation can become loaded with jargon. But, in this process we’ve uncovered some pretty common-sense things. Most everyone has said that setting up environments for community interaction and dialog is critical. Blogs, forums, mailing lists, events… Luckily, I think we’re doing this, too. I came away asking, “How can I do this better?”

    …on marketing and the community: I heard a few times that any organization that wants to “build community” needs to genuinely want that. Anyone that comes to the community in hope to really just market a product will probably fail because the community will quickly see through it. That was a great point I heard. In my experience, I really believe that the Mozilla community drives this project and any effort we make toward marketing is really only done if the community wants it.

    The big take away for me in this process is that interviewing for some of these “softer” roles is tricky. I think I am really trying to gauge if the person “gets Mozilla”. I say that pretty carefully because it makes it sound like Mozilla is some private club that is hard to understand. It’s not really too hard to understand. Maybe it’s more appropriate for me to say that I am really looking for an organizational/person/job fit.

    And, if you’re a candidate and reading this, well, I haven’t shown all my cards. I’ve saved some tough questions for you when we chat.

  • Mozilla gets a visit from some Slovenian students

    March 7th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    This past Wednesday, about 15 students from the Information Science Students Association (associated with University of Ljubljana) came to Mozilla to learn more about the project and what we do.  The students are in the U.S. for two weeks doing a tour of software companies in Silicon Valley and we were the first stop on their trip.  It was good for us to learn up front that many of these students use Firefox, but are not open source enthusiasts.  The beginning of our conversation was educating the students on our open source community and software development process.  Many of them knew our Slovenian localizer, but had not taken the plunge into the world of Mozilla.  We finished a brief presentation and then opened it up for comments and questions.

    Frankly, the Q&A started a bit slow and the students seemed a bit shy.  Perhaps they were feeling some nervousness about their first visit or sitting inside Mozilla’s Mountain View office.  Nearly all of them were avid Firefox users and the few who weren’t greatly admired the project.  At this point, we did our best to engage the students.  It felt very much like grassroots campaigning or organizing.  We were surrounded by knowledgeable users of our software, but none had taken up the call to get involved.  That’s not to say the students were not engaged, but it became pretty clear that they may not have known how.  Fortunately, Mary had prepared a slide with several ways to get involved and we went right to that during the Q&A.  We began to brainstorm what this group could do to and what would be fun for them.

    What’s fun for a college student?  Partying, of course.

    The group decided that they would host a launch party at their campus for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.  That party might also serve as a starting point for their campus reps program.  After about an hour of visiting and touring about the office, the students left for Google seemingly enthused about helping Mozilla.

    Why was this visit important and what did I learn? 

    For one, Slovenia has the second highest market share of the Firefox browser, just behind Finland.  Both of these countries are over 40%.  (see the Xiti monitor study) According to this study, Firefox has 44.6% market share in Slovenia.  We’re always excited to welcome visitors to Mountain View, and we were thrilled to have students visiting from a country where Firefox has so much popularity.

    Also, I was reminded about the importance understanding the audience to whom we were presenting.   We had to start at step one with these students, explaining the nuts and bolts of open source software development and what Mozilla has been able to achieve.  After we established that foothold, we were able to adjust our message and present a way to participate.  I think we did that and the result is that we have a group of enthusiastic students who will hopefully bring the Mozilla message back to their campus.

    A final takeaway:  always have some good SWAG to hand out.  Yep…Stuff We All Get.  It can mean a lot to a visitor to Mozilla, if nothing more, it’s a nice souvenir for a tech student who visited one of the “big” companies in Silicon Valley.

    With most every blog post, I like to end with a call to action.  If others have similar stories of community building, perhaps messages or presentation styles that were successful or anecdotes about trying to organize others, please do share them with us.

  • Narro project code now open

    March 6th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Alexandru Szasz was one of the localization tool presenters at FOSDEM and he recently opened all of the code for his Narro Project.  What a great step forward!!  Thanks, Alexandru!

    The source is available under GPLv2 license here:

    http://code.google.com/p/narro/source/browse

    He also mentioned to me that “there is a database sql script there, but right now [he is] going through constant code and database changes. Not fundamental, but the picky small ones.”

    You can also follow the Narro blog ( http://narro-project.blogspot.com/ ) to watch for the progress and first public release.  Alexandru relayed to me that he will define a “public release” by “an application that can be easily installed”.

    We’re starting to make a lot of progress here with l10n tools:  we are holding formal conversations about tools at places like FOSDEM, we’re receiving proposals from some developers who are requesting funding, and we’re seeing people like Alexandru open up his code for all to see and contribute.

    Congrats to Alexandru and Narro.  Please take a look at his code and start experimenting with him.