Some summit l10n follow-up

I’ve been meaning to post a quick summary of my experience at the Mozilla Summit, focusing particularly on localization, who I met, and ideas that came from the event.

One of the highlights for me was meeting people at the summit.  I think I met nearly every localizer in one way or another.  That was terrific.  Having the localizers attend, many of who travels thousands of miles, was certainly valuable.

One meeting that was long overdue was with Dwayne Bailey.  You all remember Dwayne by now, right? I had worked with Dwayne for several months finalizing a grant we made to his organization earlier this year.  Somehow, Skype chats, instant messages, and IRC conversations just don’t replace an in-person meeting.  In addition to finally shaking hands in person, we sketched out an idea to do Mozilla’s first developer day in Africa.  Imagine that?  With the help of a partner organzation, we hope to have a meeting that focuses on localization in Africa.  Recently, Dwayne’s colleague Friedel flew to Uganda to help students there localize Firefox in Lugandan.  Here’s a nice article about that effort.

Not that you asked, but what was my favorite session?   Issues facing smaller translation teams presented by Erdal Ronahi from our Kurdish locale.

Here is his presentation.

Lots of good ideas to consider in here, some very valid, others that we have already started to improve.  I think my biggest takeaway from this session was that we need to improve our communication about all that is going on in l10n.  I’m hoping to help there.

I gave a few presentation, but the big one was on L10n Community Development.  I thought it went well, except that the projector wouldn’t recognize any Mac machines…so I had to transfer it to a Linux machine that Gerv was running.  Special thanks to Gerv and Chofmann for helping on the presentation.  Gerv presented, what I thought, was some compelling data about how to improve our coverage of the Internet population based on languages spoken and where we localize.  I’d like to find a way to incorporate his data into our l10n dashboard so we have a state of l10n tool for all to see.  We can show what locales are in the build and release process as well as what percentage of the Internet population we have covered with all of our localization efforts.  Would that be helpful?  If you’d like to see my presenation again, ping me and I’ll post it.

What’s next?

We have a lot of follow up with individuals.

• One specific area is working with Dwayne on a developer day in Africa for early next year.
• I’ll also be in Barcelona October 24 and 25 for our developer day.  Hope to see many of the European localizers at that event.
• Gandalf is working away on his community pack.  I know many were interested in working on that with him, so please do contact him if you have interest.

If I missed an important point or if you have other ideas, please comment here or ping me.  I think mini-meetups among localization teams is a really interesting concept both to build community and friendships and to accomplish a lot tasks.  Let’s think of high-impact/leveraged ways to get people together.

So much went on, I know I am missing stuff.  But, these were my highlights.  What were yours?  No bears or rockslide comments please…just l10n stuff where we should focus.