More visibility into the l10n-drivers

Back in July, I blogged about the l10n-driver team reviewing some goals from previous quarters and how we did.  In that post, I wrote about defining the role and scope of the l10n-drivers team so that people in the Mozilla community might understand more about the team’s function.  We want to answer the questions “What are the l10n-drivers? What do they do? And, how can they help us?”

This quarter, I think we’ve started to make some progress on those questions.  Here’s what I have noticed so far:

L10n dashboard

I won’t spend too much time here because I’ve blogged about it before, but this tool will only become better and better as time goes on.  It is the one tool I look at consistently to remind me what localizations are translating Firefox, who might need to be contacted, and how we are doing as a community upcoming releases.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so.

Weekly Meetings

One thing we added recently is a weekly, Tuesday bug triage call.  In those meetings, Axel uses the l10n-dashboard and Bugzilla to review which localizations are awaiting responses from us or might need a “poke”.  He then gives good recommendations to each of us for next steps.  This is when Axel is playing quarterback for our team and passing out assignments for each member.  Perhaps some of you have noticed that we are trying to proactively get people to start localizing Firefox 3.1.  We’ve been pinging people in bugmail to see if they are ready to move their translations from cvs into Hg.  The whole team meets by phone every Tuesday at 10 AM Mountain View time to discuss who we should ping and which member on the team needs to do what.

Tricks of the trade

I blogged last week about changes to the l10n team.  Here are some additions to our process from the new team members.

Stas has created a Firefox 3 l10n release trackers bug and then shows the dependency tree inside bugzilla to help us track each language we are trying to get into upcoming releases.  It’s a simple change allows us to not let anything slip through the cracks.  With Axel’s l10n dashboard and little things like this blocker bug, we’ll continually track who in our community might need some help or hear from us in bug- or email.

In addition, Gandalf is working closely with me to reach out to some of the newer localization teams in the queue.  We try to gather the status of these teams and see where they might need help in navigating through the early stages of our process.  I often send people to these pages that dicsuss things necessary for starting a new localization.  (Those links discuss Mercurial and starting a new localizaiton).  One specific example on how we have helped, just today, Gandalf and Axel prepared a zip file that presented all the string changes from Firefox 1 to Firefox 3.1 for a localizaiton team from Africa who had stopped its work right around the launch of Firefox 1.  That team hopes to translate and get into the 3.1 release cycle.

Responding to requests

With these tools and team members, I think we are doing a pretty good job at responding to requests.  We’ve scheduled IRC meetings with a lot of teams, including all of the teams that are launching in Firefox 3.0.2.  I’ve also considered scheduling a monthly call for all localizers to dial into.  It would be a time for locales to ask questions and for the team at Mozilla to give a semi-regular in-person update.  This is just an idea, but might be worth a try.  Thoughts?

Adding languages

We added 8 new languages with the upcoming release of Firefox 3.0.2.  By the release of Firefox 3.0.3, we hope to add 5 more.  That’s 13 more languages in the span of two minor updates.  The challenge going forward may be keeping the pipeline filled with languages and making sure we reach out to the locales that have been working away for a long time.

I am up for more suggestions from the community on how we can improve.  Please just comment or email me.