This past summer, our summer intern Blake Cutler spent a lot of time analyzing data about the localization community.  One thing he examined was the size of our l10n beta testing community across various locales.  With the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, I thought I would share a series of charts that show us a bit of that information leading up to the release of Firefox 3.  The charts reference “AUS ping” data.  For an explanation of that, I’ve linked to a long post by John Lilly where he describes the “application update service“.  (Just search for it, it’s in the body of the long post.)

Keep in mind that the data visualized below shows information about some, but not all of our localization communities.  It would be very difficult to create a meaningful chart that shows information on every locale.  The first chart shows the number of downloads of Firefox 3 beta in May, 2008.  The information is presented with daily AUS pings on the horizontal axis and monthly Firefox 3 downloads on the vertical axis.  (Apologies for the size of these charts.  Please use your Full Page Zoom feature to get a larger view.)

This next chart is just a zoom into that bottom left corner.  Same data, just closer…

And, a little bit closer….

When I saw these charts, one question came to mind.  How can we grow our localization communities so all localizers can benefit from having thousands of beta users?  I am really looking for some comments or other interpretations of this data. What else would you like to know?  We used Google motion charts to generate the information.  Perhaps we can look at the data to get some new information.  Not sure, but tell me and we can try it.