L10n in 2010
Amidst all that is going on in our day-to-day related to Mozilla localization, one of the most important things we can do is to think about the future. It’s about this time each quarter that I start to think about the goals for next quarter. What can we do better and where should we focus? Stepping away to do that can be challenging when so much is going on. My hope is that the l10n community will create its goals together for the next quarter. We’ll start that ambitious exercise soon…
…even more ambitious is the undertaking of Mozilla’s chief lizard wrangler. You may have seen Mitchell’s post about the 2010 goal setting process. Mozilla is really trying to push the envelope when it comes to inclusiveness and distributed authority. And, we want everyone in the l10n community to have a chance to provide his or her input on the vision of Mozilla for 2010. When you think of the localization community in the future, what do you envision?
Mitchell lists the following Mozilla-wide goals:
1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet
- communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
- thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
- innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
- technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
- projects and products remain vital
2. Data: provide leadership in
- helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
- making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource
3. Mobile
- have an effective product in the mobile market
- demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web
4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum
What are your thoughts? As you read these, what do you think as they relate to what you are doing inside l10n? How would you change these goals? What do you like?
Please comment on this post. I will respond to everyone’s comments, so this is not a one-way post and response. Let’s disuss it here. Any thoughts? Don’t hold back, let’s hear what you have to say. 
When I think of where I see us going for L10n in the future, my first thought is this: Let’s lead the way in creating an L10n API/integration infrastructure that does suck less than all those we know right now – esp. as the ideas for this are already around in the form of the “L20n” stuff!
@kairo: I think you’re right on here. In 2010, let’s have an API/integration infrastructure that leads the way in open source translation. I think Silme is a start in the right direction for that.
I would like to think that Firefox handle 70% of the most popular localized content websites, as efficiently as the IE as the goal for 2010. This require that the l10n scope expand to include support for windows fonts, works with the owners of the sites to effect the changes may be by developing add-ons that work seamlessly.