How do we scale the Mozilla localization community?
Between the release of Firefox 3 and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla will add twenty-six new localizations to the Firefox’s list of localized versions. It’s likely that we will ship Firefox in seventy-four locales, not including the en-US version. What does it take to scale our community and increase our locale count by over fifty-four percent?
It turns out that many who learn about our growth often ask if we can articulate any of the magic behind this scale. It’s not really magical, and it’s pretty straight forward. In fact, I’ve been meaning to write something on my blog about our process to describe the many things that make this possible. Coincidentally, Greg Bell, who helps run the website Open Logic, learned of our growth and asked me if I’d answer this very question in a post for his site. This seemed like the best opportunity since Greg provided a deadline that would force me finally to write it. He and his staff titled the article Go Local, Be Global: Scaling the Mozilla Localization Community and they wrote a very nice introduction about Mozilla. I hope you find time to read it.
Of course, it’s quite easy to write a piece like this when we have a remarkable community of contributors. Special thanks has to go out to the l10n community and l10n-drivers team who have been building for years the foundation that has made this scale possible. Most of all, Axel Hecht and Pascal Chevrel have been the two Mozilla employees most responsible for our global growth. Hats of to them.
Finally, many thanks to Greg for offering me the opportunity to write. He caught me at the height of our Firefox 3.5 release work, so it took me a few more weeks than expected to write it. Luckily, he let me slip my deadline twice until I finally got this together.
Good article, really (and yes, Pascal and Axel do rule! You really have a kick-ass team!)
Congratulations on the article, Seth. I would mention another issue about scaling to this size: the quality of the product. If Firefox was an obscure browser with few people interested in it, you would not be writing that article
So is the popularity due to the localisation, or the localisation due to the popularity? That might be open for discussion, but I don’t think they are entirely separate issues.
If things go well, we will be able to add some more African languages during the release cycle of Firefox 3.5 – a few million people more served in their own language
Friedel: You make an excellent point. I think there is probably a bit of the network effect here: people everywhere see more and more of Firefox due to its growth. So what causes that growth? Probably not the localization. It’s probably growing because it is a fast, secure, and customizable browser that is free to download. Our developer community’s pursuit to be cutting edge and excellent helps that groundswell spread to new locales. We’re just here to try to make localization a bit easier, and we’re getting a little bit better at that.