1. The localizers may not face the same complexity of plural forms that we see in other languages in other regions.  But, they are craving *more* transparency and clarity for our process.  It’s my belief that we have made it very clear just what needs to be done to get a localization official.  So, it might require me to do a summary email or reblog post to highlight a few places to look when wondering what checklist exists for localizing.
2. Again and again, I heard people asking me what Mozilla is going to do to get content localized on the Web.  A common remark I heard was that it’s very nice to have the browser chrome and UI translated into so many languages, but what are we going to do for translation of content on the web.  Frankly, I am not sure what stance Mozilla should take here.  I can see the obvious point that a translated browser is a good step, but what good is it if all the content on the Web is in English.  But, I also know that we are developing client application software in addition to fighting for standards on the Web.  My first thought is to keep a close watch to see where we can enter to help promote a healthier Web that includes content for everyone. One response that I provided to a lot of people is that we do our best to work with localizers to find the best local content that exists on the web that we then feature on our “Getting Started” page.
3. Fonts are an issue in India and some of the creators of most highly used fonts have only designed them to work on IE.  Arun took particular passion in this field and we plan to follow up with a few folks to start the evangelism on making fonts work on the Web, regardless of a users browser.
4. Web developers we met found Arun’s presentations and demos terrific and we seemed to gather a lot of questions about SVG, OGG and theora.
5. HTML5 is a hot topic with a lot of curiosity.  A lot of excellent questions arose about the specs of HTML5.  Arun did a really nice job illustrating canvas and video tags with relevant examples demoed in Firefox 3.1.

It’s my opinion that we had a really successful trip through India.  Our localizers are a close team who are dedicated to helping Mozilla.  Our campus reps program is taking off and everywhere we went we met at least two or three new reps.  Web developers we met had a sincere interest in the open Web and Arun made lots of friends with that topic.  Without question, there is a lot of interest in the Mozilla here and I think we’ll benefit by offering continued support and helping those inspired Indians to become the leaders of the large, diverse, and complex community.

I am now leaving India and “stopping through” Beijing to see Li Gong and meet the localizers and community there for the first time.

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One quick bug to report for the Bespin guys.  It seems that there is a limit on the number of people who can login with a project of the same name.  Initially, everyone named their project “IndiaFlag”.  Only a few were able to start and everyone else was locked out.  A sharp student realized the potential bug and made the suggestion to have everyone try to rename their project to a unique name.  That did the trick and the room applauded his fix.  Also, the copy/paste function didn’t seem to work.  Not sure if this is just a limitation of cut/paste with <canvas> or not.

Today, Arun gave a talk on the open web.  I met many of the campus reps here and got a few testimonials on video about their passion for Mozilla.  As I write this, Arun is meeting with a professor interested in the semantic Web.  We are now heading to Mumbai en route to Pune for the GNUify conference where we’ll both speak.

If you attended either of our sessions, please comment here, leaving your name and what you thought.  Arun and I (and Jay and Mary in California) would love to keep in touch.

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Now for some side-candy related to India. I’ve posted picture below that shows some interesting Firefox usage statistics here. These were sent to us by Chofmann to use as a talking point for the various conferences where we will present about Firefox growth.  Chofmann’s commentary:

“This one shows a great pattern of growth over 2008 almost doubling the number of active daily users from 600k to almost 1.2M current. The challenge to the students is to see if they can double the number of Firefox users again in 2009…”

Please keep in mind a few things about these stats:

1. They are a tally of anonymous pings we receive on our update server.
2. The active daily user (ADU) number translates into a higher number of actual end users that is some multiple of the ADU figure. We don’t know that multiple for India and make a guess.
3. The dip right around the year-end 2008/year-beginning 2009 is an IT glitch getting fixed.

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At the start, we did some initial introductions while we got ourselves technically situated.  During that initial go-round, we found that nearly 100% of the participants in the room had coding experience with C++, JS, HTML, XML, CSS, and more.  All used Firefox with several extensions.  A few had developed add-ons.  The audience had some great initial questions, teeing us up for an extra special afternoon.  Here is what took place:

*  Pascal Finette did an online Skype chat discussing the Mozilla Labs concept series
*  I spoke about Mozilla community and L10n
*  Arun gave a presentation with lots of demos on SVG, HTML 5, OGG video formatting

Frankly, I was blown away by Arun’s presentation.  This guy is good.  As a member of the Developer Relations team, he really showed excellent demos to this audience.  My favorite was probably an OGG formatted video with SVG and CSS overlayed.  The reaction by the audience, if I remember correctly, was a gentle “Oooohhhh!”.  The combination of his showing his excellent demos, explaining the technology, drawing laughs (when a man was shouting outside and Arun somehow thought he was getting heckled), and driving interaction with the audience really made the crowd squeeze the most out of the 2 hours he presented. Obviously they were impressed and I won’t be surprised to hear from Arun that a number of the developers emailed him to find out how to participate.

I focused on l10n and community development.  After I finished, one request I had for Mohak and his team was to use the Mozilla Community Sites project for Mozilla Camp Delhi.  Given all the excitement, I hope they’ll use the MCS to set up a point for community development and interaction here in Delhi.  I also handed out a number of cards to people who hope to look at and contribute to Silme.

In closing, the first event in India was a big success.  I am not sure we could have anticipated such enthusiasm or curiosity in Mozilla.  If you attended the event, please comment on my blog.  Tell me who you are, what you do, and how you want to get involved.  I’ve linked below to many of the topics I mentioned in my presentation and will post the slides soon.

Special thanks to Mohak for his efforts.  Well done!

http://contribute.mozilla.org
http://wiki.braniecki.net/Silme
http://diary.braniecki.net/tag/mct/

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February 6 – 9:  FOSDEM in Brussels with many European localizers and open source developers
February 10 – 11:  Delhi, India for MozDelhi Camp
February 12 – 13:  Kanpur, India for FOSSkriti at ITT Kanpur
February 14 – 15:  Pune, India for GNUify
February 18 – 21:  Beijing, China with a big community event on Saturday, February 21 at the Mozilla office

On my journey through the subcontinent, I will be joined by fellow Mozillan, Arun Ranganathan.  When I separate from Arun, I’ll go to our China office in Beijing to visit Li Gong and the team and to present to the community there.

During our presentations, we will demo several tools for developers and localizers to use to expand their impact, build new community, and drive more mainstream adoption of Mozilla ideas.  It will be a breakneck pace and we are staying with friends along the way in hope to make this trip as leveraged as possible.  Many thanks to Shashank (FOSSkriti) and Harshad (GNUify) for providing me and Arun both transportation and accommodation at their respective conference locations.

My presentation has four sections, designed for easy plug-and-play, depending on the audience.  Here is what I plan to discuss on the quest.

1. Mozilla and Community overview, using localization efforts to illustrate the breadth of Mozilla’s community contribution.  I’ll present some interesting Firefox 3.1 localization participation statistics, including new languages since FF 3.0.
2. New Community tools, demoing Mozilla Community Sites project
3. Improving localization tools, recapping Verbatim, demoing Silme, and discussing new ideas
4. Where do we go next?  L20n demos

I’ll post the slides when they are ready.  They are still in pieces and demos are still being finalized.

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He recently held a workshop to disuss a new effort called FUEL:  Frequently Used Entries for Localization.  Rajesh describes FUEL in a blog post with the following:

“…all major desktop related entries [needing localization] appearing on menus and sub-menus are not more than five-six hundred. So if we move to standardize a mere 500-600 entries and the process is backed by the active localizers and entities who get benefit from localization then we can make a successful move against the problem of standardization and inconsistency in software translation. This is the main idea behind FUEL.”

To learn more about FUEL, please read this post by Rajesh.  And, here is one more link about FUEL.

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Mozilla relies on the volunteer contributions from a very dedicated community of localizers who work so hard to meet Mozilla’s standards of perfection.  Contributors who choose to localize work with us to meet that standard and we do the best we can to meet their needs inside the pressures of release cycles.  In fact, I wrote a post about the process several months back and illustrated it with some slides.

The Mozilla process is not perfect, but we hold high standards for user experience and expectations for Mozilla Firefox.  We choose to ship our official, non language-pack locales only when they are ready as a bug-free experience for the end-user. Because of this, the process is very elaborate, detail-oriented, and complex.  (see my linked to post above…)

With the help from those volunteers, we released Firefox 3 in a coordinated effort that included simultaneously shipping official versions of the browser in 46 locales.  Two more are in beta status.  And, 20+ language packs that can be installed in the browser as addons. That is incredible work from around 70 different translation teams.  In fact, over 100 such highly-motivated teams have stepped forward to work at this on Mozilla projects over the last 10 years.

Internet Explorer 7 simultaneously shipped its major release in one locale…English.

Now that Firefox 3 has shipped, Mozilla’s l10n team and its community can focus both on getting new, official translations into the build and release process and on improving the existing process.

One way to think of the release process is like a train leaving a station.  We do our best to try to get everyone to catch the next release train.  Another release train (Firefox 3.0.1) will be leaving the station soon and we will be trying to get more localization aboard.  Volunteers working on localizations come from all over the world.  Brazil, France, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the list goes on and on.  (If I didn’t mention your country, I meant no offense.  You can see all the teams here.)  Those contributors are working hard right now to translate our software in their native languages to make sure they are ready for the the next release.

As we grow as a global project (presently with over 180 million users), we continue to meet so many new contributors.  You might imagine that at times we are overwhelmed with the level of interest from our developer, testing, localizer, and user communities.  What a wonderfully complex challenge that contributors help make work in order to ship in 48 languages.

As the dust settles from shipping Firefox 3, we are eager to increase the number of localizations we ship and improve our process.  It’ll take a strategic plan to make gains in our process and here is a piece of the plan I’d like to see take place:

1. Globally, we reach out to individual localization teams and set up IRC or even telephone meetings,
2. Figure out what is feasible to happen in the next 3-6 months for each translation team,
3. Discuss plans for teams close to finishing translation on Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0.x, or Firefox 3.1,
4. Address other agenda items for each team.

What do you think of this plan?  Good idea or bad idea?  Did I miss anything?  If you have agenda points, let me know.  If we set up these team meetings, we can add those points to our list.

Our goal is to get as many localizations that are close to finishing their translation, shipping when/if they can.

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I asked Ankit to write his story for several reasons.  First, he has been a long-time contributor to open source projects and very dedicated to Mozilla.  Additionally, I wanted to showcase the story of a localizer who is creating a translation for a community in a high Internet growth region like India.

In the last post, Friedel, who is a tools developer and translator, wrote about his experience.  This is a bit of a different story about a localizer in a region of growing importance to Mozilla…

Please take a minute to read about Ankit’s efforts.

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From the student team’s executive summary:

“India being a country of more than 1 billion people with significantly growing number of internet users presents itself as a prime target crucial for the success of internet browsers like Mozilla Firefox. This report provides guidelines for developing the marketing strategy for Mozilla Firefox. We conducted extensive market research among college students because they are the most heavy internet user segment. This research was administered through an online questionnaire widely circulated among college students. The proposed strategy stands on three prime pillars – Development of community leaders via viral marketing, content development for targeting the Indian consumer and addressing the cyber cafes – the primary centre for internet browsing by the Indian youth. To address the cyber cafes, a field visit was organized but our efforts suggest that success of this initiative requires active involvement by Mozilla senior management.

“The success of this strategy would need high level of commitment from Mozilla in conducting campus campaigns for developing community leaders, targeted content development for Indian masses addressing their usage requirements and exclusive agreements with large cyber café chains. We believe this marketing strategy would enable Firefox in achieving larger market share and in becoming the first internet browser of choice for the Indian customer.”

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