Maybe you’ve noticed, but our Evangelism team and many others have written blog posts about the efforts that have gone into the development of Firefox 3.  For instance, you may have seen posts from the following people:

• Deb Richardson who has been blogging about the amazing new features in Firefox;
• Mark Finkle blogging about Firefox 3 Parental Controls and native JSON parsing;
• Gen Kanai writing about UTF-8 support in the Awesome Bar

Over the next few days, I’ll be linking to posts written by three of our localizers who I asked to blog about their experience localizing Firefox 3.  I tried to find three people who represented distinct areas of localization.  I asked them to tell us about their work, a bit about themselves, interesting challenges they faced along the way, and any other stuff they wanted to mention.

First up is Friedel Wolff.  You’ll remember Friedel as the lead tools developer of the Translate Toolkit.  Additionally, he works on localizing Firefox in Afrikaans.

I’ll let him tell the rest of the story…

Of course, if you have a story to share, ping me or comment in this blog.

After reading countless blog posts on planet about Download Day and a chance to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, I admit, I got a bit of nostalgic and curious.  So, I thought I’d write a bit of different post than the ones we’ve read so far…

To start, how cool would it be to add this record to our list of cool things done by the community?  Since I’ve been working at Mozilla, I’ve gotten to participate or witness Firefox Flicks (the very tale end of it), the Firefox Crop Circle, and Operation Firefox.  All were such cool community-driven ideas.  This is just one more to add to the list.

But here is why I felt nostalgic:

The last time I paged through a GBWR was probably in the 4th grade (sometime in the late 1980s), waiting at the library for my mom to pick me and my brother up after school finished.  At the time, there really wasn’t a more sought after book to page through for a young guy like me.  The pictures alone were awesome!  I’d go straight to the page which showed Moses Malone palming a basketball and almost slam dunking without jumping…just standing.  There was the woman with the longest finger nails in the world.  Then, there was the Mongolian man who stood 7′9″ tall.  And, then the World’s Largest Pizza.  Does anyone else remember any others?  Please comment with some pictures!

All the nostalgia, got me thinking…what’s today’s book look like?  And, who’s going to be our company in the present day GBWR?  Without trivializing how cool this record will be, I decided to pull out some of the more fun records I could find, very similar to the crazy records on the Download Day site.

You gotta admit, this is some pretty good company:

“The world’s highest ranking law-enforcement camel is Bert, who was accepted as Reserve Deputy Sheriff for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, San Dimas, USA on April 5, 2003 and regularly goes on patrol with his handler Nance Fite (USA).”

“David Huxley pulled a Boeing 747-400, weighing 187 tonnes (184 tons), a distance of 91 m (298.5 ft) in 1 minute and 27.7 seconds on October 15, 1997 at Sydney, Australia. David has now retired from the strongman circuit. He currently owns and runs an event management and public relations company called Tartan Warriors, based in Sydney, Australia.”

“It’s death defying, it’s daunting and it’s downright dangerous. But, England’s John Evans balanced a 159.6 kg (352 lb) Mini on his head for 33 seconds at The London Studios, UK on May 24, 1999.  John’s a gigantic guy. He’s 2 meters tall and weighs in at 155.7 kg (343 lb). But it’s his 60.9cm (24-inch) neck that’s the only part of his body strong enough to take such immense weights.  This big fella has broken 25 records in 11 categories and is going for more.”

“The longest journey on a lawnmower is 23,487.5 km (14,594.5 miles) in 260 consecutive days by America’s Gary Hatter. Hatter started his drive through Portland, Maine, on May 31, 2000 and passed through all 48 continuous US states as well as Canada and Mexico before arriving in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February 14, 2001.”

“A Fender Stratocaster guitar signed by a host of music legends fetched US$2.7 million (then £1.57 million) at a charity auction for Reach Out To Asia at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Doha, Qatar, on November 17, 2005. Stars who signed the guitar included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Brian May (all UK). The Reach Out To Asia campaign seeks to support worthy causes around the world, with particular emphasis on the Asian continent.”

****************
We have to get in this book! This is great!

Please add more records to the comments in this post.  Seriously, what else is out there?  It’d be great to have this post be a catalog of the great world records out there.

I hope you don’t mind for just verbing the word “planet”…

but, I forgot to tag my last three blog posts so that they showed up on planet.  I think the new Word Press interface overwhelmed me, leaving me a bit clumsy.

Here are the links with quick descriptions:

• A post from May 12 about the Screencast Contest…please read it!  I talk a bit about why I think this contest is important…
  
• A post from May 21 showing a few localization video demos from Translate.org.za… You might have seen this because Brian King blogged about it here.
  
• My day yesterday (May 27) at the Net Squared conference. You may have seen this one because I re-planeted it today.

I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon learning the ins-and-outs of the interface.  (It’s not that hard, Seth, comeon!!)

Staś and I had a nice Mozilla Community moment last week.

Turns out, some people have been reading our blog about the Community Survey program.  So, that’s not really a big deal since we syndicated it on Planet and have been writing a lot about the first three surveys.  (Here are links to surveys #1, #2, and #3.)

But, the cool moment came when a statistician named John Williams from New Zealand approached me and Staś and offered his expertise for the survey program.  He’d been reading our write-ups and decided that he could probably add a bunch, noting that he really liked what he read so far and would like to help take the analysis even further.

Here is a quick bio on John:

“John Williams is a lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He specialises in teaching Marketing Research and has degrees in Marketing, Economics and Statistics.  He has been using Free Software since before the turn of the millenium, and is attracted to the consumer empowerment and related business issues that Free Software raises.”

John introduced himself and we immediately set a meeting to discuss his involvement. The meeting was easy to plan even though I am in California, Staś is in Poland, and John is in New Zealand. After our initial discussion, he did the following:

• re-analyzed survey one to confirm results and give some new insight;
• introduced new techniques to our plan, including “Principal Axis Factoring” to compliment our “common factor analysis”;
• created this wiki:  http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Community_Surveys;
• started a new IRC channel #surveys;
• and challenged us to think about managerial questions we should ask after seeing the results of our “satisfaction-based” questions.  Why did someone answer with a lower rating of satisfaction on one question compared to another person?  And, what do we do to fix it?

John also volunteered to finish the analysis of the second survey, which has been lingering for a while due to the two other surveys we have been conducting and other obligations like Staś localizing stuff for Firefox 3 and me working on the Screencast Contest.  (Did you submit your screencast yet?  You know you want to enter, just get it over with and do it!)

So, why did John volunteer to do all this for us?  His quote was something like, “Hey, I do this kind of stuff for big companies all the time.  It’s nice to get to do it for an organization like Mozilla, which is really making a difference.”  That’s paraphrased, but you get the picture.  What a guy!

Thanks, John.  We’re looking forward to your experitise and contribution.

A few of us headed over to Cisco today to attend the annual Net Squared conference sponsored by Tech Soup.  I’ve blogged about Mozilla’s involvement with the Net Squared confernce a couple months back. Today, we got to see a number of very interesting projects that are using web technology to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Some of the projects I met:

• Maplight.org - brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics.
• reframe it.com - a web browser plug in that creates a space for comments in the right hand margin beside any web page.
• OpenCongress - brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.
• HealthyCity.org - improves the ability of low-income, underserved children, adolescents, and their families to access services and advocate for critical resources in their communities.
• The Genocide Intervention Network - empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

All of the organizations participating can be found here.

I also ran into Nick Reville and Holmes Wilson of the Miro Project.  Remember Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundaiton?  Mozilla helped them out with a grant last year.  These guys have brought Miro a long way, but could still use some help.  I offered to Nick to try to help with some fundraising and scaling challenges.  If you want to help out, please let me know.

In my opinion, getting “off-campus” and going to conferences like these is worthwhile for a lot of reasons.  For one, it’s always great to meet people who are doing really high-impact work like the organizations listed above.  And, in almost every case, these organizations have or are hoping to use Mozilla to created addons for their constituents that relate directly to their work.

Finally, going to a conference like this reinforces that hybrid organizations like Mozilla (and by “hybrid”, I mean that we have the a non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit subsidiary Corporation) are faced with a lot of non-traditional challenges.  Somewhere down the line, a few of us at Mozilla are hoping to do something meaningful in order to get to the bottom of a few of these core challenges.  We’d like to examine how Mozilla can take what it has learned about scaling and help other organizations do the same.  Perhaps a scaling/marketing challenge?  We’re just starting with the idea, but more to follow in the coming weeks.

I’d like to point everyone to a set of screencasts available for download on the l10n server.  These videos demonstrate the functionality of Translate.org.za’s set of localization tools, including Pootle.

At my request, Dwayne Bailey and Friedel Wolff worked very hard to produce these videos so we could have screencasts showing just how to use their tool set.  Thank you so much, guys!

Their software is available for everyone to use, but only if you choose.  If you’d like to learn more about the project, click here to reach their home page.  Or, you can click here to get a glimpse at the code and other aspects of the project.

I asked Dwayne and Friedel to create the demos so that our Mozilla l10n team and the Mozilla community could get a much closer look at the tool set.  We have been working with Translate.org.za over the past several weeks on a grant proposal where Mozilla would provide them funding for their project to help them advance their overall mission.  Additionally, many of our existing localization teams are using the Toolkit to translate Firefox and Thunderbird.  Empowering them to make their toolset better seems to be a good thing for the Mozilla community.

…more details to come soon about the decision of the grant proposal.  For now, please take a look at the screencasts, tell me what you think of the software as an option for a translation tool, and reach out to me/Dwayne/Friedel with your ideas or questions.

Recently, I’ve been helping David Tenser with the SUMO Screencast Contest, which will launch this Monday, May 19.  You’ve likely read about it in the about:mozilla newsletter and on the SUMO blog.  Please consider participating!  Although the microsite for the contest is not live, we are launching the contest through Spread Firefox.  Therefore, we’ll send the link around next week so you can learn how to enter the contest and submit your screencast.

Before I go further though, here’s a bit of why I got involved.  This quarter, I decided to work more closely with David and the support team to help build the SUMO community.  Three weeks ago, I blogged about my experience with Mozilla Live Chat! and why I thought it was an important experience for me to have tried as a Mozilla contributor.  Live support is such a great way to help end-users, and highly educational, but it is likely that it will have some challenges of scale.  Nevertheless, that was one effort by me to become more involved and I’ll keep participating when I can.

Another project I’ve committed to working on is the contest.  David and I came up with the idea to host a contest where anyone could create a screencast that visually demonstrates the instructions that are spelled out in any one of the top 100 support articles in the SUMO knowledge base.  Our thinking was that if we could get people excited to help produce cool, short screencasts that illustrated various support topics, not only would it lead to some great content for the SUMO site, but also to ongoing contributions from interested volunteers.  We’ll see if we are proven right or wrong, but David and I have high hopes.

One reason I find this one so important is that a good screencast can serve as the unique user experience that bridges a well written how-to article together with live support.  With a set of great screencasts, a user not only will read the accompanying article that might solve the issue they are having, but also he or she will see exactly how to perform the fix to the problem.  Without being able to provide live support to every single end-user (we have north of 150 million of users these days!), screencasts are a leveraged solution that come pretty close to live support.  I know I have benefited from live help with other technologies, but also have found that a great screencast can be even more helpful.  I can go back and watch it again, pause the video, and share it with others.

So, if you have time and interest, please participate!!  We have great prizes:

• a unique run of t-shirts for those people who submit the best screencast for each of the 100 articles (yes, that could be as many as 100 winners if we get enough screencasts submitted!)
• and, a grand prize for the best overall video…ok we’re still keeping it a secret, but you can use it to record stuff and then play that stuff back…

Looking forward to receiving your entry!

Lately, I’ve been managing two blogs, this one and the Community Surveys blog.  I wasn’t sure how many people subscribe to planet.mozilla.org or just to the feed for my blog, so I thought I would cross-post what I’ve been writing there.

Two links:

• A series of posts reporting the results from our first survey about the Mozilla Community
• The ongoing series about the results from the second survey regarding Mozilla Support

Many thanks to my colleauge in this effort, Stanisław Małolepszy.  Staś (his nickname pronounced Stosh) has created every graph you see in these posts and done the bulk of the raw data analysis.  Together, we’ve done the interpretation of the data and drawn the conclusions we’ve made.  Though I have done a bulk of the writing, Staś has also taken first cut at many of these posts, and then I have edited. As a non-native English speaker, Staś has really been able to write some eloquent parts.

Every now and again we all get to work with a colleague who seems to catch every error, suggest great ideas, and complete your thoughts.  That’s Staś.  Hope you all get to work with him one day.  Here is his blog if you want to see what he’s up to.

Umm…you might have to read Polish…but the pictures are cool!

A series of blog posts has been written about how we might start to apply the idea of “Powered by Mozilla”.  I’ve read posts by Slater, Tiffney, DougT, and David Boswell.   These posts all came just before or after a nice lunch time conversation we had about what the term “Powered by Mozilla” actually represents.  If a project used the term, what exactly did that mean?  Lots of thoughts emerged, but I came away thinking that we should start by defining some easy cases where we would feel comfortable with a project using this phrase.

Building on that idea about a week ago, I invited Harvey (Mozilla’s internal legal counsel) and a few others to sit with me and Asa, where we would draw the code stack on a white board and literally start circling the aspects of that code that would have to be included if we were to encourage someone to say they were powered by Mozilla.  The drawing looked something like this:

Luckily, Brendan then walked in the room and the conversation got even more focused.   One point that was mentioned was that any “Powered by Mozilla” app should be, at least, Interenet-enabled and should align pretty well with Mozilla’s mission/vision. Brendan and Asa really helped drive the discussion of the code and what has to be involved to define an applicaiton.

So, I began to think about ways that we could tell if the app was Internet-enabled.  I brought up the point that maybe an application powered by Mozilla has to clearly state that it uses the Gecko user agent.  That’s not too hard to tell, thanks to cool applications like this that Asa forwarded to me from Henrik Gemal’s blog.  With this service, you can see what user agent your browser (or Internet-enabled app) is using.  Wouldn’t this be a fairly easy way to determine some good cases? This particular discussion is ongoing and I am sure more posts will surface, but I do think this is one interesting and fairly straight-forward way to find applications that could make the claim they are powered by Mozilla.

On Friday, I participated in our first Support Day at Mozilla.  My last post talked about what I had hoped to accomplish during the day.  I’m proud to say that I did nearly everything except upload a screen shot to an article.  (I use a Mac and found that most of Mac-specific SUMO support articles also had great accompanying screen shots.)  I thought I would use this post to relay some observations about Mozilla’s support day.

Most of my day was spent doing Mozilla Live Chat! support.  After a few training sessions where I observed a member from our SUMO community doing live chat, I was cleared to take support requests from end-users.  I was struck by the importance of this experience — interacting with our users, answering what might be considered simple questions from within the walls of Mozilla, and learning a lot about our product.  My experience also begged the question, “Is the end-user part of the Mozilla Community?”.  Some may claim that the question is not really something to debate.  Of course, the end-user is part of the community, right?  Or, is our community simply the world of volunteers who help make our product ready for end-user?  You be the judge:  I learned from them just as I learned from those who help localize our software or help others write extensions.  And, I found myself asking, “How easy is our software to use and how well is our software designed for user interaction?”.

Here is an excerpt from a support session, in case you’d like to read about just how one went.  I’ve changed the end-user identity and edited out some parts to keep it short:

Friday, April 11, 2008

(12:43 PM) sethb: hi end-user51
(12:43 PM) end-user51: Hi.  Can you help?
(12:43 PM) sethb: so you cannot view your adobe documents with your browser?
(12:45 PM) end-user51: No.  The message reads”Cannot use reader to view document in your browser.  now closing.
(12:46 PM) sethb: let me do some research on your issue. i’ll be back in a second.  ok?
(12:47 PM) end-user51: ok.  Trying to get my proof of insurance so I can register my car.
(12:47 PM) sethb: ok…we’ll try to do this quickly.
(12:48 PM) end-user51: Thanks.  Work graveyard at a casino.  Had to stay up in order to do this.
(12:49 PM) sethb: ok.  what version of Adobe Reader are you using?
(12:49 PM) sethb: can you find that?
(12:49 PM) end-user51: Will check
(12:49 PM) end-user51: 7.0
(12:50 PM) sethb: ok
(12:50 PM) sethb: can you do one thing for me?  open a new tab in Firefox and paste (or type) about:plugins into the URL bar where you would type a webpage.
(12:50 PM) sethb: let me know when you’ve done that
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok, got it
(12:51 PM) sethb: i am going to see if your Adboe Reader plugin is enabled.
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok

I quickly found out from end-user51 that the plug-in was enabled.

(12:54 PM) sethb: is Adobe open?
(12:54 PM) sethb: try this:
(12:54 PM) sethb:    1.  In Adobe Reader, choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”.
2. Deselect “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
3. Choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”
4. Select “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
(12:55 PM) end-user51: sorry.  Got kicked off firefox.  Had to restart session.
(12:56 PM) sethb: no problem.
(12:56 PM) end-user51: ok. give me a minute.
(12:58 PM) end-user51: will retry my proof
(12:58 PM) sethb: ok.

The end-user followed this recommendation and responded:

(1:00 PM) end-user51: Yeah, it works!!  Thanks so much!!!!!!  Was stuck huh?
(1:00 PM) sethb: so now you can view your Adobe docs?
(1:00 PM) sethb: great.
(1:01 PM) sethb: if there’s nothing else, please go get some sleep and take care of me next time i visit the black jack tables.
(1:01 PM) end-user51: didn’t have to restart to get it to work.  Thanks again.  Good training excersize?
(1:01 PM) sethb: great exercise.  thanks.

A few remarks and observations about this conversation and my experience with Live Chat!:

1. “end-user51″ has a life!  Brilliant observation, I realize…  But, after reading that this person had been working the graveyard shift and had stayed awake to figure out this problem, I was somehow even more motivated to solve this quickly.   It took about 20 minutes for me to figure it out, but with more familiarity, I bet I could have answered this in under 10 minutes.
2. Why wouldn’t this person deserve anything less than a consistent, polite, and helpful experience from Mozilla?  That was my main objective.  If this person is coming to us for live support, there is a good chance that they are on the verge of frustration or even anger.  Maybe the person is even ready to ditch Mozilla for (gasp) “other browser”.  What a great time to recapture a user’s loyalty, no?
3. Is Live Chat! scalable?  To provide quick and superb support to end-users, it seems like we will need to have a big, reliable, and well-trained Live Chat! community.  Going forward, I will be dedicating a piece of my week to participate in Live Chat!, in hope to make it scalable.  Please join me.
4. Live Chat! is a great way to get your head out of the weeds and learn about how the product impacts the lives of end-users.  My guess is even the most gifted developers would learn how to make Firefox better if they participated.
5. Another shout-out to the community…  The articles that have been written to help end-users solve issues and the active members of the community who were online behind the scenes to help me help end-user51 were critical to my success.  Thanks to everyone!

I didn’t spend all day on Live Chat!.  My day ended by scanning five articles in the SUMO knowledge base and providing minor edits when necessary.  I competed the task, but again, I found that many articles were really well written and required only minor tweaks.  This is not to say that SUMO is in perfect condition - a lot of content still needs to be created.  But, what’s up is pretty darn good.  David Tenser (our fearless and ebullient SUMO leader) and I want to continue to build the SUMO community this quarter.  We’ll be trying creative ways to get more content on the site and to get more of you involved in the process.  Interested?  Then just ping me, please.