ILUG-BOM, our last event in India

Chofmann and I made our last stop in Mumbai, arriving on Friday, July 20, and leaving yesterday at 12:20 AM (India time, July 23.)

Several contributors from the ILUG-BOM group assembled for the final event of our Indian Tour. It was held at the Homi Bhabha center, TIFR and many thanks to Dr. Nagarjuna G. for hosting. Dr. Nagarjuna is a driving forward the GKnowldege program, which is an effort to organize knowledge and produce a network of concepts interrelated to each other by appropriate relations. Nagarjuna is also the president of the Free Software Foundation, India and his doors seem to be very open for open source contributors. Thanks to Dr. Nagarjuna for making the event so nice and welcoming!

The ILUG-BOM event was initially organized by Nirav Mehta, who was one of the lead localizers for Firefox in Gujurati. He invited several of his colleagues and other enthusiasts to attend. We were so honored to have people travel distances far and wide to meet us. In fact, several came from Pune, which is at least a one-hour flight away. Thanks to everyone for making the journey. It rounded out a wonderful trip to India where we met so many people enthusiastic about the Mozilla community.

The day was filled with presentations.

• Chris and I gave the “Mozilla: Now and Then” discussion, where I spoke about the community and Chris gave a lot of back story on Mozilla and the growth of our project. We also opened the conversation for comments on “just-about-anything” (answering questions when possible ). Finally, we put out a specific call for contribution to localization projects and to community building in India. I believe we will try to do some very organized events in Bangalore and Mumbai, perhaps a Developer Day in concert with FOSS.In. If you have interest in participating, please contact me via this blog, Orkut, or Facebook.
• Ankit is one of the localizers in India and gave a great presentation on how to localize for Firefox. His knowledge of the process and description of the interaction he has had with others in our community (Pike!) was an awesome sign of the vibrancy, commitment and energy of contributors in India.
• We saw a great presentation by Shantanu Oak on an extension that translates all content on websites into a home language in India. You can experiment with it here. In Shantanu’s words:

“Whenever I see any page that is not written in Hindi script, I simply click on this option and read it in Hindi.”

• We also saw a presentation by Krishnakant Mane, a blind developer who is contributing a lot to Mozilla’s accessibility code. He told a nice anecdote about how he had submitted a bug related to accessibility issues and expected it to be corrected in a reasonable time frame. He went to lunch and when he returned 20 minutes later, the bug was fixed! He really gave a lot of praise to Mozilla for the attention that we have put into accessibility stuff. To see Krishnakant present was so inspiring! Congratulations to him. Chris and I left thinking that he should do a YouTube video on all the features he has been using and contributing to for those who have any accessibility issues. I also intend to connect him with Ken Saunders at Access Firefox.
• Then, a contributor named Siji showed some issues about printing India Sanskrit-based script from Firefox. He created and showed his extension, which solves a lot of the alignment issues when printing.
• Finally, Dr. Nagarjuna presented on an extension that he and others developed for the GKnowledge project.

You can read more from Kartik, one of the day’s organizers, at his blog: http://kartikmistry.org/blog/?p=343

The day was great. Thanks for attending, everyone. Please email or comment if you have questions.