“In Mozcamp i said, mozilla is no helping just to translate firefox to mayan, mozilla is helping to rescue and make strong the mayan language. Well, i’ll send it and we’ll be in contact.” [sic]

Aw, shucks.  That just makes me happy.

Maybe I have delusions of grandeur as I sit here and sip my Kool-Aid, but I think there is something critical to language preservation happening in the Mozilla localization project for cultural anthropologist and linguists to study.  I’ve discussed this topic with other Mozillans who are interested like Tiffney Mortensen, Chofmann, Staś, John Lilly, Søren Skrøder (Mozilla Denmark), and Kadir Topal (Mozilla Germany).  Every time we ship a new version, even for some of the most niche locales, Mozilla helps just a little bit to preserve the culture of language and communication.  Imagine how unique an experience it becomes for a total newcomer to browse the web with an application whose user interface is both translated and customized for local use.  That can be very powerful and is why we want Mozilla locale count to continue to grow.

To see a little more about what our Mayan friends are doing, check out these links:

• Mayan Firefox language pack
• Screen shot of Mayan Firefox
• Mozilla México en Mérida, Yucatán
• Local press

Do you know of a new localization effort?  I will pay chocolate dipped cake donuts for every referral that becomes a localization.  

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• Population is 92 million, online population is between 20-24 million
• English is one of the official languages of the Philippines.  Tagalog is spoken by roughly 22 million people in and around Manila.  Cebuano is another language spoken by nearly 20 million Filipinos south of the Luzon region (where Manila is located).
• Depending on what factor we use as a multiplier for our blocklist/AUS ping data, we can estimate that between 3 and 6 million Filipinos are using Firefox.  That is a rough guess, but it places Firefox market share at a low-end of 12.5% and a high-end of 30%
• Most people we spoke to browse the Web in English (Firefox US version), but some did suggest that a local version would have appeal.
• Even further debate arose on whether a Tagalog version would have traction, with an audience of bloggers at Wordcamp responding collectively that it might not.

That latter point does not rule out Mozilla shipping a local version of Firefox.  But, like every other localization, if we were to ship something localized to the Philippines, it will be because a local community member(s) responds to my call to action and decides to help us complete the body of work.

Obviously, Mozilla Firefox is taking off in the the Philippines, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see if the nascent community stepped forward with an offer to localize Firefox.

Finally, take a look at some stats about Firefox in the Philippines.  (All numbers are based on our blocklist data.)

Growth of blocklist pings over one year

The Philippines is #4 on the list

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1. To gain further insight into the landscapeof the Web and Internet in the Philippines;
2. To assess whether or not a localized version is something our community here mightpursue;
3. To meet our community of campus reps and others.

It’s been a steamy (as in the humidity), but amazingly kind reception here and we booked our schedules full with meetings and events. That’s all Gen’s amazing work.

As for my WordCamp chat, here is my presentation. I started by taking the audience through our open web demos (video, canvas, svg, css, js etc. thank you Paul Rouget…), and then honed in on describing our Mozilla community, using localization as an example of how we are a global community of passionate contributors working to promote Mozilla’s mission.

My call to action was two-fold: the blogging community can help promote the Open Web through their blogs, AND, if people feel empowered to do so, let’s start a localization for Filipino users.

Feedback from these local bloggers was energetic, questions were poignant, and the message was embraced. My prediction, a Mozilla community here is going to take off if we continue to nurture, empower, and participate.

I am trying to embed the presentation here, based on some code that Gen shared with me, but it looks like it is not working.

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However, as we ramp up our efforts to localize Firefox 3.6, and a mobile Firefox, we have been reaching out to our “mn” community leader, Natsagdorj (Nagi) Shagdar, but have had no response to the emails we have sent.  I guess it’s an inevitability to have some turnover when a 100% volunteer community rallies together to ship Firefox in over 70 languages.  Building sustainable communities is critical to our ongoing success and something we take very seriously.

Therefore, this is an open blog post to reconnect with our Mongolian team in order to make sure everything is OK and receive a status update on the work/team going forward.  It would be terrific to receive an email from Nagi or others to let me know how to proceed with work on the mn locale.

This post serves a secondary purpose because we also would like to invite any others interested in joining the Mozilla Mongolian community to contact us.  We are looking for community members to help take up some of the localization effort so we don’t lose all that we have accomplished with the mn version.  Plus, we don’t want to let down thousands of our Mongolian users who will be looking for the latest and greatest when Firefox 3.6 comes out.

If you have interest in joining the community or know of anyone who might help in some capacity (even with simple referrals), then contact me through the comment section of this blog.  We have a robust set of community members and tools that makes localization easy and fun.

As a matter of fact, we are welcoming all newcomers, so just ping me.  Thanks, everyone!

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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.

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Soon after, one of us then makes contact to see if the people are ready or willing to start our localization process.  If the answer is yes, we give them the basic set of documents to get a localization going and we then start the work together, oftentimes with Mozilla’s l10n community helping to answer questions along the way.

Swahili, Romansh, and Oriya are a few in our near-term pipeline.  Which languages are in our longer-term list?  Maybe you saw Gen’s post about a Gecko-based browser in Khmer.  And, here’s a new one: a screen shot from new volunteers who are working on localizing Firefox into Azerbaijani. If you know of some other possibilities, please feel free to share them here.

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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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In addition to shining a bit more light on the contest, I thought I would also take this opportunity to explain a bit about why I got involved and what went into it.

I met up with David Tenser at FOSDEM in February and asked him what we could do to empower more community members to contribute to SUMO.  Our idea was pretty straight forward and focused: to empower community members to help build a more robust knowledge base for Firefox Support.

One way to make that knowledge base more helpful for end-users was to create screencasts for the most often reviewed articles.  And so, the Screencast contest was created.

We had a lot of options to consider when we first dreamed up this idea.  Would we host the video?  What software could everyone use to film?  How do we choose the articles for the contest?  David had thought a lot about this and had most of these qustions answered.   We wouldn’t host videos, but encouraged participants to use Jing Software to do the screencasts.  David also had a way of isolating the top 100 most frequently visited articles.

But, how would we promote it?  Would we create something like Operation Firefox that had a separately-branded microsite?  Or, would we use existing tools like Spread Firefox to showcase the contest.  We chose the latter for a few reasons:

• Leverage:  (there’s that word again…)  We didn’t have any external costs related to a third-party design firm.  Also, we were able to get front-page placement on Spread Firefox for the first week of the contest.
• Timing:  We could move pretty swiftly since the Spread Firefox platform was built to help do projects like this.
• Ease:  With all the effort our community has put into creating SFx, it was clearly easiest for us to use the tool that’s been designed for something like this.

I created the contest rules with Catherine Brady (one of Mozilla’s legal gurus) and wrote a lot of the content you see on the contest pages.  David chose all the articles that are featured in the contest and wrote a lot of the content for the site as well.  Finally, Tara came in and designed some really great art for us to use.

This was one of the more efficient and tightly run projects I’ve worked on.  We met each week for about three weeks and just kept knocking off tasks left and right.  I had the benefit of helping to guide the Operation Firefox campaign, so I lifted a lot from that experience.  Many thanks to David and Tara for working so hard with me to launch this thing.

Finally, a huge thanks to the community.  From your hard work, the SUMO knowledge base will have *hopefully* 100 great screencasts for more than 150 million users to access if they are having trouble with Firefox.  Very nice.

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