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Nice finds
Now and again, we’ll come across volunteers who speak languages where we do not have a localization, but who look promising to join us for future Firefox releases. We receive references from everywhere: Gerv forwards me names from the comments on his blog; Gen does outreach at conferences he attends and then sends us information; or we find newcomers through our l10n newsgroup. 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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IIT Kanpur developer workshop using Bespin
We’ve wrapped up our stop at IIT Kanpur. Arun and I did a developer workshop last night…well, Arun led the workshop and I assisted. Nearly 150 people attended an we were there until after midnight, working with students for over three hours. The enthusiasm of the students was inspiring to see, and Arun and I felt very at home with this crew of young Mozillans. But, what made this workshop so special was that it was the first time the the web-based IDE, Bespin, was used by such a large group. All things considered, it was a big success. We found a few bugs, but used Bespin to edit an HTML and JS file using <canvas> to have the students draw an Indian Flag.
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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More from India, now in Kanpur
Arun and I just arrived at the IIT Kanpur and were welcomed by a crew of students led by Shanshank Chintalgiri and Surya, whose last name I didn’t catch. Surya actually came 2 hours by car to pick us up in Lucknow at the airport. We had a brief lunch at the Campus Restaurant and then went to the lab where we will host our three-hour workshop tonight. At that, Arun will lead a sure-to-be spillover audience through a series of exercises where students will demo Bespin (Mozilla’s experimental Web IDE) and run through other exercises with SVG. We anticipate spillover because last time this team hosted a kernel hacking session, they expected 50 and almost 400 showed up.
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:
- They are a tally of anonymous pings we receive on our update server.
- 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.
- The dip right around the year-end 2008/year-beginning 2009 is an IT glitch getting fixed.
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Moz Camp Delhi
Today, we arrived for the Mozilla Camp Delhi at the India Social Institute at 2 PM to a crowded room of Mozilla contributors and developers led by Mohak Prince, the most enthusiastic campus rep from Delhi. In just two weeks, Mohak organized a midday event that attracted somewhere between 75 and 100 interested folks. Three to four large posters had been created feature me and Arun’s visit. (I have some pictures forthcoming, but I left my USB cable at home.) Our names were spelled out on the 4′ x 3′ screen-printed posters.
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 formattingFrankly, 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/ -
More on the Screencast Contest
We are in the third week of the Screencast Contest, which has gotten a good number of submissions, but could certainly use some more. Early next week, we’ll start our final push to get more videos submitted, and the contest will close on June 15th. If you haven’t submitted a screencast yet, please go visit the contest home page, pick an article, and submit your entry.
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.
community website
