Our last trip to India was no exception.

On our first Sunday night in Mumbai (Feb 22), we co-presented with one of these organizations at a Mozilla community meetup.  The group calls themselves Pad.Ma or, in longer form, the Public Access Digital Media Archive.  The project “is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use.”  And, right on their website, they state their intentions to align with web standards:

Q:  Which browsers do you support, on which platforms?
A:  We currently support Firefox and Safari, on Linux, MacOS and Windows.  We do not support Internet Explorer. However, if you wish to endeavour to make the site work on IE, please appeal to IE to support web standards in their next version.

(In fact, for some fun, fire up IE and visit their website to view a strong statement from them regarding your present use of IE.)

More on the meetup, but let’s rewind by just a few hours before we met Pad.Ma face-to-face…

After a four hour roadtrip on the Pune-Mumbai highway, we arrived at our hotel in the cool neighborhood of Mumbai called Bandra.  Freshened up in about fifteen minutes, we piled two-by-two into autoricks and motored our way on a humid evening through the snaking streets to the event location.  Arun had treasure map-like directions that led us down narrow alleyways.  “When you see a cross on the wall, proceed a few more feet and you’ll see an apartment entrance on your right…” Arun read as we navigated through the Pali Hill district’s corridors.  Up a few stories and our eyes opened to a rooftop event with a large projection screen, bean bag chairs, a minibar with soft drinks and beer, and two big vats of local food.  We made it.

Invited by a local community member named Sanjay, about 25 people came to hear us speak about the Open Web and how we were building community in India.  After our presentation, the team from Pad.ma followed by showing their amazing work to archive movies on the web.   If you’re a movie person, this site will fascinate you, so please look around it.  The Pad.ma presentation was followed by their demo of the “Firefogg” addon, which allows you to easily convert videos to .ogg theora video compression format.

It was a nice tandem.  Arun chatting about the Open Web and explaining cutting-edge demos.  And, just when we thought we might lose the audience on how the technology could be applied, Pad.Ma presented their work and the Firefogg addon.  It was a nice blend of demos and practice and I believe the group’s imaginations were sparked.  The Open Web had been delivered to a rooftop audience in the Pali Hill neighborhood of Bandra.  Sometime during the evening, fireworks started to explode.  This was not planned.  An Indian wedding was taking place in around the corner.

Our first big event was the three-day conference at gnuNify ’10 held in Pune.  On Friday, February 19, we held an entire track to chat about Mozilla.  Arun gave a talk on web standards that seemed to be a crowd favorite throughout the entire trip.  Ragavan chatted about Mozilla Labs, and, since all of our Indian localizers are there, I invited Axel to join so we could chat about the new project “l20n” which I’ve blogged about in the past.  The rooms were pretty packed, in some cases, standing room was the only option.

I was particularly pleased that about half of our localizers cut out of work early on Friday to see Axel and me.  Not only did we chat about l20n, but we reviewed a new locale (मैथिली Maithilī), worked on moving Oriya out of beta status, and caught up in person with some of our most dedicated community members.

On Sunday, we held our annual entrepreneurs breakfast with local web entrepreneurs in Pune.   Arun lead the morning with a detailed discussion about the Open Web, covering the following:

• The Open Web as a platform
• Future of video on the Web
• Device orientation events in Firefox
• Font issues on the Indian Web
• The geolocation API
• WebGL and 3-D graphics

At the end of session, we held a small workshop where we split the groups into teams of three and asked them to come up with entrepreneurial ideas that encapsulated all that we had discussed.  The groups were given 10 minutes to come up with their ideas.  Then, each team had one minute to present to the audience.  We served as a panel, questioning about the idea, potential business model, etc.  Of the ideas we saw, four stood out:

1. A “Typekit.com” for indian languages – typekit.in
2. e-learning classrooms for physically impaired – using video capabilities of HTML5
3. A video mashup app – something like online maps with text to speech audio and video
4. Using the geolocation API from Firefox – giving users local search results through a map website

Everyone’s ideas were great, but we selected these as standouts and gave the winning team some Mozilla stuff.  We chose the e-learning idea.  We offered to follow up on specific ideas and questions if anyone had them.  The team that came up with the geolocation API use-case has already started their business and intends to experiment with the technology and promote Firefox on their local map website.

In conclusion, the event in Pune was a great weekend for us to kick off our Indian adventure.  We landed into familiar arms since we presented at gnuNify ’09.  Because of that, we saw many faces we already new and were able to really push our conversations to very technical levels and Mozilla-related ideas.

So, why blog about Holi? In addition to it being a fun holiday, I was impressed to see the Firefox/Holi site using the Mozilla Communities logo. Gandalf and I have been seeing the new MCS community logo spreading to new sites and being used in new ways. This was really one of our goals and hopes for the project….to have a unifying element that our community could use.

Tanmay, thanks for the heads up.

Here’s a link to their Firefox extension.

You don’t have to speak Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Konkani, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Arabic or Urdu to see how cool or powerful this is.  But, if you do speak one of those 18 languages, now you’ve got a tool to help create content your constituents can read.  And, that’s thanks to Lipikaar.

I’m blogging about projects like Lipikaar and Heredict because I want to see how we can impact the web in new markets.  Localization is just one small piece.  With website evangelism and the ability to create content, users will start to see dramatic increases in what’s available to them on Firefox and on the Web more generally.

Please help spread this project around if you are in India or speak one of the languages listed above.

I hope anyone interest will contribute or change their theme. We can help with that if you’d like.

Lastly, I posted this entry about GNUnify09 in India. But, I am afraid that it didn’t hit planet since I recently converted all the categories on my blog to tags. We upgraded our blogging software to WordPress 2.7 and that was one of the new features I used.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.