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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/ -
Travel
Yesterday, I embarked on a long journey where I will visit much of the Mozilla community. By the time I am done, I will interact with about 30 of our localization teams at various conferences where I will be a participant. Here’s an itinerary for anyone who might be interested in meeting up:
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 officeOn 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.
- 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.
- New Community tools, demoing Mozilla Community Sites project
- Improving localization tools, recapping Verbatim, demoing Silme, and discussing new ideas
- 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.
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Frequently Used Entries for Localization (FUEL)
Rajesh Ranjan is one of our lead localizers in India. Aside from working to complete the Hindi translation of Firefox, Rajesh does a lot of community organizing and outreach to open source enthusiasts around localization efforts.
He recently held a workshop to disuss a new effort called FUEL: Frequently Used Entries for Localization. Rajesh describes FUEL in a blog post with the following:
“…all major desktop related entries [needing localization] appearing on menus and sub-menus are not more than five-six hundred. So if we move to standardize a mere 500-600 entries and the process is backed by the active localizers and entities who get benefit from localization then we can make a successful move against the problem of standardization and inconsistency in software translation. This is the main idea behind FUEL.”
To learn more about FUEL, please read this post by Rajesh. And, here is one more link about FUEL.
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Some thoughts on Mozilla l10n
In the past couple days, the Mozilla’s dev-l10n mailing list has seen a thread of conversation asking about how Mozilla chooses languages that are shipped and what can be done to improve the process. I thought I’d write a bit on the incredibly hard work that goes into localizing and what might constitute plan for Mozilla post Firefox 3.
Mozilla relies on the volunteer contributions from a very dedicated community of localizers who work so hard to meet Mozilla’s standards of perfection. Contributors who choose to localize work with us to meet that standard and we do the best we can to meet their needs inside the pressures of release cycles. In fact, I wrote a post about the process several months back and illustrated it with some slides.
The Mozilla process is not perfect, but we hold high standards for user experience and expectations for Mozilla Firefox. We choose to ship our official, non language-pack locales only when they are ready as a bug-free experience for the end-user. Because of this, the process is very elaborate, detail-oriented, and complex. (see my linked to post above…)
With the help from those volunteers, we released Firefox 3 in a coordinated effort that included simultaneously shipping official versions of the browser in 46 locales. Two more are in beta status. And, 20+ language packs that can be installed in the browser as addons. That is incredible work from around 70 different translation teams. In fact, over 100 such highly-motivated teams have stepped forward to work at this on Mozilla projects over the last 10 years.
Internet Explorer 7 simultaneously shipped its major release in one locale…English.
Now that Firefox 3 has shipped, Mozilla’s l10n team and its community can focus both on getting new, official translations into the build and release process and on improving the existing process.
One way to think of the release process is like a train leaving a station. We do our best to try to get everyone to catch the next release train. Another release train (Firefox 3.0.1) will be leaving the station soon and we will be trying to get more localization aboard. Volunteers working on localizations come from all over the world. Brazil, France, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the list goes on and on. (If I didn’t mention your country, I meant no offense. You can see all the teams here.) Those contributors are working hard right now to translate our software in their native languages to make sure they are ready for the the next release.
As we grow as a global project (presently with over 180 million users), we continue to meet so many new contributors. You might imagine that at times we are overwhelmed with the level of interest from our developer, testing, localizer, and user communities. What a wonderfully complex challenge that contributors help make work in order to ship in 48 languages.
As the dust settles from shipping Firefox 3, we are eager to increase the number of localizations we ship and improve our process. It’ll take a strategic plan to make gains in our process and here is a piece of the plan I’d like to see take place:
- Globally, we reach out to individual localization teams and set up IRC or even telephone meetings,
- Figure out what is feasible to happen in the next 3-6 months for each translation team,
- Discuss plans for teams close to finishing translation on Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0.x, or Firefox 3.1,
- Address other agenda items for each team.
What do you think of this plan? Good idea or bad idea? Did I miss anything? If you have agenda points, let me know. If we set up these team meetings, we can add those points to our list.
Our goal is to get as many localizations that are close to finishing their translation, shipping when/if they can.
community website
