This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions.  We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox.  This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.

So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team.  We started by researching which locales lacked a download page.  Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe.  But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones.  We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month.  Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages.  Let’s see how it impacts downloads.

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I’ve used it so many times when images or text are small and I want a scaled up view of the details.  Also, I have to admit that sometimes my eyes get a little tired and it’s nice to scale text to a bigger size so I can read without focusing too closely.

How do you use Full Page Zoom?

So, before we get too far into it, here’s how to use full page zoom…

I use a Mac and love keyboard shortcuts, so I press Command and the “+” sign to zoom in.  Command and the “-” sign pulls me back out.  You can also go to the View –> Zoom menu and zoom in and out from there.  When hitting the command “+”, I can zoom in over and over again until the image or text I am viewing scales up to the desired size.  Once I am finished, I hit command “-” to take me back to the state I want.

(On a PC, you can use similar keystrokes with Ctrl + and Ctrl -.  Or, go to that view menu again…)

And, if you prefer it the old way, where you can zoom in on just the text, select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the View –> Zoom –> Zoom Text Only.  With that setting activated, you’re back to zooming just text.

One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists.  If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain.  This can be very handy for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility.  Readers who prefer a much larger text for reading will not have to re-zoom every time they visit their favorite sites.

What’s in that tide pool?

Let me give an example of how I have used this recently.  My friend Jordan puts all of his wonderful photography on his site he calls Nomadic Planet.  Recently, Jordan has started experimenting with high dynamic range photography (or HDR for short).  HDR allows photographers to take several photographs with different light settings to create a more dynamic range of exposures.  Nifty software allows the photographer to then combine all those shots into one, resulting in a final photograph with a depth of field that shows great detail in the foreground all the way to the background.

Jordan describes this as a beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau’i at Ke’e Beach State Park in Hanalei, Hawaii.  It’s a 3-exposure HDR taken on April 27, 2008.

But, I really like tide pools.  And, because Jordan’s HDR technique provides so much detail in the entire landscape, I want to zoom in on the bottom left corner to see if I can find any little shells or starfish or whatever.

Voila, FULL PAGE ZOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

Here’s the shot from my browser (I uploaded the screenshots to Flickr to allow me blog this…)

Anyone see a starfish?  I don’t.  But, thanks to full page zoom, I was able to get very close to the area I wanted to investigate.

Want more technical background on it?

Robert O’Callahan did two interesting posts about this feature a while back.  The first post you might want to read came in February of 2007 and discusses a patch landed by Eli Friedman that “is a major cleanup of the way we work with length units in Gecko.”  The second post worth reading again discusses the behavior the zoom implementation.

Without a shred of knowledge about this computer science behind this feature, I found these two posts really interesting.  Thanks to Roc for passing them my way as background.

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To start, how cool would it be to add this record to our list of cool things done by the community?  Since I’ve been working at Mozilla, I’ve gotten to participate or witness Firefox Flicks (the very tale end of it), the Firefox Crop Circle, and Operation Firefox.  All were such cool community-driven ideas.  This is just one more to add to the list.

But here is why I felt nostalgic:

The last time I paged through a GBWR was probably in the 4th grade (sometime in the late 1980s), waiting at the library for my mom to pick me and my brother up after school finished.  At the time, there really wasn’t a more sought after book to page through for a young guy like me.  The pictures alone were awesome!  I’d go straight to the page which showed Moses Malone palming a basketball and almost slam dunking without jumping…just standing.  There was the woman with the longest finger nails in the world.  Then, there was the Mongolian man who stood 7′9″ tall.  And, then the World’s Largest Pizza.  Does anyone else remember any others?  Please comment with some pictures!

All the nostalgia, got me thinking…what’s today’s book look like?  And, who’s going to be our company in the present day GBWR?  Without trivializing how cool this record will be, I decided to pull out some of the more fun records I could find, very similar to the crazy records on the Download Day site.

You gotta admit, this is some pretty good company:

“The world’s highest ranking law-enforcement camel is Bert, who was accepted as Reserve Deputy Sheriff for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, San Dimas, USA on April 5, 2003 and regularly goes on patrol with his handler Nance Fite (USA).”

“David Huxley pulled a Boeing 747-400, weighing 187 tonnes (184 tons), a distance of 91 m (298.5 ft) in 1 minute and 27.7 seconds on October 15, 1997 at Sydney, Australia. David has now retired from the strongman circuit. He currently owns and runs an event management and public relations company called Tartan Warriors, based in Sydney, Australia.”

“It’s death defying, it’s daunting and it’s downright dangerous. But, England’s John Evans balanced a 159.6 kg (352 lb) Mini on his head for 33 seconds at The London Studios, UK on May 24, 1999.  John’s a gigantic guy. He’s 2 meters tall and weighs in at 155.7 kg (343 lb). But it’s his 60.9cm (24-inch) neck that’s the only part of his body strong enough to take such immense weights.  This big fella has broken 25 records in 11 categories and is going for more.”

“The longest journey on a lawnmower is 23,487.5 km (14,594.5 miles) in 260 consecutive days by America’s Gary Hatter. Hatter started his drive through Portland, Maine, on May 31, 2000 and passed through all 48 continuous US states as well as Canada and Mexico before arriving in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February 14, 2001.”

“A Fender Stratocaster guitar signed by a host of music legends fetched US$2.7 million (then £1.57 million) at a charity auction for Reach Out To Asia at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Doha, Qatar, on November 17, 2005. Stars who signed the guitar included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Brian May (all UK). The Reach Out To Asia campaign seeks to support worthy causes around the world, with particular emphasis on the Asian continent.”

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We have to get in this book! This is great!

Please add more records to the comments in this post.  Seriously, what else is out there?  It’d be great to have this post be a catalog of the great world records out there.

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Building on that idea about a week ago, I invited Harvey (Mozilla’s internal legal counsel) and a few others to sit with me and Asa, where we would draw the code stack on a white board and literally start circling the aspects of that code that would have to be included if we were to encourage someone to say they were powered by Mozilla.  The drawing looked something like this:

Luckily, Brendan then walked in the room and the conversation got even more focused.   One point that was mentioned was that any “Powered by Mozilla” app should be, at least, Interenet-enabled and should align pretty well with Mozilla’s mission/vision. Brendan and Asa really helped drive the discussion of the code and what has to be involved to define an applicaiton.

So, I began to think about ways that we could tell if the app was Internet-enabled.  I brought up the point that maybe an application powered by Mozilla has to clearly state that it uses the Gecko user agent.  That’s not too hard to tell, thanks to cool applications like this that Asa forwarded to me from Henrik Gemal’s blog.  With this service, you can see what user agent your browser (or Internet-enabled app) is using.  Wouldn’t this be a fairly easy way to determine some good cases? This particular discussion is ongoing and I am sure more posts will surface, but I do think this is one interesting and fairly straight-forward way to find applications that could make the claim they are powered by Mozilla.

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The biggest challenge that I have had when interviewing these candidates is trying to find out how the potential hire will interact with our community and fit into Mozilla.

I remember my first few months working with the Mozilla community (I still feel so new!), trying to figure out just how it operated and what were “the rules”. I had a lot of ideas, but was really, really tentative because I didn’t want to be a disruptive force with bad ideas. So, I proceeded with caution.

I’ve been trying to tap into candidates’ understanding of Mozilla and how they’ll move forward when hired. What are their ideas? And, how do they plan to pull off those ideas? What do these candidates know about the Mozilla community? What tools are necessary for success? Finally, how do they plan to empower others to feel like leaders?

The questions are so open ended, I’ve realized I’m more exploring ideas, rather than looking for a perfect answer. But, I’ve learned some good things.

...on empowerment: Candidates I’ve interviewed have said some interesting things on how to empower others – like having really transparent and open communication, but making sure to follow-up. People who are empowered will probably look for some sort of endorsement of their ideas, even if they are charging forward with something on their own. Providing meaningful and timely responses to others who feel empowered is really important. Complete agree! And, I don’t think I could ever stop trying to become better at this.

…on tools needed for success: Talking about tools can get dangerously high-level and the conversation can become loaded with jargon. But, in this process we’ve uncovered some pretty common-sense things. Most everyone has said that setting up environments for community interaction and dialog is critical. Blogs, forums, mailing lists, events… Luckily, I think we’re doing this, too. I came away asking, “How can I do this better?”

…on marketing and the community: I heard a few times that any organization that wants to “build community” needs to genuinely want that. Anyone that comes to the community in hope to really just market a product will probably fail because the community will quickly see through it. That was a great point I heard. In my experience, I really believe that the Mozilla community drives this project and any effort we make toward marketing is really only done if the community wants it.

The big take away for me in this process is that interviewing for some of these “softer” roles is tricky. I think I am really trying to gauge if the person “gets Mozilla”. I say that pretty carefully because it makes it sound like Mozilla is some private club that is hard to understand. It’s not really too hard to understand. Maybe it’s more appropriate for me to say that I am really looking for an organizational/person/job fit.

And, if you’re a candidate and reading this, well, I haven’t shown all my cards. I’ve saved some tough questions for you when we chat.

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Frankly, the Q&A started a bit slow and the students seemed a bit shy.  Perhaps they were feeling some nervousness about their first visit or sitting inside Mozilla’s Mountain View office.  Nearly all of them were avid Firefox users and the few who weren’t greatly admired the project.  At this point, we did our best to engage the students.  It felt very much like grassroots campaigning or organizing.  We were surrounded by knowledgeable users of our software, but none had taken up the call to get involved.  That’s not to say the students were not engaged, but it became pretty clear that they may not have known how.  Fortunately, Mary had prepared a slide with several ways to get involved and we went right to that during the Q&A.  We began to brainstorm what this group could do to and what would be fun for them.

What’s fun for a college student?  Partying, of course.

The group decided that they would host a launch party at their campus for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.  That party might also serve as a starting point for their campus reps program.  After about an hour of visiting and touring about the office, the students left for Google seemingly enthused about helping Mozilla.

Why was this visit important and what did I learn? 

For one, Slovenia has the second highest market share of the Firefox browser, just behind Finland.  Both of these countries are over 40%.  (see the Xiti monitor study) According to this study, Firefox has 44.6% market share in Slovenia.  We’re always excited to welcome visitors to Mountain View, and we were thrilled to have students visiting from a country where Firefox has so much popularity.

Also, I was reminded about the importance understanding the audience to whom we were presenting.   We had to start at step one with these students, explaining the nuts and bolts of open source software development and what Mozilla has been able to achieve.  After we established that foothold, we were able to adjust our message and present a way to participate.  I think we did that and the result is that we have a group of enthusiastic students who will hopefully bring the Mozilla message back to their campus.

A final takeaway:  always have some good SWAG to hand out.  Yep…Stuff We All Get.  It can mean a lot to a visitor to Mozilla, if nothing more, it’s a nice souvenir for a tech student who visited one of the “big” companies in Silicon Valley.

With most every blog post, I like to end with a call to action.  If others have similar stories of community building, perhaps messages or presentation styles that were successful or anecdotes about trying to organize others, please do share them with us.

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From the student team’s executive summary:

“India being a country of more than 1 billion people with significantly growing number of internet users presents itself as a prime target crucial for the success of internet browsers like Mozilla Firefox. This report provides guidelines for developing the marketing strategy for Mozilla Firefox. We conducted extensive market research among college students because they are the most heavy internet user segment. This research was administered through an online questionnaire widely circulated among college students. The proposed strategy stands on three prime pillars – Development of community leaders via viral marketing, content development for targeting the Indian consumer and addressing the cyber cafes – the primary centre for internet browsing by the Indian youth. To address the cyber cafes, a field visit was organized but our efforts suggest that success of this initiative requires active involvement by Mozilla senior management.

“The success of this strategy would need high level of commitment from Mozilla in conducting campus campaigns for developing community leaders, targeted content development for Indian masses addressing their usage requirements and exclusive agreements with large cyber café chains. We believe this marketing strategy would enable Firefox in achieving larger market share and in becoming the first internet browser of choice for the Indian customer.”

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As it turns out, managing student teams to do community building on the other side of the world can be difficult.  But, I suspected that going in.  It was best to keep my expectations fairly realistic while setting goals for the students.  We accomplished some stuff with our projects, and I am still gathering final write-ups from a few of the teams.  Today, I’ll focus on Team 21 from the Indian Institute of Managemenet, Ahmadebad.

Team 21, led by Vijay Haryal, jumped right into a fairly comprehensive market research plan for Mozilla.  We’re going to post their final report to Spread Firefox, in the Firefox in India Group. Once we have listed the report there, please download it and read for your enjoyment.

The initial goal of the team:

To develop a marketing plan for the launch of Firefox 3 customized to the needs of the Indian community.

This was an ambitious goal, and I can say that we did not quite create a marketing plan for the launch of Firefox 3, but we learned a great deal from the students about the Web and Internet culture in India.

The team started by addressing the language issue in India.  I’ve blogged about this before, but a crucial aspect to understand about the Indian Internet culture that is different from other countries is the existence of over 20 languages spoken regularly by different groups within the country.   The team looked at the pros and cons of localizing Firefox in multiple languages and later surveyed users about this issue.

Additionally, the team created a plan for their market research.  It was fairly straightforward:

• Research frequent user behavior to identify some key attributes of Indian Web users through in-depth interviews and focus groups
• Validate what we learn about the attributes by looking at the demographics of those surveyed and interviewed
• Analyze the data
• Present the findings

All of this is explained in further detail in the forthcoming report we’ll post on Spread Firefox.  When it is loaded there, I’ll link to it.  (If you want an advance copy, email me or comment here and I will send you a .PDF)

Here are some main findings from Team 21:

• Position Mozilla as a more secure browser. To back it up, reach out to various financial institutions, encouraging them to enable their sites to allow secure banking transactions.  According to what Team 21 found, Indian users can only use IE to complete their banking transactions.
• Also, in order to make Firefox look and feel “more Indian”, in addition to the en-IN version proposed, Firefox should ensure that Hindi and Tamil fonts render properly
• Factor analysis shows that the users can be categorized into two main segments – one which is seeking technical features like compatibility & security, and the other which is seeking a browser with a more “Indian feel”
• Mozilla should start an evangelism campaign to convince Indian web and content developers to make their sites compatible
• India-specific user preferences, like addons for travel websites, should be promoted or included in some bundled download

I thought these were particularly helpful action points to learn about users in India.

In closing, this was a great project to do with the student team.  They did many things that got them involved quickly in the Mozilla community.  They took time to understand how we work by doing simple tasks like logging into Bugzilla and commenting on bugs.  They hosted regular calls with us via VoIP software.  They wrote many progress reports and sent them to us, copying their advisers.  Thanks, Team 21, for making the 13 hour time zone difference seamless.

Vijay has indicated that he would like to stay involved in some capacity.  As an engineering student who returned to business school, I hope he does because he has both the technical background and the business acumen to help spread Mozilla in India.  Thanks for leading the project, Vijay!

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