It’s been a few days now after the Mozilla Balkans 2010 first ever meet-up in Skopje, and all I can say is that I’m gonna remember only good things – because there were no bad ones! The very process of organizing this event made some of us thrilled about it, even a few weeks before the actual event. We all hoped that we’re gonna experience something good, and we experienced something awesome.

Photo credits: Emil Stanchev

On the first day, we had a pretty productive internal meetings, discussing about almost everything related to promoting, metrics and communities in general. The best thing about it was that almost all sessions were interactive, so this is basically the only time and place we had in years to tell every thought of ours, to argue about this and that, and to hear other people’s opinions. Face to face confrontations while discussing ideas about various Mozilla projects made it several times more funny than we’re all used to. After all, we’ve came up with a set of goals for all communities, and hope that we can achieve at least portion of those, so we could gather up once more, and set some new goals.

Second day in Skopje, public day event, was a story all by itself. A lot of sessions in front of all of us, a lot of interesting questions for Mozilla Staff, and a lot of fun. We had sessions about Mozilla in general, localization, add-ons, drumbeat projects, development, etc. What I noticed about those sessions, is that everybody were all ears, swallowing every word out there. Although there were not as many attendants as we predicted at first, I’d say that those who attended this event, were more than enough to make this thing happen and feel the joy while presenting Mozilla’s mission and its projects.

As traditional rule on Mozilla events says, we needed to finish up this awesome gathering with `kafana`, just to made that weekend even better. Some of us were having fun, the others were having a lot of fun; I don’t actually remember anyone rejecting a glass of rakija. We’ve had some pretty girls, we’ve had a lot of handsome geeks (led by handsome camera guy), great band playing Macedonian/Serbian folk songs, and we also taught a few geeks how to play oro.

All in all, this meeting is something that, I’m sure, a lot of us will remember the whole life, and all of us are proud that we could be a part of such a nice crew.

Hi Seth. Can you tell me a bit about yourself, how you got into working for Mozilla and what were your first tasks?

Sure. I first started working for Mozilla back in 2006 when I was asked to start Mozilla’s Community Giving and Empowerment program. With the help of Asa Dotzler, I was able to launch a program to help members of our community with reasonable levels of support that would both assist and amplify a volunteer’s or a community’s contribution to the Mozilla project. Because so many of our community members had their beginnings in the localization work, I learned a great deal about localization and the needs of the community. It was clear that Mozilla should formalize even further the localization-drivers team to increase our focus on the global distribution of Mozilla applications and websites. Because I had much exposure to our volunteers, I was asked to help lead the l10n-drivers team.

Can you compare the importance of localization against some other parts of a complex projects like Firefox?

From a technical standpoint, someone could argue that localization is not as difficult as hacking on the Mozilla platform code or doing php web development, and they would be correct!  However, that is a bit like comparing apples to oranges because localization is incredibly important to the release engineering process at Mozilla.  If we were not able to localize our code, our global audience would not have as rich a user experience as they do now with a localized product.  Localization touches many parts of the release process along the way to final release, including the user interface, QA, and build.  Therefore, our localizers often have to wear many hats, understanding how to translate the language of the user interface, how to access nightly builds, how to read html and php code, and how to test the versions ready for release.

How do you see the localization in the future, in terms of a popularity among localizers and its complexity?

I think the localization of Mozilla products has gotten easier in the past two years, with more tools, reporting, and documentation available for localizers to use. I also believe that it will continue to get easier. But, the important fact here is not to eliminate choice. Our volunteers should be able to choose how they want to localize products and websites, whether using a “slick” webtool or using a more technical code editor. The point is that we should make hard things easy and let everyone experiment and participate as they choose.

Can you tell me, based on your experience, can we expect more and more localizers, and what do Mozilla do to attract new contributors and to promote using the localized builds of its applications?

We work very hard to continue to attract new localizers. This takes a combination of steps. The first step is to work with local communities to help build contributors. If a local community wants to actively build new contributors, we need to work with them to push that authority to them and to the edges to make sure they are empowered to do so. We are in the midst of planning one such event now with Mozilla’s “Inter-Balkan Meetup”. The second step is to build tools for better localization. This includes improvements to our infrastructure, documents, and tools for translation. New localizers do not always know exactly how our process works. So, we need to create a clear path for them to engage and learn how to contribute. With those two steps in combination, I think we will always be adding new community.

What does Mozilla do to improve the ease of translation for its localizers?

One very specific step we have taken is to implement tools like Verbatim. If a localizer visits http://localize.mozilla.org, he or she will see all the open web projects needing translation for various languages. This brings the work flow and avenue for participation to the localizer in a fairly understandable and clear way. Secondly, we try hard to furnish up-to-date statistics about the state of product and web localization through our dashboards. Localization communities can always see the status of various projects (including how many strings are needing translation and where they are located in the code base) by vising this URL: https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/ If we continue to enhance our tools and streamline our infrastructure to provide to our localizers the most timely information and statistics about work needing to be done, we will continue to make the process easier.

What message would you send to all potential localizers reading this?

Give localization a try!

• If you speak a particular language, check out what needs to be done at the Verbatim URL: http://localize.mozilla.org.
• Contact the locale leader for your language. You can see who the locale leaders are for various language teams here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams
• Email me if you have any questions. You can find my contact information at my blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth

We always look for new contributors and welcome anyone with any level of experience to participate.

It’s finally there! A few weeks ago confirmed Balkans inter-community meet-up, second of this kind hosted by Mozilla Europe, will take place in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on (next) Thursday, 20th May. The meet-up will be separated in 3 major parts:

1. Internal meet-up for Mozilla staff and community
2. Public event led by Mozilla staff and community
3. General wrap-up of ideas

As noted on the official wiki page of the event:

The aim of the event is to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other’s experience working on the Mozilla Project and improve collaboration in the future. All participants are asked to help each other define joint quarterly goals for the year.

This event will actually be a gathering of several Balkans’ Mozilla communities, including Macedonian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian and Slovenian community. For the most of the things, we owe a beer to Gorjan, leader of the Macedonian community, for all his efforts over this few, very busy weeks of planning, organizing… Also, this all wouldn’t happen without endless support from our beloved Mozilla friends, William and Seth, among others.

When talking about schedule, we all agreed that we’d need a whole week to present everything we’d like to, and we needed to decide which topics need most attention. Therefore, we decided to talk mostly about promoting communities and its development, a little bit about development and add-ons, and also a bit about Support and Drumbeat. After all, we all hope that this is not the last meeting on Balkans, so we left some other topics for next occasion.

Mozilla Balkans 2010

Because most of you guys reading this post will not be able to attend this, we’re going to film it all so we can watch it again later and share it with all interested in it. What is most important, we’re also going to provide a live video stream for all of you to watch it directly in real-time, and we’re going to try to make the quality as good as possible.

A few last words: I’d like to thank all of you guys (you know who I’m talking about) for making all this happen, and of course, a big hearth <3 goes to Mozilla and Mozilla Europe for promoting and investing in our community!

One of the question that I’m asked about many times, and there is a really simple answer for, is how can a one get more people involved in Mozilla projects. Although it seems like a one would need to use some tricks to get people excited about and contribute to free and open source projects, I can say that that’s just not the case. I’m sure that a lot of people would contribute and get involved in Mozilla, only if we explain everything the right way. So, here are some guides on how to explain to potential contributors what’s really going on in the IT world and how can we change it, in 3 steps:

1. How good the Web can be and what’s its true potential
2. Internet that we’re now living in, proprietary and closed
3. Mozilla will change it, and with your help, it’s going to happen pretty soon

First of all, it’s really important to know what you want to achieve, and to truly believe in what you’re about to say to your friends or people you want to attract to Mozilla. The next major thing you have to think about is the current situation on Internet, in terms of a Free vs. Proprietary software and Open vs. Closed source. Of course that everyone prefers free over software that needs to be paid for before use, but I’d like to quote a Free Software Foundation page title, that says everything: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price”.

So, the Internet inhabitants that do not participate in any of the Free and Open Source communities, probably think that the Internet is just the way it is, and it changes as the time goes by, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Well, that assumption is VERY wrong, because we, the proud Mozilla contributors, among other contributors from other open source communities, are the true power of the Web, the ones that care about our future and doing our best to improve it. That means that we know how can Internet look like in a few years, what’s the true potential of it, and what can we do to change it to be even better.

Our virtual lives on the Web in its current state are not so bad, but that doesn’t mean that they’re awesome. There are a lot of things that are blocking the progress and we’re going to need to make people aware of them, of all its pro’s and con’s. Internet Explorer, as an pretty good example of how can a company control browser market share in the world, is a software that every second Internet users uses, and that’s not because it’s so good. It’s only because people are unaware of other options out there, and have no will to explore new possibilities offered to them. That’s pretty much discouraging contributors to keep on with their work.

Most of the Mozilla team in Prague (photo by Ludovic Hirlimann, used under CC-BY-NC license)

Fortunately, we’ve seen Firefox getting what it realy deserves, and we’re constantly working on to make it even better. More and more people are now using Thunderbird rather then the easiest option they have, Outlook Express, and that’s all because our awesome community which is promoting Mozilla products and technology. After that, there is another great thing Mozilla is doing to help spread awareness, and that’s offering the whole source code and a lot of documentation for developer, encouraging and educating people on how to use its platform for their projects.

So, as all of you reading this article can see, we’re almost there, we just a need a bit more work on it, and a little help promoting this, and we’re all going to enjoy the Free Internet. And what’s the best about it, it does not cost you anything, it does not take much time, and there’s a lot you can do about it. We’re a global community of contributors, and not all are Linux Guru’s nor are tremendous hackers. We all contribute as much as we can, and in a way we want to. Every help is appreciated! You can translate articles, do web or graphic design, helping with our user support, test our applications to improve quality, code add-ons, improve current code-base, or you can simply come and hang out.

As many of you already know, we’re planning an Mozilla Inter-Community meet-up on Balkans, in Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia. Among many discussion topics we had past month, I’d like to write about a one we need help with.

On the Balkans:2010 wiki page, you can find a lot of info about this forthcoming event, as well as a link to a page with logo proposals. Of course, we’re going to use Mozilla Communities logo, but we wanted to add something to (or around) it so we can have something unique for all Balkans’ communities. So, if you have some graphic designing skills, and are eager to help and contribute to this event, you’re free to check up on our proposals and create and submit some too.

Mozilla Communities

We all agreed that we shouldn’t involve symbols of the countries, because no one is here to represent its country – we’re all here to represent and promote our local communities and to follow Mozilla’s mission. Another thing we’d like to see is the 3 dinosaurs logo, and to possibly have it as essential part of the graphic we’re going to use on our T-shirts and fliers. So, maybe the best way to do it would be to add some text to MCS logo, or some tiny graphic somewhere around it. Anyway, idea should be all yours, and all 10 Mozilla local communities from Balkans would be grateful. You will also get a T-shirt and a thank-you-letter signed by all Mozilla lead community members and Mozilla Staff attending the event.

If you have any proposals, you can register an account on Mozilla Wiki, navigate to logo proposals page, and attach your graphic. Or, if you’re too lazy to do that, you can just visit contact page and send me a link to your design(s).

Whether you do or do not participate in this, please share this post on Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace or wherever you can. That way you’ll help us get a logo that we deserve. Thanks!