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Meeting Details

• 9:00am Pacific, 12:00pm Eastern
• 650-903-0800 x91 Conf# 206 (US/INTL)
• irc.mozilla.org #l10n-drivers for backchannel

Attendees

TimR, Mic, Axel, Pascal, SethB, Choffman, WilC

Agenda

• Other items: new Incubator tests (Axel)
• QA automated testing for Fx3
• marketing buffet for localizers (Seth's wiki page)
• helping localizers grow their community
• Fx2 post mortem, improvement items we need to pay attention to

This call actually took place over Wednesday and Thursday due to technical issues with the telephone system.

Incubator

Axel created a new version of incubator box last night. This does not just create incubator builds but also runs the same kind of tools on trunk localization (if configure wasn't broken). The incubator box is supposed to check in on Bonsai to kick off a compare locales test: succeed or warns, then generates a language pack for download. This tool also calculated the percentage of translation completed by comparing all strings that are not keys and figures out whether localized version and en-US has same string or not; so if says 70% that means 30% of strings are same as en-US. It includes all access and command keys so those are not in statistic; e.g., japan was 70% before removed these and then was at 90%. Generally speaking, 80% is good, 75% needs improvement. This gives us an idea of what's ready to go.

QA testing

Mic is still waiting on feedback. Clint is only available for a few weeks so we need to speed this up. Our objective is to get to a core set of values we want to test and get them into an automated framework. Axel noted he still had some concerns about the differences between the two testing paths we're trying to converge. ACTION: Mic bug list of recipients again

Marketing Buffet for Localizers

• Seth has an initial presentation to talk to localizers to help build communities
• We are generally concerned about giving too much work to localizers and them burning out due to work load. We're working towards how to better help localizers improve the locale ecosystem, not only the localizer or marketing side, having places where people who speak the same language could meet e.g., IRC in language channels, etc.
• For smaller locales where we have one or two folks doing everything, helping them with web presence to meet with others speaking same language and finding people to help them e.g., Greek, no forums or anything to support this. For smaller languages we need to help their community grow and not just localizers.
• We have some ideas like sponsoring paying hosting costs for smaller locales. For example, $500/year for hosting is a lot of money in different locales (while that may not be perceived as a lot of money in other countries). We are awaiting approval from the marketing team on these suggestions.
• The team had several questions:
  • Has the team considered administration efforts for e.g., a forum (thinking of experiences with German, whenever there is a security update)?
  • The team did discuss this and proposed two things:
    • in the short term creating smaller communities
    • in the longer term helping local non-profit organizations to provide semi-professional hosting to open source projects, this is common in France, in Germany where open source is organized and there are many legal entities helping and promoting open source.

Growing Localizer Communities

• In smaller countries, we need people to help us translate web pages, product, spread Firefox type information, etc. We also have longer term view to create stable good communities portals.
• The team has also thought about how to help connect localizers - mentorship program, Pascal has been thinking about this. We have asked some localizers to help new localizers e.g., Toni for Catalan has been helping Provençal (Occitan variant) project. Cédric has been helping Breton. This has not been organized, it's been ad hoc but it's a model that seems to be working upon which we'd like to expand if possible. The team is still contemplating if it needs to be formal, or just a thing that happens when someone new joins to ask if they want help and find people who are willing to help.
• Other ideas discussed were feedback forums and hosting costs: for example, the Romanian team opened a Google group, other teams do this as well. This kind of solution is good for small team 5-10 people on focused projects. Our objective is to encourage the community at large to grow. We want to encourage not just localizers (or core translation or technical skills) but writers and others to join.
• Another idea discussed is to create channel for each; however scaling issues were seen with this approach.
• We believe the Localizer should be the "middle man" to the broader community.
• We still don't have a concrete proposal to improve localization work for small locales
• One issue we've seen is that 2/3 of in product pages are done by product localizers. Bigger teams, have people dedicated to web localization to share workload. The team is working to create a page set on moz.com that's smaller so it's easier to get home page set up without all rest of it. The problem with moz.com is that the English version has many pages. One of the problems is whether we need to translate everything, so we've been targeting key pages like support, in product not much more than have on moz.europe or japan. We're trying to work as simply as possible. (which is not that easy). For all new locales, need at least 2 people one for in product pages and other for web. (this is based on experience at Moz.Europe)
• We need to create bug to find out how to make sure we know which localized content is up to date and which is not; something that let's people know where to volunteer to help; john may an opinion on this.

ACTION: mic to engage John in a discussion here