The new Verbatim registration

Verbatim is probably one of the least known and at the same time one of the biggest L10n tools at Mozilla. If you see localized text on one of the mozilla.org sites or Mozilla campaigns, chances are it was localized with Verbatim. Hundreds of localizers are registered for the various sites and languages that are managed by Verbatim.

Registration was always open at Verbatim, but to commit any localized text, you had to file a bug, print out the committers  agreement, sign it and send it back by fax or traditional mail. That’s quite a barrier, if all you want is just to help localize a mozilla campaign. Some time ago we made that easier by allowing contributors to take a picture of the contributor agreement and email the signature. But still, the agreement had to be processed by someone at Mozilla and only after closing the bug we’d be able to assign you commit rights.

Last week we went one step further and removed the necessity for the contributor agreement altogether. Now we ask you to accept our license agreement upon registration, and locale leaders can request commit access for any registered user. This will reduce the overhead for contributors and Mozilla staff significantly, and it will hopefully lead to more contributions in 2012 and happier localizers overall. Of course we are not done yet, you can see our immediate plans for Verbatim on the Verbatim planning page. One of the next steps now is to allow the management of contributors by locale leaders instead of the Verbatim admins.

Another feature we added last week is acknowledgment of contributors on Verbatim. We now have a page linked from the Verbatim footer that shows each languages with its supported projects and the contributors to each project. The next step for this is to allow individual sites to credit their localizers directly on the sites. And hopefully we can crosslink the names to Mozillians sometime soon, to make it even easier for new contributors to get in touch with our established localizers.

Implementing bureaucratic overhead is usually rather simple, but reducing it is an order of magnitude harder. Especially as organizations grow and people change, it sometimes becomes unclear why a process was put in place and sometimes the process stays even as the world changes and the need for it goes away. That makes it all the more important for each and every one in an organization to constantly re-evaluate existing processes to simplify them and to eliminate the ones that are no longer needed.

In the case of Verbatim registrations several teams at Mozilla helped to lower the bureaucratic overhead needed to contribute as a localizer. I’d like to thank Seth Bindernagel who agreed to start the discussion about that with me, and Gerv, who drove the change to allow camera-pictures as contributor agreements last year; Chris Hofmann and the L10n team, who helped to drive the main discussion on Verbatim and localizer tools forward, the legal team for reviewing our processes and giving us the green light; Mike Morgan and Laura Thompson for assigning the necessary web developer resources to make those changes happen, Peter Bengtsson for the fantastic implementation and finally Stas Malolepszy for his continued support throughout the whole process.

We have around 400 million Firefox users by now, that means that offering traditional support to them is completely impossible, especially since the support team has only 5 employees. But we still want happy users, and the only way that works is when users help other users. So, after evaluating the situation, we spent most of last year designing the best possible tools for our community. Because we are facing the same challenges most free software projects will face, I wanted to share our assessment and our solutions with the broader free software community, and since I needed a catchy title, it’s called “How to support 400 Million users with 4 employees.”

Instead of boring you with the slides, that don’t makes any sense on their own, I tried a little experiment. I recorded the whole presentation with my voice on it and exported it as a video. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but hopefully still useful. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I like to think that the Balkans event was as fun as it was productive. For us it’s important to reach as many people in their native language as possible, especially with support and that’s a goal we share with our localizers. We already had locale leaders for half of the languages spoken in the Balkan region, big thanks to Aleksandar, Edo, Milos and smo; and we added 3 more with Bulgarian, Greek and Mazedonian, another big thanks to Emil, Martin, Pierros, Contanton and Gorjan. This event was a first in that the locale communities set goals for themselves to track their progress. There we didn’t but here I pledge that I’ll try everything I can to help the locale communities to bring support to people in their native language. And hopefully we will have localized support for the top 20 articles in every language spoken in the Balkans by the end of the year

And a huge thanks to William and especially Gorjan (who is 17!), for making the Balkans meeting such an amazing event!

Patricia was so kind to translate this into Belorussian. How cool is that?! Check it out here:
Belorussian by PC

If you are a localizer and want to know about the popularity of an article, just ask in our contributor forums, I’ll try to come up with an answer quickly.

today is my first day as the SUMO community manager. I actually do plan to put that on my business card “SUMO community manager”. I guess it will lead to a lot of interesting questions And that will give me an excuse to tell people about the extraordinary privilege that I have doing just my job.

I have been with Mozilla for more than seven years now. I started as a localizer for Firefox (then m/b or Phoenix) and lead the German Firefox community ever since. A few month ago I applied for the position of the “Support community manager” at Mozilla. After all, managing a support community is what I’ve been doing for several years as a hobby.

I mean that’s the dream of most people, right? Getting payed for something you would do even if nobody happened to pay you. Turning your
hobby into your job. But it’s more than that. Now I don’t have to feel bad for putting so much time into it and I get to extend the scope of my
work, which is just awesome.

While leading the German community I had a lot of time to gain experience in building communities and working with them. I’ll still be
part of the German community, but now I hope to use that experience to work much more closely with the international community on global support issues at Mozilla. Coming from a local community I know the pain points of those communities and my hope is that as part of the SUMO-Team I’ll be able to guide the way to a much more localization- and community-aware SUMO.

So, all in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better situation to be in, I’m grateful everything worked out so perfectly and I’m excited to get
started. Oh, and I have one more blog post about why I think I have one of the best jobs in the world.

Mozilla hat aber eine riese Userbasis für Betatests, da liegt es also nahe, diese auch für Addon-Betatests zu gewinnen. Genau dafür ist der Add-on Compatibility Reporter gedacht. Wer den installiert, kann alle Erweiterungen installieren, auch die, die als nicht kompatibel markiert sind, und kann dann an Mozilla melden, ob das Add-on auch in der neuen Firefox-Version noch funktioniert. Diese Daten stehen dann den Entwicklern zur Verfügung und Mozilla kann direkt einzelne Entwickler anschreiben, wenn die Add-ons nicht kompatibel zu sein scheinen. Wer daran teilnehmen möchte, kann die Erweiterung hier herunterladen.

Die Nightlies  für Firefox 3.6 befinden sich unter:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.2-l10n/

Windows Installer
Windows-Zip
Linux
Mac

Die Nightlies für Firefox-Trunk:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-l10n/

Bitte beachten: Das muss mit einem sauberen Profil getestet werden, sonst wird in machen Fällen der vorherige Wert beibehalten.