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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

Proposed Agenda

• QA update
• Community Development
• New localizations triage/Documentation
• AMO/Language packs - progress update
  • polemical langpacks, specifically the Valencian one
• All-Hands agenda
• Other

Attendees

WilC, Axel, Pascal, Seth, Mic

community dev

Notes from Seth's trip to India, for more information see Seth's blog

• Language issue in India is like going from state to state in the US where when you go across States it's a different dialect, using same basic Sanskrit
• Currently, there is a limited number of people who access internet - it is reserved for people who speak English and Hindi
• There is a strong correlation between English and PC users.
• 40-60M online. 1.1 billion total people
• There were people that Seth met on his rip who are trying to localize Firefox in their languages; two have been done Gujarati and Punjabi.
• There are 6-8 major Indian languages that we would like to get communities to localize; it would open up access to millions of local users.
• Met 4-5 different groups of people who are very enthusiastic about creating localized versions of Mozilla applications.
  • First an English-Indian version, then leading to many other languages like tamil, etc.
• The main group is called Mahiti organization
  • part of their team is contracted by the Indian government to localize Open Office.
  • They are very proficient and excited to localize Firefox.
  • Their objective is to ship free and open source software to Non-Governmental Organization's in India.
  • People that they are serving are in country side and could really benefit from this as it would shed light on an amazing amount of content that's being accessed elsewhere
• ACTION: Seth to point them to the [Category:L10n_Teams] pages to start with, so they can find existing groups in India and begin an in-country coordination effort first (connect existing teams)
• We discussed which path we should recommend they take e.g., official localized version with cvs status or doing a language pack - what should be appropriate
• The list of languages they'd like to tackle are: tamil, hindi, karnathaka, spengali, english-indian, gujarati (taken care of), punjabi, kelugu.
• We did inform them we do have existing efforts in one form or another:
  • Tamil - we have rough/tough team for Tamil
  • Hindi is probably not as good a state as it should be
  • Spengali is Runa who is working with RedHat. Redhat is big player in field who are tying to get localization in the field/India.
  • Kelugu - have two registration bugs for this; get someone to create a bugzilla account
  • Punjabi - strong team, good and established
  • Gujarati - strong team already exists led by ankit and nirav, connecting of the groups
  • Karnathaka - make sure that this is on the list of the ones that are suggested (state of Bangalore). ACTION to Seth to verify
  • En-In version - one suggestion might be to do something with GB version, new territory for this (how to grab existing build and do something with that); researching what would be involved in doing this version, L10n-drivers suggest creating a wiki page that lists set of requirements (less formal than a bug), suggestion is to patch GB less worries about QA and more worries about build/release
• ACTION Seth to connect Mahiti to the 3 groups of localizers already working on things
  • Ankit - Localizer in India who is really good, enthusiastic, knowledgeable about our process, will get them in touch with them also, take leadership in guiding them through would offload work on our side
• ACTION: bug - language selection features that google's offer in India, Mic to work with Product on this
• Another suggestion, have a special category for l10n India to get teams work together - could have a newsgroup for them moz.dev.l10n.india - localization issues that span india

Documentation

• We discussed lang pack vs building a localization; Axel asked for feedback on whether we do languages as language packs only?
• Example, Galecian, official language in Spain, long history of people giving up
  • Mic's view - give them the choice to make (point to documentation for understanding)
  • Wil - sees no issue with this approach
  • Pascal - minority language, do we "trust" team in long term; advantage of language pack is don't have to support it on website and so on, should remain in language pack; if "minority" language comes up and have very organized team would be in favour of supporting them; in documentation should make clear if get involved doing so for long term
  • Axel - is there a way to estimate how much web update work there is to do? how much maintenance work the web is for a localization team? in terms of what we expect them to do in response to e.g., bugs; how much work how often how likely to happen within a year; Pascal suggested there is not too much, with Google snippets (there is a problem on Google side)
• We agreed suggesting the localizer team choose their path after reviewing the Documentation is the best option
• ACTION: Mic to inform John and QA (Tim) on this decision

amo/lang packs

• API for AMO - we need a follow on discussion

all hands

• Reminder of Friday's meeting from 9a-12p

other

• Next week's call will take place on THURSDAY August 9th instead of usual Wednesday