[Anubad] Fwd: Are there ideas for locales with small number of contributors?

[sankarshan]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pascal Chevrel <pascal.chevrel at free.fr>
Date: Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:48 PM
Subject: Re: Are there ideas for locales with small number of contributors?
To: dev-l10n at lists.mozilla.org


Le 23/05/2011 08:18, Timur a écrit :
>
> I'm head of Firefox translation team for Kazakh language. Well, I
> think, the word "team" is quite exaggeration since there are only two
> of us who translate Firefox into Kazakh. Since Mozilla has switched to
> rapid release cycle I'm afraid, we may miss some of these rapid
> releases because both of us have jobs to do and families to look
> after. I believe this situation is not unique for Kazakh language. I
> think every other locale was (or even IS now) definetely in the same
> danger of becoming extinct. So how to increase number of contributors
> to the locale? Are there any locales with success stories of
> increasing nnumber of contributors? What are plans of Mozila to help
> such nearly orphaned locales?
>
> Thanks.

Hi Timur,

I don't have a magic recipe but I can tell you how I found volunteers
for my locale as well as other locales in the past. Of course, some
solutions can apply to your context and others can't but they may be a
source of ideas:

Wikipedia: I looked at who maintain the firefox and mozilla pages for
the locale, if these people regularly dedicate some time to maintain
those pages that means they would probably be interested in being part
of the Mozilla community (plus they have writing skills).

Inventory of Mozilla supporters in your locale and contacting them
directly: people blogging regularly about Mozilla, people maintaining
the Firefox/Mozilla packages in Linux distros, most active people in
open source forums, people twitting in Kazakh about open source,
ex-contributors to the mozilla project in your locale if they exist
(they could be interested in coming back), people that may have
translated add-ons in your locale etc.

Being present at all the open source meet ups I can, for example this
week end I will be manning a booth at Ubuntu Party Paris and one of
the main purposes of the booth is to attract people that could become
volunteers. It is not uncommon to meet people in open source
gatherings that are actually at the event because they are looking for
an open source project to contribute to.

Spreading the word regularly on my blog, twitter account, mozilla
community forums. I also maintain a couple of "Beta test Firefox"
threads in open source forums for Linux distributions, another source
of contributors.

Setting up an IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for your locale, that
proved to be quite efficient for French and Spanish at least.

Advertising the lack of volunteers on mozilla and mozilla community
websites, for example in the past I found translators after a call for
help in Babelzilla forums, I also often had volunteers showing up
after news items on mozilla-europe.org or short messages placed on
about pages.

Also an advice, do not reject people that want help in other areas as
localization (marketing, code, support...), they are necessary to
create an ecosystem around your locale and they can also help on
localization at a later stage, especially for web properties.

There is also the possibility to put a call for volunteers on some key
pages or even in google snippets, we usually don't do that for major
locales because the number of requests would probably not be
manageable by the community but for a small locale in terms of
end-users, that should not be a problem.

As an experiment in geoIP and if our Russian localizers agree we could
also indicate to Russian users from kazakstan that a Kazakh version
exists (I coded that yesterday on https://stage.mozilla-europe.org/
but I would need you to load the page and confirm that geoIP is
working).

Regards

Pascal
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-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>