Because we wanna give a general overview of this meeting by our own upcoming post in the European blog, I want to focus on the actions and results of the community meeting. Because there is too much to say I’ll list everything from our notes:

Schedule
12.00 - 13.00 Brunch, informal talks
13.00 - 13.30 Talk about Mozilla Europe by William
13.30 - 14.00 Talk about Mozilla Website localization by Henrik
14.00 - 15.00 Talk about SUMO and MDC by Kadir
15.00 - 15.45 Coffee break
15.45 - 18.00 Talk about new Websites by Kadir and Henrik / general discussion

Presentations / demos
William

• Overview of Mozilla Europe and its work in Europe
• How Mozilla can help local communities

Henrik (Demos of)

• Localization needs for websites of Mozilla Europe, Google snippets, surveys and special events
• Overview of the processes
• Overview of tools

Kadir (Demos of)

• support.mozilla.org
• developer.mozilla.org
• forum and wiki on firefox-browser.de

Discussion about new community website

General Discussion

• People didn’t know that we are in need of help
• The coordination newsgroup was either unknown or people said that they don’t use newsgroups
• People don’t want to use Bugzilla (need for a simplified UI or another tool)
• There is no style guide people can follow when translating
• There is no glossary to look up common words to be consistent

Next steps:

• We need a status page, where people can see at first glance if we need help and if yes in which areas and whom to contact
• We have to rethink the way we coordinate work right now using newsgroups and Bugzilla. A forum could be the way to go here
• We need to work on a style guide, possibly reusing parts from the style guide of erweiterungen.de
• There is a glossary for extensions at babelzilla.org, managed by Jürgen Berg. We need to contact him to see if we can reuse that for all German localizers

Mozilla Europe

• The language selector on mozilla.com is at the bottom of the page, but most people don’t even scroll down, so they don’t get to see the website in their own language.
• The Google Snippets are outdated and are advertising Firefox 2

Next steps:

• We should move the selector to the top of the page or automatically serve users the website in their own language (bug 454890)
• Pascal already sent the snippets to Google and we have to wait for the new ones to be included (bug 444568)

SUMO

• People say that SUMO ist too slow to work with. That’s why they prefer other options.
• At the moment we have only the former internal Firefox help on SUMO.
• People think that SUMO has a corporate feel to itself and are afraid that they won’t be able to write as freely as they can do on the community wiki.
• One really big advantage of SUMO is it’s ability to show different versions for different browsers and OSs.
• People were not aware that they could write new articles without an existing English version
• There is some discussion about license problems when porting our wiki to SUMO
• SUMO still has some annoying bugs like not working language sniffing.
• One big problem is, that even a punctuation correction in the English version marks the German version outdated. This is a known bug, but still unfixed.
• In the community wiki everbody can start new articles and correct existing ones. On SUMO there is too much overhead with article versions that need to be made public.
• Most people have not yet looked into SUMO. After the discussion they are not opposed to moving to SUMO, but the points above need to be addressed.
• We have rescheduled a voting about moving to SUMO until everyone had the time take a closer look on SUMO.

Next steps:

• We need to talk with the SUMO team about possible speed increases for the website.
• We need to talk with the SUMO team about the language selector (bug 452825) and significant edit (bug 431501)
• We need a lot more peers on SUMO, so people don’t have to wait for their articles to be made public. Especially outside of the core help.
• We need to sort out any licensing problem with the wiki. That should be not so much of a problem as we know most of the contributors and can ask for a relicensing.
• We’ll need to have an online discussion about moving to SUMO in about a month, when everbody had a chance to look into SUMO

MDC

• Has just moved to a new wiki, localization is unclear
• Some communites have a huge amount of content translated into their language
• German is grossly underrepresented on MDC
• Nobody is in charge for the localization of MDC right now
• A German translation could help to make the technology behind Mozilla more popular in Germany

Next steps:

• Getting in touch with other locales, how they handled the amount of work needed
• We need to find someone to lead the localization of MDC

New Community Website

• The current website is 6 years old and was created as the official German Firefox website.
• Now the official website is Mozilla Europe. Our website has to reflect that change in status.
• A new name (www.camp-firefox.de) is proposed to show that this website is really only about the community.
• The new website needs to be more active. With extension of the week, aggregated blog posts about news in the Mozilla world etc. The forums need to be more prominent and the wiki or SUMO has to be more visible than it is now.
• To do that, we need to move to a new server and Drupal as a CMS.
• Gandalf is alreay working on a community pack which will include Drupal, phpbb and other software (e.g. SUMO). As we will move to that system anyway we can help Gandalf in testing it.
• The forums will be a big part of the new website. Currently we have only one active moderator left and the forums are getting only more popular, so we urgently need more moderators.
• The last few months and years have shown that some forums are more active than others, we need to change the structure of the forums to reflect that change in interest.

Next steps:

• We need to talk with people who agreed to blog about current developments in Mozilla world, to include their post into the new website
• Several people stood up for the moderation work in the forums. We need to decide with whom we want to work
• Moving to another server and to a CMS will take somewhere between 2-3 month. We’ll get in touch with Gandalf to see if his community pack will be ready by then.

Mozilla.de

• Mozilla projects in Germany are scattered over a lot of different websites, we need a place which can point people to the right websites.
• mozilla.de is finally owned by Mozilla and is the perfect address for this task.

Next steps:

• We need to decide whether the website should only point to other sites or offer own content

Extensions.de

• Ongoing discussion about the future of this website (German AMO available now).
• Unfortuntately we didn’t have enough time for discussions to come to a decision.

Next steps:

• Start a discussion online about how we can move forward with the German Addon Website, now that AMO is localizable.

Further Meetings

• We need to address a lot more people with the next meeting. Too many people were missing.
• The venue and organisation was okay, so we can use it again for the next meeting.
• For the next meeting we definitely need some shirts (and sizes), so people have something to take home.

Other related posts to this event can be found by William Quiviger and Abdulkadir Topal.

It’s as simple as that. Since yesterday the web frontend (pushlog) supports querying by date. You can use the same date format like it was used for Bonsai or just enter “yesterday”, or “today” which will also work. Sweet! Thanks goes to Ted Mielczarek who implemented this enhancement in bug 437445. Now it only has to replace the changelog/shortlog pages and should be shown by default. Hopefully this will happen soon. Until then just bookmark the above URL.

Together with Abdulkadir Topal, who co-ordinates the German translation of Firefox and helped me a lot with the website translation, we will reach Vancouver this Thursday evening. So we have 3 days to explore Vancouver and the area around. There is still a plan of things to do but its not final. So if anyone is interested to join us, you are welcome. Just ping me in IRC or add a comment here. Otherwise see you on Monday!

Some hours ago Mozilla has advertised the release date for Firefox 3! So this wonderful piece of software will be official available on June 17th, 2008. Amazing work was done during the last three years which result in a huge list (approx. 15.000 of them) of new features and improvements. Deb Richardson has written a field guide for Firefox 3 which describes the most impressive ones in detail.

Anyone who is interested in Firefox 3 should also pledge to download Firefox 3 by June 18th. It will help Mozilla in trying to set a world record for the most software downloads within 24 hours. Read more about the Download Day 2008.

Don’t forget: Spread the word around and inform your family, friends, and colleagues!

As a circumvention it was possible to use Safari and change its download folder to the specified location. From now on Firefox and Thunderbird are using this folder to store the temporary files. It’s not the best solution but I’m fine with that because I do not use Safari and I’m not interested in its download folder. But with the release of Safari 3 this isn’t possible anymore. The newer versions are using an other way to store its download folder settings and don’t touch ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist anymore. So how it can be easily changed without using a plist or hex editor?

It’s just easy. Download one of the former versions of Safari and use it to change the download folder. There is a project called Multi-Safari which gives you the possibility to run different versions of Safari in parallel. So grab the latest Safari 2 release, open the preferences, and select another download folder location. It looks like that the best solution is to use ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems (NS_OS_TEMP_DIR) where all contained files will be deleted on restart. If you want to have the files deleted on exit of Firefox or Thunderbird you can also add the preference browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set its value to true. That’s all.

Please remember that this is just a workaround. It would be nice to see bug 311292 fixed in a timely manner.

To be a bit more concrete about the topics I had at FOSDEM and work that I’ve taken with me, I will give a short overview:

1. Some weeks ago during a QA session on IRC, Marcia Knous asked me if I would be pleased when Mozilla would support my work. I was happy to hear that because I don’t have the perfect equipment to build my own debug builds under each operating system. This is bad when triaging crasher bugs which only happen under a special OS. Now everything goes really fast. Three days later I got a message from Seth Bindernagel who leads the community-giving program. After some conversations there was made the decision that I will get a new Mac Mini and the appropriate OS licenses. Finally we met each other at FOSDEM and discussed if I would fit into the Community Loan Program. But due to I don’t have a real plan of things I want to do - QA work is really widespread - we dismissed that option. Meanwhile I got the Mac Mini from my local Apple salesman and I will start to set it up within the next days. Hopefully I’ll get some help.
2. Over the last month I heard about SUMO several times. But I hadn’t the change to gain insight into this project. So I was totally uninformed on Friday evening when I was introduced to David Tenser, the smart and blond Swedish guy behind this project. To make matters worse his first question was about the German translation. I had to acknowledge my ignorance. But during his talk on Saturday I get more and more informed about the background. In co-operation with Abdulkadir Topal we will try to find some reliable localizers who are engaged to help translating the Firefox 3 help into German. We plan to do some posts to our German newsgroups and forums. Lets see if we are successful.
3. On Friday I also had the chance to talk with Chris Hofmann about the translation of the Firefox privacy policy into German. Due to the legal text no-one wanted to do that in the past. Now we will give it a try and do our best to create a good first translation. But the final review will be done by a lawyer so we don’t have to know everything in detail. That’s really helpful! Thanks Chris.
4. Stanisław Małolepszy and Seth Bindernagel did a great job in analyzing the latest community surveys. Hopefully we can get some data to be able to have a detail view onto the community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It looked like we are really a bit behind and not so enthusiastic like the Spanish folks…

Finally I have a lot of things to do right now and will give several status updates over the next weeks.

I asked several people who are still working on OS X for a longer period of time. But no one was able to give me a hint. So I started searching the web. I got this nice shortcut overview but no system wide shortcut is given. Now, while writing this post, I found this HIG document from Apple. It’s quiet interesting but once again a keyboard shortcut isn’t mentioned.

I’ll stop searching right now and hope that someone, who reads my post, could help me. I would be deeply grateful. Thanks!

To collect as much feedback as possible from users and the communities, Mozilla launched the Community Survey Program with the first survey today. It’s still available in 10 languages and further surveys will be put online from time to time.

Please take a few moments to answer few questions and help Mozilla to better understand its community. Thanks!

The idea to improve the German localization started a long time ago (as far as I remember it was at FOSDEM 2006) while having a talk with Abdulkadir who is responsible for the Firefox translation. We had seen that our community is totally scattered and that we don’t have a place for discussions. Also with that result at the back of our’s mind it should take over a year. While working on other parts this topic get lost until this year’s developer day in Paris. There I had to spot the work of other localization communities like Spain, France or Poland. They are perfectly organized and also have a handful of contributors to do various translations beside the product localization, e.g. the Mozilla Developer Center. That’s a part which we nearly haven’t started yet. The big question is why that not happened? One reason is definitely the lack of a central place where ongoing localization work can be managed and distributed to community members. That’s why Axel and me started to collect ideas what we can do to catch up with the other communities without having to much overhead for now. As result we decided to create a newsgroup and mailing list. You can read about the steps of creation on Bug 391048.

Two weeks ago both ways of communication were created and synced with each other. The newsgroup can be accessed over news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.l10n.de or Google Groups. If you are interested to join the mailing list add yourself here. We are looking forward to community members who are encouraged to help in the localization work. Join us and help to improve your favorite application.

But now it’s time for you. If you are fine with an alpha release and you want to help finding regression bugs you are welcome. It’s really simple how to use this brand new feature. Due to we don’t have an UI currently, you have to add some hidden preferences. It can be done by directly modifying your prefs.js within your profile while the application is closed or with the help of the config editor. The following three lines you have to add:

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.osx.description", "System Address Book");
user_pref(”ldap_2.servers.osx.dirType”, 3);
user_pref(”ldap_2.servers.osx.uri”, “moz-abosxdirectory:///”);


That’s all! Start Thunderbird to write a new mail or browse through your addresses within the address book. You will be surprised!

Update: Also users of Thunderbird 2 still have the possibility to use that feature. It doesn’t come with an official build of Thunderbird but there is a custom build available. If you are interested then have a look at following forum entry on Mozillazine.

Yesterday I had a nice experience. It happened in the morning. During breakfast which I had together with my parents at home my doorbell was ringing. Normally I’m at work at this time and I also didn’t expect to see anybody. So I ask through our entry phone and a man said that he has a parcel for me. Strange because I haven’t ordered anything within the last days. I was surprised and sprinted down all 3 floors. By opening the front door I saw an older not very well-tended man with an A4-like envelope. It was one of the postmen I’ve never seen in my area. He had a big smile on his face and told me that he has something for me from Mozilla (United States). I was surprised again and it seems that he saw it in my eyes. So he answered that he also has been a user of Firefox for some weeks now. He really likes our web-browser and if I don’t want to have this envelope then he will take it himself. I had to laugh. It’s not too often that you have fun with a postman who even is a proud Firefox user. It’s a pity that I hadn’t any Firefox sticker/fans downstairs and that he was in a hurry. If I’ll see him again one time - Mozilla please send me another parcel - then he will get a big sticker of Firefox! That’s guaranteed.

But let’s start with some content which fits into this blog entry. Last weekend I traveled to Paris to join the Mozilla Developer Day. I really forgot to sign-up myself so I was lucky to get booked a hotel room (thanks to Anne-Julie from Mozilla-Europe) and got one of the last available train tickets. It wasn’t the best connection but a duration of 4 hours to arrive Paris is quiet impressive. I never used a train with 320km/h before. You felt like sitting in a Citroen with smooth up and down movements.

In the train I met Adrianer a member of the polish team - thanks to his Thunderbird shirt and my memento. After we arrived in Paris we have taken the metro to get to our hotel and checked-in. After some minutes of refreshing Rubén joined us and we had a visit in the Mozilla Europe office. Afterwards we made our sightseeing tour through Paris. Just have a look at Flick to see all pictures I made. In between we also had a discussion about the communication quality between the localizers of each language. I had to see again that the Spanish and Polish localizers are quiet good organized. Instead our German localization team is split up into different groups and anyone is doing his own stuff without knowing all the other contributors. I already talked about this problem with Abdulkadir Topal at FOSDEM 2007. Till now we hadn’t a change (or better known as time) to make improvements to get a better communication. I’ll try to figure things out and prepare a proposal for that issue. That won’t only happen for the German localization. Also all other poor organized localization teams will benefit from the work.

After the visit of some beautiful places like the Notre Dame, Eiffel tower, and the Louvre we directly walked to the restaurant Dalva. A small but nice place to have the initial-dinner by MoCo. I met some interesting people I’ve only known from IRC before. Quiet a nice evening.

On saturday we had our real meeting in Club Confair which is a short walk away from the hotel. It was really crowded all over the day with a lot of discussions, impressive demonstrations and talks. A list of the topics is available on the Wiki page. During lunch Ruben and me had a talk with Eric Shepherd, leader of the Mozilla developer center. For myself I haven’t known that there are so many localizers who are translating the developer documentation. Even at this place the German translation is far behind the Polish, French and Spanish one and no change was made over several month! Hopefully the plans to enhance the communication quality will bring us back to normal. During the later offical discussion a lot of ideas and improvements were pointed out. Eric has made a list of them.

Later we were invited to join the dinner in the Spanish restaurant La Bodega. A great location with a fantastic meal - ok I don’t like Paela but anyway - and some live performances.

Finally such meetings should be held more often in Europe to bring developers, localizers and the marketing staff together. You will have a better communication with non-faceless persons.

Sollten widererwarten Fehler auftreten, dann meldet Euch bitte.

Wieviel Zeit wirklich benötigt wird, um die Veröffentlichung einer neuen Version vorzubereiten, habe ich dieses Mal auch wieder gespürt. Meine eigene Arbeit spielte sich dabei aber nur in der Koordination und Übersetzung der deutschen Thunderbird-Seiten auf Mozilla-Europe und den ersten offiziellen deutschen Versionshinweisen ab. Hiermit auch ein Danke an die Helfer und Alexander Ihrig für das Review. Glücklicherweise konnte ich gleich viel von den Versionshinweisen für Firefox 2 kopieren, die Abdulkadir Topal und ich kurz davor zusammen übersetzt haben. Auch an dich ein Danke! Nie zuvor habe ich wirklich so oft den deutschen Firefox und Thunderbird verwendet. Sie waren eine echte Hilfe, um mir möglichst schnell das entsprechende Glossar aufzubauen und bei der Installation von weiteren Sprachpaketen kleine Bugs zu entdecken. Ich denke, dass ich mich in der nächsten Zeit etwas mehr mit dem Thema l10n auseinandersetzen werde, da hier noch einiges an Arbeit notwendig ist.

Alles in Allem kann ich nur raten, sobald wie möglich auf die neue Version zu wechseln. Wann hier jedoch ein automatisches Upgrade erfolgen wird, kann ich nicht sagen. Ich hoffe nur, dass es nicht so lange dauert, wie bei Firefox 2. Da warten die Benutzer immer noch. Also am Besten die 2er Version selbst herunterladen und installieren.

Update: Auf meine Frage an Scott MacGregor, wann für die Benutzer der Version 1.5.0.x ein Upgrade auf die Version 2.0 angeboten wird, erhielt ich die relativ schnell eine Antwort. Priorität hat vorerst Firefox. Erst wenn die Benutzer von Firefox 1.5.0.x ihren Browser auf die 2.0.0.x Version aktualisiert haben, wird es auch für Thunderbird ein Upgrade auf die neue Hauptversion geben. Zeitliche Prognosen wollte er jedoch nicht geben.