Mozilla Developer Day 2007 in Paris

Starting with todays post I’ll switch to a bilingual blog. I made this decision while thinking about my contribution to Mozilla. Only having a German version and talking about Mozilla related stuff will exclude all other readers. I hope you are fine with the change and still read my blog.

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.