First Mozilla community meeting in Germany

In the last months a lot of things were going on in Europe. Several local communities have taken the chance to held a community event in their own Country. Probably you have read something about it in the European Mozilla Community Blog hosted by Mozilla Europe. But nothing happened in Germany so far. As a German citizen I wasn’t glad about. So we have taken the chance to organize our first community meeting ever. Thanks goes to Abdulkadir Topal who managed everything to make it a terrific event.

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.