Chit and Thanyawzinmin (Tin Aung Lin) from the Mozilla community in Myanmar recently represented Mozilla at BarCamp Mandalay. Please go over to Chit’s blog to read all about it!
https://ahkeno.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/mozilla-myanmar-at-barcamp-mandalay/
This is the formal announcement for a meetup of the Mozilla India community at GNUnify ’12 in Pune, the weekend of February 10-12. Mozilla will participate at GNUnify on Feb. 10 and 11, and the India community meetup will be held on Sunday, Feb. 12th.
The goal of this meetup on Feb. 12 is to gather the India community together for a number of objectives including:
Arky and Axel from the l10n Drivers will be attending. I will be attending. We also hope to get a member from Developer Engagement to attend. More info to come when we have it.
Anyone who is active in the Mozilla India community is welcome to join this event. As Mozilla will not be providing any funding to attendees, we selected Pune as this location is home to the Red Hat team which has a number of key localization team leaders and members.
We will do our best to accommodate online participation via IRC but this will depend on local connectivity at the venue which is not yet determined. Information about the weekend will be posted here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Indiameetup2012
Vineel is helping to organize the weekend but we would love help from Mozilla community members in Pune for local support and knowledge. If you can help Vineel with planning, please contact him directly or post to the Community-India mailing list or Google Group interface.
The planning for the event will be discussed on the Community-India list (see above) so please join the list to participate.
See you in Pune!
Posted in Asia, community, Firefox, India, localization, Mozilla, News, open source, open web
Thanks to Gunnar from the Mozilla Foundation, Arky from the l10n team, and Mark West from the East-West Management Institute in Cambodia, Mozilla was able to co-sponsor the Open Cambodia workshop in late August.
The event is a specialized, exclusive session for local Open Sourcers – bloggers, coders, and designers who share the Open Source ethic – to attend before Bar Camp. This session is a unique opportunity to learn about the relationship between Open Source and civil society issues, such as: protecting the Open Web from Internet censorship, the benefits of continuing to develop “indigenous” (Khmer) Open Source tools, and using web-based Open Source security tactics to improve data collection for both the public and private sector. This event is a special, exclusive opportunity to spend two days with these American experts leading into late October’s Barcamp meeting.
The largest Cambodian online news source, Sabay, covered the event as did the Cambodia Daily (English.)
Posted in Cambodia, community, events, Firefox, localization, Mozilla, News, open source, open web
I’m preparing for our Mozilla meetup in Malaysia this evening but wanted to publish the presentation I gave yesterday at the 2011 Malaysia Open Source Conference in Penang.
I want to thank my colleagues at Mozilla, Chris Heilmann and Robert Nyman, as their presentations provided significant inspiration and content for my own presentation.
I wanted to thank the MOSC 2011 secretariat for the invitation to speak and the coordination for the event.
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Posted in Asia, community, events, Firefox, javascript, localization, Malaysia, Mozilla, open source, open web, plugins
With the hard work of Hung Nguyen, we have had a Vietnamese Firefox since 3.6. However, Hung is working on his own and is looking for additional help to localize Firefox as well as other Mozilla software and websites into Vietnamese. This mailing list has been set up to coordinate the localization of Firefox and other Mozilla software into Vietnamese. We are actively looking for volunteers- please come help if you are interested.
If you would like to join the mailing list, please do so here:
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-vi
If you prefer the Google Groups interface (same emails, different interface) you may sign up here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.l10n.vi
Note this is a moderated list because the spam to Usenet has been severe in recent years. Only spam messages will be moderated/deleted.
Thanks to the efforts of Dietrich, Arky and Chit in Myanmar, as well as the support of Mozilla IT, we now have a mailing list and mirrored Google Group to discuss and plan and work on a Burmese language Firefox.
If you would like to join the mailing list, please do so here:
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-my
If you prefer the Google Groups interface (same emails, different interface) you may sign up here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.l10n.my
Note this is a moderated list because the spam to Usenet has been severe in recent years. Only spam messages will be moderated/deleted.
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Posted in community, localization, Mozilla, Myanmar, open source, open web
Thanks to the hard work of the Mozilla Indonesia community during the Firefox 4 launch, Indonesian magazine Gatra has featured the id-Mozilla community (PDF) alongside a review of all of the major browsers. The lead photo is from Surabaya, where Josh Aas, David Mandelin and David Anderson visited.
In the span of a few months, the brand new Mozilla community in the Philippines is active and ambitious. A new Mozilla Philippines Community website, Five Years of Firefox in Manila, and check out the 2010 plans they have for promoting Firefox and Mozilla in the Philippines here: Mozilla Philippines Community 2010 Kick-Off.
And for photos from the 2010 kick-off meeting, be sure to visit Pics from the Mozilla Philippines 2010 Kick-Off Meeting.
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Posted in community, events, Firefox, localization, open web, Philippines
Before you read my post (below) about Mozilla’s recent activities in the Philippines, please note that the September 26-27 Tropical Storm Ketsana has caused over 100 deaths and over 340,000 affected by the flooding – the worst flooding in Manila in living memory. Aggregated information about the floods and how to donate to those who were affected can be found at Ondoy Relief, Typhoon Ondoy, Pinoy Tumblr, Ondoy Tumblr and the Philippine National Red Cross.
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Over the weekend of Sept. 18-20, Seth Bindernagel and I traveled to Manila to begin to understand the Philippines as a growing community of Mozilla users. We met various people in order to begin to understand the Philippines as an Internet market including domain registrars, network operators, social network service operators, web developers, a group of Spread Firefox Campus Representatives from a few of the schools local to Manila, and the attendees of the 2009 WordCamp Philippines event.
Dinner with the Mozilla Spread Firefox Campus Reps:
Seth has covered a lot of the information we learned from our trip but I wanted to share a few other pieces of information as well as some photos of the places and the people we met.
Chin Wong, who writes the Digital Life column in the Manila Standard met with us and provided a good overview in his article of what we are trying to understand with regards to web usage in the Philippines.
Digital Life by Chin Wong — Filipino Firefox
DO we need a Filipino-language version of Firefox? Mozilla, maker of the world’s most downloaded browser, wants to know.
Chin provided a thoughtful response in the column wherein the first response was that most Filipinos use the Internet in English, all software in English, so a localized (Filipino) version of Firefox is not necessary. But he went on to note that:
On the other hand, I realize there might be a lot of interest in a localized browser, and that there are many more end-users out there [in the Philippines] for whom English is not their first language. After all, the most widely viewed TV shows are all in Filipino, and the most widely read newspapers aren’t the English-language broadsheets but Filipino tabloids. Certainly, folks who fit this media profile would benefit from a Filipino browser.
The majority of people we met with in the few days we were in Manila were more than happy with the English Firefox, which makes sense. These are Internet professionals, web developers, bloggers, people who’s entire academic education was in English. For people like this, an English language Firefox is most natural. But considering the nature of the Philippines, where there are multiple languages in use across the over 7000 islands, where a majority of the population has yet to get online in the first place, and considering how common it is for people to use Filipino (or Taglish) in daily conversation, Seth and I came away convinced that there is a need for a more localized version of Firefox. Exactly what that will look like should be up to the Filipinos who will make that happen, but we’re looking forward to what that may be.
In the coming days, we will be launching a Filipino community mailing list and hopefully from there a website with perhaps a forum so that Filipino users and developers can start collaborating and sharing and planning what to do with Mozilla or Firefox in the Philippines. If you’d like more information on this new Mozilla community in the Philippines, please leave a comment and I’ll email you the details once they are running.
I am also hoping to be back in Manila for the Philippine Blog Awards, which Mozilla is co-sponsoring this year. I look forward to meeting bloggers and Firefox users at the Blog Awards event in Manila.
Here are some photos from Seth & my trip to Manila:
Makati at dusk
The infamous traffic of Manila (on a Friday night in rush hour no less)
Beau Lebens, Automattic
Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla
2009 WordCamp Philippines speakers on stage
Please Don’t Hurt the Web, Use Open Standards
Seth & Beau providing entertainment as they eat Balut. (I didn’t partake.)
Even many of the Filipinos at dinner that night don’t eat balut…
Posted in Asia, community, events, Firefox, localization, Mozilla, open web, Philippines
It’s very exciting to be in Manila this week, learning about the Internet in the Philippines and trying to understand how Firefox has recently become very popular in this country. Mozilla’s Seth Bindernagel and I will be at WordCamp Philippines 2009 on Saturday, September 19th to hear from Filipino web designers and bloggers about the web in the Philippines, Firefox in the Philippines and what Mozilla can or should do here in the Philippines.
Seth and I are hosting an informal evening with some of our volunteer university campus representatives on the evening of Friday, September 18th. We are meeting at the Food Court of Gateway Mall, Cubao, Quezon City at 19:30 on Sept. 18th. Please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you would like to join us. (Campus reps who we are already in touch over email, no need to RSVP again here.)
If you are coming to WordCamp here in Manila, we’ll see you at the event.
Seth and I will be sharing more information about what we are learning here at our respective blogs and hope to meet more Mozilla and Firefox fans here in the Philippines.
If you cannot join us this week, I will be back in early October for the Philippine Blog Awards and hope to see you there!
Posted in Asia, community, events, Firefox, localization, open web, Philippines