Categories: Events

Mozilla Balkans Meet-up

Bucharest, Romania was the excellent host of the 5th Mozilla Balkans Community Meet-up. The 2-day workshop took place at the end of May in a similar form as previous Balkans events that were kick-started back in 2010.

800px-MozBalkans_Logo_lung

The aim of these gatherings is to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other’s experience working on the Mozilla Project, improve collaboration in the future, and work on specific tasks.

Having attended all but one Mozilla Balkans meeting, I feel confident in congratulating Ioana Chiorean for a brilliant job she did working on her specific task – organizing the whole thing. Everything from transportation, accommodation and venue to the drinks out in the open during the Eurovision Song Contest was flawless. Mersi, Ioana!

Ioana - always in action

Ioana was always in action.

Invited were lead contributors from 8 Balkans communities: Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian, and Slovenian. Members of Mozilla staff from 4 different functional areas were also present: Participation Team, Quality Assurance, Support, and Localization.

One of the 5 goals of the Mozilla Balkans community reads Ensure that Firefox and Thunderbird are localized into every Balkan language. While the Thunderbird part may sound slightly outdated as the goal, it clearly shows how important Localization is in this part of the World. So Pike, Flod and I basically went to Bucharest to see how we’re fulfilling this goal.

It doesn't look like Gašper is listening to Pike.

L10n discussion.

We talked to each L10n team attending the meet-up separately to hear their feedback on our tools and translation workflows. One of the questions raised was why do we have so many tools. Well, this problem is now solved. 🙂 We also provided some ideas on how to plan upcoming work regarding product roadmaps and schedules and recruit new community members.

I found discussions with localizers, both formal and informal, very valuable for the feedback on work I’m personally engaged with. I hope other participants agree with me that such events not only answer questions, but also make us more motivated.

Here’s to the next Balkans Meet-up!

The group photo in brand new Balkans T-Shirts!

And, of course, the brand new Mozilla Balkans T-Shirts (hello, Flod)!

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