In a previous blog post on my personal blog, I described the unique sentiment that carried through the LATAM hackathon we held in Lima, Peru in June 2015. I won’t rewrite that here, but I think that Delphine, Guillermo Movia, and Juan Becerra would agree when I say that the event seemed to represent the bringing together of old friends to serve those users who spoke their native languages; whether all of these Mozillians were friends before this event or not, they all left with a depth of friendship that usually requires years to forge. It was truly special to be a part of and see how localization could bring together people from over 2 different continents.

This blog post is actually quite late, but doesn’t make it less important. As with other l10n hackathons, the agenda followed the same format: group discussion in the morning, free time in the afternoon. The discussions were phenomenal! Thanks to Marcus Saad for being our notetaker, we have all of the discussion notes (in an etherpad) linked to the hackathon’s wiki page.

This time around, I want to highlight what I felt were some of the most noteworthy accomplishments by the l10n group in both discussion time and free time:

Discussion time:

– L10n tool workflows were successfully understood by all present. This led to some with more technical skills becoming interested in hacking on Pootle and helping to resolve outstanding bugs within that system.
– Sustainable l10n team organization was explored in a variety of different ways. We discussed what a successful team org could look like for small (1-2 people), medium (5-6 people), and large l10n communities. We also discussed that there are always ways to make room for new localizers within a team’s organization through project, module, and rights assignment.
– Concerns about l10n workshops and interactions between localizers and Mozilla Reps were discussed, with ideas of how to improve and strengthen those relationships.

Free time:

– All locales presently shipping official l10n projects were able to sign off on products and focus time on web parts l10n.
– Mozilla Nativo v1.2 was born! Their purposes and goals were refined, having committed to change their strategy away from focusing on recruitment of l10n teams for all indigenous Latin American languages and toward focusing on sustaining and supporting 5 existing teams through the process of shipping their first localizations.
– Some ideas about creating l10n workshops in Brazil were discussed, with timelines for how to introduce these ideas to the Brazil l10n team as a whole.
– The Maya Kaqchikel team was tasked with identifying a launch version goal for their localization of Firefox for Android.
– The Zapotec l10n team was able to have repos and automated builds set up for their l10n of Firefox OS.
– The Paraguayan Guaraní and Bolivian Guaraní l10n teams were able to meet and compare both similarities and differences between their languages and their efforts. The Paraguayan l10n team came away with a strong strategy for approaching their l10n work with sustainability in mind (creating l10n resources first, as well as empowering more community members with reviewer and translator rights).

These lists certainly do not contain the full list of what was completed or accomplished by meeting together, but the time was certainly well spent. Our Peruvian hosts were incredible. Absolutely incredible. We sincerely thank the Reps in Peru for their support and involvement. This event couldn’t have happened without you.

Here are some photos taken at the event. Credit goes out to Juan Eladio Sanchez for his fantastic photo skills 🙂