Many teams change and evolve over time. These changes involve organization changes as well as reorienting the team’s focus, mission, and function. I’m excited to announce that we’ve been experiencing some changes within the l10n-drivers team at Mozilla.
Team Organization
The biggest of these changes is that Chris Hofmann has stepped away from Mozilla after more than a decade of service. During his time, Chris ran a number of projects including starting mobile engineering. More recently, he’s been running l10n and our bug bounty program. We wish him the very best. I’ve been asked to lead the l10n-drivers team in Chris’s place as Head of Localization.
Another change is that Pascal and Arky are moving on to other projects. We’re grateful for their years of service to l10n and wish them the best in their future efforts.
Finally, we’ve made some specific decisions on team structure and responsibilities. I’m very happy to introduce you to the new l10n-drivers team organization:
Technical Group
The technical group’s focus is on simplifying the l10n process through tooling and automation for product development teams and the localization community. Additionally, they are dedicated to experimenting with state-of-the-art solutions from the localization industry and aligning our technology within the industry standards to ensure a higher degree of interoperability. The members of this group are:
- Axel Hecht — Technical Lead
- Staś Małolepszy — L10n/I18n engineer (L20n, mozIntl, ECMA 402)
- Zibi Braniecki (aka gandalf) — L10n/I18n engineer (L20n, mozIntl, ECMA 402)
- Matjaž Horvat — L10n engineer (Pontoon)
Technical Project Management (TPM) Group
The PM group’s role is to be the intermediary between Mozilla dev teams and the l10n community to make sure we’re able to ship fully localizable products with the highest possible localization coverage from release to release. They seek to represent the community within decisions involving l10n and work to empower and support l10n communities. They also manage project communications for their corresponding projects and perform the practical technical tasks associated with delivering localizations for their projects. The members of this group are:
- Jeff Beatty — TPM Lead
- Francesco Lodolo (aka flod) — Technical Project Manager (Firefox)
- Delphine Lebédel — Technical Project Manager (Android & iOS product & app stores)
- Peiying Mo — Technical Project Manager (mozilla.org, marketing, legal, etc.)
Updated L10n Mission
One of the most unique things about Mozilla is you, the dedicated community of volunteers. Your dedication and passion to breaking down language barriers on the Web is unmatched. Let’s be frank, localization at Mozilla is complex. In many areas, it’s unnecessarily complex. Our updated mission needs to be based on simplifying localization for you (the community) and for internal Mozilla teams. As a secondary mission, we must develop tools and practices that exemplify and promote multilingualism, open & free language data exchange, and interoperable, open source community localization platforms on the Web.
The new l10n-driver motto is “simplicity and opportunity.” Simplified and open localization for internal teams and localization communities makes for a better user experience across our localized products. It helps your contributions to go farther than before and allows you to spend time on the tasks you find most valuable. Through this focus, we aim to empower global communities to advance the Mozilla manifesto principles in their language by localizing Mozilla projects.
With these principles in mind, we’re evaluating our tools vision, our processes, and practices to learn where we can simplify, automate, and improve the localization experience for everyone. We’ll be more open to your feedback on how to accomplish this, while asking for your patience and feedback when experiment with new ideas. We’re also committed to being more data-driven in our decision making. I’m sure there will come a point in time where we make both popular and unpopular decisions. I hope that we can all assume good will and trust that both the popular and unpopular decisions were made with the intent to further our team mission for localization.
I think that I can speak for the l10n-drivers when I say that these are exciting times for localization at Mozilla. Thank you in advance for being a part of them!
Rajesh Ranjan wrote on