Hello, SUMO Nation! This week, since we did not have a meeting on Monday, you get a combined post with some recent updates and our “MozBalkans special” from Bucharest.
First, let’s walk through the weekly updates:
Welcome on board, new SUMO friends!
Reminder: the next SUMO Community meeting…
- …is going to take place on Monday, 1st of June. Join us!
- If you want to add a discussion topic to upcoming the live meeting agenda:
- Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Monday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
- Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
Announcement: SUMO Community meeting about Tiles – 8th of June
On the 8th of June, we’ll have a special SUMO Community meeting with a guest – Patrick Finch, who is going to talk about Tiles. If you have questions and want to know more, head over to this forum thread.
Help needed!
- We are still looking for 2 SUMO localizers with an iOS device for each of the following languages: Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish, to help us test Firefox for iOS. If you’re interested, get in touch with Roland.
Developers
Knowledge Base
Community
- The always awesome Bangladesh community is meeting in Dhaka for their first SUMO Meetup. You can follow the action on Twitter, among other places. Are you interested in organizing a meetup like that? Let us know!
Localization
- Thanks to all the l10ns who are working on the Pocket articles for 38.0.5!
And now, the trip report:
#MozBalkans
(All photos taken from the MozBalkans 2015 album and used with their authors’ permission)
The official logo of the meetup. Looks great on a t-shirt!
Now, let’s rewind a bit and look at the last weekend. Together with Madalina, we travelled to the capital of Romania for the weekend-long Mozilla Balkans Summit, organized by the great Romanian community, with Ioana at the helm of the whole operation together with Konstantina’s support.
Ioana taking a break from keeping everyone and everything in order (by sending organizational emails about the next day).
I won’t bore you with all the technical details, as you can find them on the event’s wiki page. Suffice to say that our hosts did an amazing job at making things happen and keeping everyone going over two very inspiring days. The Mozilla Balkan Summit was an outstanding example of a well-organized community-organized event that brought people together and left everyone with new friends around the world and new ideas to work on.
We went there to promote SUMO to the regional community (using our ‘universal’ deck and presentation talents), but also to brainstorm making SUMO more visible and organised in the region. We had two presentations (followed by many questions from all corners of the room, which was great), and two working sessions during which we introduced SUMO in practice and learned a lot about what drives the local communities and keeps them engaged.
Does this look familiar? It should!
One interesting finding we can share straight away is that SUMO contributors in the Balkans are very often not known to or active within the local communities in their countries. While we are not going to force anyone to do anything against their will (and available time), we will definitely try to bridge that gap – after all, the more the merrier!
Our first working session with Pavel, Ada, Redon, Kristi, and Nikola
We were not the only ones, of course – here is the L10N working session…
…and the QA working session!
The other thing we learned is that while SUMO is definitely known as a site, the communities in the Balkan region are busy contributing directly to the development of Mozilla’s products and its local presence, which means a smaller focus on support. We will be addressing that as well, through several ideas we want to turn into locally lead mini-projects. There may also be a new funny video promoting SUMO coming your way later this year… Yes, we talked about a lot of ideas.
Remember this little guy? Could he be competing with the minions from “Despicable Me” soon?
Aside from the presentations and workshops, we had a chance to simply hang out and talk about all things Mozilla, and not only. We also took advantage of the fact that the most European of events was taking place on the same weekend, to bond over it. Yes, we are talking about the Eurovision 2015 finals!
Eurovision live and direct from Austria, courtesy of Goran’s phone
On the second day, Madalina helped us restart our brains with a lightning-fast session of geekdating – a great way to get the energy flowing right after your morning coffee, and to learn even more about the people you’re working and having a good time with.
Geekdating, Balkan style
All in all, this was definitely not a “one-off” for the SUMO crew. We are both looking forward to staying in touch with the community in the Balkans and learning more about their inspiring local projects. We have made many new friends and are definitely ready to help them help the users in their countries!
MozBalkans sending their greetings to all Mozillians worldwide
Bucharest itself was a silent star of the event, with its eclectic history, majestic architecture, and very friendly inhabitants. If you ever have a chance to visit Romania, do give the capital a chance to charm you – it’s definitely worth it!
The second largest building on the planet – no photo can give it justice, you have to see it for yourself
It has been an absolute pleasure and great honour to be invited to the Summit and talk with everyone present about SUMO. Mulţumesc MozBalkans, Bucharest, and Mozilla Romania!
…and there you go – that’s it for this week of SUMO news. See you on Monday and have a great weekend!