Hello, SUMO Nation!
Today we have a guest post by one of our most involved and organized community members from Bangladesh – Ashickur. He has been supporting SUMO for quite a while now and working really hard on making the Bangladesh Mozilla community a success, together with many other great Mozillians in the area.
This post is about an event that he co-organized. If you are interested in organizing an event for SUMO, take a look at our Event Kit page.
Why did we meet?
After completing localization of all the existing KB articles in November 2014, during our first ever SuMo community meetup in July 2015, a big part of our local community came together and talked about future plans for SuMo. Thus, one of the main reasons to meet in Dhaka was to check what we have accomplished according to the plan – but also to plan ahead, for the next six months.
We also wanted to start working on a local style guide for bn-BD localization. Reviewing the problems of our current methods and ways of improving the language we use required our top contributors to sit together.
Finally, it was high time for our community to welcome the new people who joined the SuMo team from Dhaka, as before we were mostly aiming for contributors outside of the capital.
Who organized the event?
The organization team consisted of Ashickur, Ashfaq, Seeam, Amit, Pranjal, and Sharif. Seeam is our community’s main visual designer, while Sharif runs the Mozilla Bangladesh community website. Ashfaq decided to take the responsibility for leading the creation of the style guide.
How did the organization go?
The organization was not hard, because we had previous experience in organizing the venue, projector, sound system, and all the logistics. Thanks to this, the event went smoothly. We learned that sharing responsibilities with new members helps us grow the community and make everyone work better together. The biggest challenge, as always, is to find the right people to lead the community discussion and involve everyone in it. We try to address this with varying the agendas between events and set different goals to keep everyone involved.
What was the plan for the event and what were the outcomes?
Our first goal was to support our old contributors and give them new motivation. Since we wanted to have the style guide in place first, we asked them to share their stories with new and potential contributors, which sparked a lot of interest.
We also wanted to organize the localizers a bit better for the future – to have a person for each product, who would check updated documents and informed the localizers each week about new material to work on.
The biggest success for us was a lively discussion about the existing localized content. We received a lot of constructive feedback from old and new contributors that will help us compile a useful style guide and create a glossary for the most frequently used technical terms that will allow for easier and more consistent localization in the future.
That’s a LOT of happy faces in one photo :-) Thank you Ashickur and Mozilla Bangladesh! We are all looking forward to more great community events in the region.
We hope you found this post informative and inspiring – let us know in the comments!