We’re thrilled to announce that we have some new amazing features to make community leadership at SUMO much easier. We are making contributions at SUMO more transparent and with our new metrics it’s very easy to understand what your community is doing and how you can have an impact.

We want to make it easy to understand how the local communities are working so that:

• it’s easier for new contributors to spot the right contacts and get started.
• contributors can coordinate the work, assign rights and share the work load
• we can show everyone how wonderful our contributors are and how much they contribute to nurturing the open web

So if you’re interested in doing community building for your locale here’s our magic toolkit:

The starting point is your locale dashboard*, where you will find the menu on the left side:

Locale metrics

You can track the localization coverage over time and feel proud of the impact you’re having on all the users in your locale!

Also you will be able to see how many contributors have been active over time, so you know how strong  the community is. If you want to know who has been active you can check the “Localization team” site.

Localization team:

Here you will be able to see who are the locale leaders and the reviewers. Also you will be able to see the active users in the past 90 days. This will help new contributors find the localizers they need to contact if they want to get started. And active localizers will be able to see who is active to coordinate better. It’s much easier to do community building, share the work load and make friends : )

Something very cool about this page is that the locale leaders are now able to add locale reviewers. It means that the locale leader has all the rights to turn editors into reviewers, without needing an admin. We want to give communities all the tools to be able to do community organization and building on their own.

Recent revisions

Finally, we added the recent revisions to that menu, so that contributors can quickly access this feature that let’s you see the last reviews in that locale. You will be able to see the last activity and who was active. Pretty amazing to understand how the locale is working!

Profiles

We also have been displaying the contributions on the user profile. So if you want to see what you or other contributors have contributed to SUMO, just go to their user profile and see their answers in the forum and the documents they have contributed to.

Tell us what you think and what you need!

Let us know what you think about these new features and if you have some other ideas. We want to empower every contributor to be a community leader.

* You can reach your locale dashboard using this link with your ISO language code: https://support.mozilla.org/[ISO language code]/localization, for example Spanish: https://support.mozilla.org/es/localization

SUMO super contributor Swarnava was featured on yourstory.in. Here’s an excerpt:

Swarnava regards contributing to Mozilla was one of the best things that has happened in his life. His area of specialisation at Mozilla are QA and User Support. The concerned people have helped and mentored him about various things relating to Mozilla such as Mailing lists, QA, Bugzilla etc. With time his contributions to Mozilla increased and now he often writes knowledge based articles about Firefox, provides support over Twitter and Facebook. Till date he has submitted around 3111 answers in the support forums. He is also a Bengali Locale Leader and contributes by translating and editing articles into the local language. He has to his credit 390 articles that he has edited/translated till date.

Read the whole piece.

Oskar Ivanić, SUMO’s amazing ginger Serbian locale leader, has written a very interesting post on what it means to organize a localization marathon. A must read for anybody interested in organizing something similar! Cross-posted from gingerzillian.wordpress.com:

Previously I have wrote an article about the first SUMO (Support Mozilla) marathon that we organized at VTŠ (College of Applied Sciences) in Subotica – the city where I live, and where most of SUMO localizers are from.

I’m going to share how we do these marathons, and hopefully this article will help you to organize the same in your community.

Venue

Well, this can be a problem sometimes.

Depending on how much people you expect and how many people have laptops, you can choose the following options:

• in a classroom – best for bigger number of translators due to availability of dekstop’s
• at your (someone’s) place – up to five people (depends on laptops availability)
• Coworking space – depends on laptops and desktop PC availability

I would strongly recommend you to avoid paying for the venue, as you can find someone who will understand what you do and why you do it.

Personally, I had few rejections from high schools, but that was due to their closed minds, where they didn’t see the opportunity to involve their students into something that can be very useful in future.

That didn’t stop me, and I have found a university that offered us a classroom whenever we need it to translate or even organize events. I’m happy to say that half of our community are from this university.

Costs

When filling a budget request (if you are a Rep) you should try to follow the guideline in order to avoid any problems.

Depending on how many people are coming to marathon, you should plan on what you want to buy and that can be from pizzas, drinks, ice-creams, chocolates, coffees and etc.

Usually, this is how it looks like on ours end:

• Pizza(s) family size
• Refreshment drinks

Depending on how much people will attend, budget request can go from 20 to 60 $.  Also, pizzas can be changed for going out to some coffee shop where you can relax and chat – and you should mix that from time to time.

Productivity

Make sure that all people who are attending had experience with translation, or you will lose time to explain them how to.

Depending on language you are translating SUMO articles, translation rate can differ.

In our example, we tend to localize and transcribe most of IT terms, and that can be tricky sometimes.

You should create a guideline for you community about how they should translate and on what they need to take a note.

When translating, try to understand that you are translating that article for someone who’s barely into IT, and you should try to translate in their language of understanding, otherwise your article won’t help them.

Remember, quality over quantity – at least for this.

Tools

Etherpad – you can use it to write down the notes for localization, track the articles and etc.

Doodle – helps you to decide the time by enabling people to vote for their best date and time option.

Google Translate – use it when you need it. Do NOT translate the whole article with it, because we wouldn’t need you to help us if GT was that good.

Glossary – very useful when you are translating and when you are having doubts on how to translate something.

Do you have something to add? Maybe your example on how you organize marathons?

It’s Thursday so it’s the perfect time to organize a new SUMO day! We’ll be answering questions in the support forum and helping each other in #sumo on IRC from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -8).

Join us, create an account and then take some time today to help with unanswered questions. Please check the etherpad for additional tips. We have been experiencing quite a high number of questions in the last few days. Our goal this Thursday is to respond to each and ever one of them, so please try to answer as many questions as you can throughout the day.

Last SUMO Day we managed to get 97% of questions answered within 24 hours. We’re so close to reaching 100%!

Let’s do it!