Engagement L10n

I think that is better to use only one way to create the L10n of our products, including the tools, because there are many ways to do it and is so confusing when you are the new kid on the block.

Translators, in some cases, are not computer geeks, so, we need L10n tools designed for them. In our case, there are many languages and the translators are cero geeks, we were working using Narro but the projects are not updated as the new betas are coming out and there are some problems with the exported files when you send the changes. Alexandru is doing an excellent job with Narro but we need more stability and reliability.

We are almost ready to relaunch our community website using web tools that let people create groups, forums and create post to talk, promote, inform so they can organize themselves in their region (Mexico City, Monterrey, Yucatan, etc.), we just need to complete the modifications to the index website to display a web element (carrousel) to show excerpt of the last news, programs like studentreps, and other relevant information, when we are ready, we will ask help to friends that write in blogs and news websites to inform about this relauch.

There are many events at Mexico related with tecnology and we are invited to give talks, workshops and even the organizers let us to put a Firefox booth if we want and even more, they help us puting the Firefox/Mozilla logo as sponsorship in their website and/or brochures without paying anything and yes, ther are more, the organizers pay for our transport and accommodation, we just need some swag to give to the attendees! I think that's so cool!

Not all are goods news, the events organizers and reporters invite me to give talks and interview just because my name appear in the Firefox credits, I mean, I think that at least the leaders of each region/country need a way to demostrate that they are recognized by the Mozilla Foundation. Maybe help an email of the MoFo or to be published in some section of the mozilla.org website their names and roles.

The website of the Studentreps program is an excellent example, it's translated in many languages, in the past, we had to translate the content of the Campusreps webpage in our wiki to explain people what it is, now, we just have to publish the web address and that's all. Now, think about all that content in the mozilla.org website, there is a lot of content only in English!

Today, at Mozilla México Community there are some contributors that are in charge for one area, in some cases, they are learning about it, for example QA, OpenWeb and Jetpack, but also, there are others in charge of our social media (twitter, facebook), public relationship and community promotion, moderators of our forums and the post comments (no technical support), of our art community, studentreps and our program called ¡Firefox en la escuela!/Firefox at school!, you can read more in the About section in the Mozilla México website/wiki.

In the case of Firefox 4, we are organizing the release partys at México, and there are many people asking me if they can organizing the regional party at their state, they just need a small package with Firefox swag, I can tell you what are the guys who are really planning a good event. I been talking with Sarah about the high cost to send swag to México, so, one alternative is to make t-shirts at México, you can pay directly to the manufacturers, so we can reduce costs.

Is this the feedback that you are expect?

Basically, in Korean l10n marketing, something are needed as following:

1. Sharing best practices between local communities
Each l10n community has operated unique user event or marketing activities. There is no sharing HOW-TO for that. So I want see best practices of other community. I learned the operation of weekly meeting form MozTW and I do that in Ko community now.

2. Extending social media to local official user forum in famous portal site.
In case of Korea, most of Internet users use Naver and Daum. as like Taiwan (Y! TW), Japan (Mixi/Gree/etc.). I know each country has unique mass user sites; we need to list up them. Our coverage must be extended to mass Web sites as well as Twitter or Facebook.
For example, I reserved http://cafe.daum.net/mozilla and http://cafe.naver.com/mozilla, but there has been no volunteers to manage it.

3. Separation from marketing and (l10n) production
I met many Firefox-marketing interested people in Korea, but they are mostly women not to be familiar with technical contribution as like easy tool in https://localize.mozilla.org/
So you need separate their job from technical job as like designing materials, managing events.

4. In addition, someone must be assigned for official bloggers in each local community.
They can translate official blog posts into each languages. The basic of marketing is
spreading one channel to all i.e. l10n of http://blog.mozilla.com/. :)

I found that the four goals specified is exactly what MozTW had been doing for past years. Some of them were successful, and some of them were not. While Channy above said he had copied weekly ideas meeting from Bob Chao, these kind of "information flow" was not happened within the communication tools and places given by Mozilla.

Thus, I agreed with Channy that we should have more opportunities to share our community marketing experience. (Perhaps for the next summit we should ask people all over the world to give 10 min talk each related to local activities instead of booths. Back in June Gen had talked about putting together a "Asia Update" talk with all of the Aisa localizers; I didn't know if it had happened or not but that could be a great example)

For the localization requirement, I think is hard to judge right now how much effort we need to put for a specific "engagement" marketing project. Given the fact local teams are all volunteer organizations, we would need specifics to know if there are people interested in or not. For example, Camino l10n project was dropped due to lack of people|localizer in interest; same thing could happen to marketing projects. However I must say news/article translations has lower entry barrier than software localization, therefore we do have good chance to do these potential projects. For example, MozTW has operated a Chinese version of Mozilla Links blog for years.

I am against the official blogger idea though; even in Mozilla Links, we do not translate all of the posts from English Mozilla Links, and we often talked about our local activities. We kept the blog "unofficial", so we could collect Mozilla news from various sources. Certainly, Mozilla Blog is one of them.