Monday, January 31, 2011

Your Browser in Your Language!

The rate of innovation on the web is incredible. Mozilla has been at the forefront of this innovation and has been doing so in an open, participatory manner. Firefox is designed for standard compliance, performance, and portability. Mozilla Localization Project, abbreviated as MLP, tries to help and ease the availability of mozilla.org products toward different world cultures and languages through the support of the open source community.
Localized to over 80 locales, Firefox is available in the native language to over 97% of the worldwide Internet population! But how exactly does Mozilla succeed in having impact and how does its
volunteer driven culture complete the picture?
Living inside the Open Source community of mozilla.org, MLP couldn't be anything else than volunteers driven. If you think one of these products should be available in your language and that helps a large group of people how they experience the web, you're probably the best person to make it happen. Or the right person to help direct the people already working on this task.

You can start following the steps described in "How to localize Mozilla" to get in touch with our community. The document focuses on Mozilla based products, containing the basic steps to start a new localization project and how to let us know you're working on it.

I am honoured to be among those who were invited to amazing Mozilla Summit'10, due to my involvement with the Student Reps program and as a Community member. Awesomely it was during my internship at Mozilla! It was a situation of double joy for me :)

Mozilla Summit was an experience of personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once. There were around 600 Mozillians: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users' like me. Mozilla Summit Science Fair, where representatives from over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

Imagine, how great it would be to capture the essence of this diverse community and their cultures that are what Mozilla is. I discussed the idea with Mary Colvig, my mentor and the team  just a couple of days before the summit and this turned out to be one of my projects during the internship! We had less time to actually shoot the video person by person as most of the schedules were fixed and people were moving for participating at various sessions. The representatives at the fair were unaware of that we will be visiting them to make a video shoot. It was random and we tried to cover as much as we can. It was amazing to talk to each community member.

Many thanks to Mary Colvig for encouraging the idea & Rainer Cvillink, the media person for his patience in time to shoot, edit and give a beautiful outcome of the video. 

And finally, 

The video 'Your Browser in Your Language', was published in the Mozilla Annual Report!

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