As Mozilla is sponsoring this barcamp, Firefox stickers were issued to all the participants when they registered for the day. I presented Firefox indic session at Barcampbangalore7 on 14 Sep 2008. There were just 3 people in the audience when the session started. It soon became 10 to 15 people. The presentation went on for exactly 45 minutes, in an interactive mode.
Couple of students from Amritha Institute of technology were keen to understand the status of Tamil localization of Firefox. After the session, I showed them the relevant Bugzilla bugs and suggested the next steps like contacting the lead localizer and using IRC for all their questions. Several people wanted to know about easy ways of contributing to localization. I pointed them to Narro
project. One guy wanted to know why we are doing this, as there are not many people using localized versions. I explained that this is a chicken and egg problem and we need the localization to break the barrier, which will result in a positive feedback loop, making the technology reach most school educated Indians, even if they do not know English.
Firefox indic session - A report
Firefox indic localization session at Barcamp7
Barcampbangalore7, is scheduled for 13,14 September 2008. This is going to be my third barcamp. As is the norm in technology, by the third attempt, any product becomes successful or looses the race. So is any initiative. I thought I should start real contributions to the Barcamp.
I have been working on Firefox Telugu localization for over 9 months and went through a lot of learnings about contributing to the open source world, be it setting up wiki pages for project, creating email-lists or tracking fellow contributors and chasing the coordinators to increase the prirority for our initiative. The Telugu version of Firefox was to have released with Firefox 2.13, but is now likely to be available with firefox 3.0.2 beta . As several other Indian languages are also planned for release, I proposed a session in the upcoming barcamp on this topic.
I propose to cover the following
- Brief history of Firefox, Features of firefox,
- Localization tips
- Other initiatives to strengthen Indic localization.
I welcome other contributors to join me for this session.
