Firefox indic session - A report

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.