Entrepreneur Geek

Mozilla Foundation is coming to India. If you are interested in Firefox, are a contributor, or want to contribute, you must grab this opportunity!

Seth Bindernagel (Community Program Manager) and JT Batson (Head, International Marketing Efforts) of Mozilla Foundation are coming to India in mid July. The purpose of the trip is build further community involvement and start to find people who can help localizer drive the adoption of Firefox 3. This includes both supporting current volunteers in contributing more and providing resources.

Magnet did most of the localization for Firefox and other open source tools for Gujarati. Continuing our endeavors, we are organizing a one day event at our office to promote and support Firefox on 21st July 2007. Seth and JT will speak about community, localization, Firefox 3 and also promotion!

Note: The event will not be on 14th July now, since Mozilla will be attending the open source conference in Ahmedabad on 13th and 14th July. We will have it on 21st July now.

Here is the plan for the day:

• 10.30AM – Registration (it’s free!)
• 11AM – Introduction & Welcome
• 11.30AM – The State of Mozilla
• 12.00AM – Do we need an EN_IN version of Firefox? Local English, local search providers, certain spellings and other India specific items. Brainstorming, and team formation.
• 1.00PM – Lunch break
• 2.00PM – Brainstorming on promoting Firefox in India (Spread Firefox.in?)
• 3.00PM – How to localize Firefox? How did we localize for Gujarati? – small workshop
• 4.00PM – Firefox 3 – what’s up the sleeve?
• 5.00PM – Completion

The day is going to be exciting. It’s going to be mix of development, community and brainstorming sessions.

Who should attend?

• Everyone who’s helped in localization of Firefox / other Mozilla Software
• Students and Open Source evangelists who want to promote Mozilla / Firefox
• Community organizers & marketing enthusiasts
• Anyone who’s interested in Mozilla / Firefox

Location:

Many thanks to HBCSE for hosting this event. Directions here.

RSVP:
Please add your name to wiki (link below), if you wish (you should!)  to attend the event:
http://db.glug-bom.org/wiki/index.php/Upcoming_meet_RSVPs

We plan to have a Mumbai GNU/Linux Users Group meeting in the evening with a talk on Ruby on Rails. The plan on that will be announced on the mailing list soon.

Participants

1. Seth Bindernagel
2. JT Batson
3. Chris Hofmann
4. Venky Hariharan
5. Kartik Mistry
6. Nirav Mehta
7. Dibya Prakash
8. Vipul Mathur
9. Barkha Khatri
10. Dilip Khanolkar
11. Mehul
12. Osric Xavier Fernandes
13. Mitul Lambani
14. Easwar Hariharan
15. Joel
16. Gaurav Chaturvedi
17. Anurag
18. Mohan S N
19. Sanjay Bhangar
20. R. K. Rajeev
21. V K Bharadwaj
22. J. T. D’souza
23. Prashant Shah

We do a lot of work in localization – especially for Gujarati language. We met Mahesh Kulkarni of CDAC Pune yesterday. We have met many other people in public sector and government over the last 3 years about Utkarsh and GujaratiLexicon. We have always got many hurdles. People have always spoken a lot about it, appreciated the efforts, acknowledged the need. But then failed to act on their promises.

This was a different experience. A few months ago, CDAC took localized versions of popular applications from us, and actually paid us for them! Yesterday, they showed interest in doing the same for other language resources we have developed – including dictionary and thesaurus.

It’s not just their willingness to pay money for the work we have done that made me happy. It is simply their approach. Mr. Kulkarni was extremely professional, courteous and valued the efforts put in. He has been in this field for more than two decades and as the head of GIST group, he knows  the sweat and emotions associated with building something for one’s mother tongue.

One of his philosophies that inspired me was about commercial aspects of language software. There is no harm in charging money for software, rather it should be done. And when foreign companies come to India for acquiring language technologies, they should be charged fairly for the services – rather than discounting the fees for the benefit of associating with a big name. Because at the end of the day, they are going to sell to fellow Indians!

It was good hearing about his experiences and learning from them. And I really salute the contribution he is making!

We organized a training workshop for Utkarsh today. It was a major success. The intention of the seminar was to teach people computers using Gujarati language, and Utkarsh as the software medium.

The team did a great job. All participants were thrilled, and felt they learnt a lot about computers. They actually wanted us to conduct more such sessions – even paid ones.

We are still to evaluate the feedback forms. But I am very happy with the event today. I think the team did a great job!

Here are some random pictures!

CDAC released OpenOffice.org in 7 Indian languages a few days ago. It’s a great step forward for Indian language computing. CDAC will also be distributing free CDs of these software very soon. This means Indians can now easily have their language on their computers. The step is important because Office applications are what people use the most. Majority of computer users are still on Windows. And providing localized applications is the first step to bridge the gap.

Utkarsh – our Gujarati laguage initiative – provided the Gujarati translations to CDAC. They have credited us well, and Charles-H. Schulz even called it news of the month!

Yikes! Gee! these are the news of the month! Congratulations to the
Bharateeyaoo and Utkarsh teams!

The good news does not end there! We are doing a lot of work with GujaratiLexicon now. We are giving away the CDs for free as well. Today’s Chitralekha has an article on GujaratiLexicon and Utkarsh. And a coupon which you can redeem for the free CD of GujaratiLexicon.

There is more to come!

I attended the Indic Developer’s Meet yesterday. It was the last day of the four day long get-together to hack on localization related issues and to also brainstorm and generate ideas. At the same time to get a perspective of what all language teams and involved organizations are doing.

The day was fantastic! Gora Mohanti summarized the progress of last three days and I could see a lot of things being done. With so many hackers in a single place you can certainly expect some miracles. The exciting thing for me especially was Gujarati dictionary support in OpenOffice. Detailed log of what happened during these days is available on the IndLinux website.

The time after the meet was equally interesting. We celebrated Kartik’s birthday and had a blast coming home from HBCSE (the meet venue). Warren played some hip-hop music on his iPod and we heard it via his iTrip on the taxi radio! Dropped by InOrbit to check out the Crosswords book sale.