Recently a bunch of us have been discussing how best we can help out with all the Mozilla/Firefox localization effort, by contributing time, effort, and resources, and by facilitating communications and collaboration. It has become obvious that people relevant to this effort would like to get more organized.
After a more detailed discussion held at the SPR Cafe in the basement of our building at Tsinghua Science Park two days ago, we decided to initiate a grouping, which we call, for the time being, the Firefox CN Lozalization Liaison Group. I know this is a mouthful — members of this group can decide what to call it eventually or what nicknames to adopt.
The creation of this group is not meant to drive any community project work or replace any of the existing activities. Its sole purpose is to facilitate communication and collaboration among all the folks who are involved with localizing Firefox and other related products. Indeed this is not necessarily limited to Firefox. For example, its scope can also cover the localization of Firefox extensions. Moreover, by localization, we meant more than Han-Hua (translating English strings to Chinese). For instance, creating adaptations and extensions for the China market would be very interesting. [And this is why I did not use L10N as a shorthand, as that is commonly taken to mean just translation of the language.] Finally, this group is not limited to people who are already contributing to the Mozilla/Firefox projects. Anyone interested in the technologies, products, deployment and other issues could join.
We decided to get organized first by asking people to sign up and also openning an IRC channel in Chinese. Later we will see whether it is benefitial to establish mailing aliases, forums, and to organize (social and/or project-related) gatherings and events.
To sign up, please send email to firefoxer.register@gmail.com , which is monitored by Alfred Peng and Rachel Zhang at Sun ERI and Jack Guo at Mozilla Online. It would be best if you send in some information about yourself (such as your name, city where you are, your cellphone number, etc.) so the group can better understand where its members are; but if for privacy reasons you decide not to include such information, that would be OK too.
The IRC channel is open at irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn. For those needing an IRC tool, you can go to [https:] and install a Firefox add-on called chatzilla, and then type into the URL box irc://irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn and get connected to many of us.
A word of thanks to those who were present at the SPR cafe discussion (in no particular order): 陆伯鹰 (Brian Lu), 沙佳瑜 (Leon Sha), 颜强 (Even Yan), 张羽 (Rachel Zhang), 彭洋 (Alfred Peng), 宫力 (Li Gong), 过元铮 (Jack Guo), 杨小云 (Sharon Yang), 石赟昀 (Sherring Shi), and 杨波 (Bo Yang) .
Please remember to send in an email to sign up! (And help spread the word!)