On January 2018 will be exactly four years since I started volunteering for Mozilla Serbia community. It’s funny how sometimes it seems that time just flies away so quickly. For me, volunteering for Mozilla is my way of contributing to the Open Web and everything it represents (Open Source, Internet rights, Internet privacy and security, etc.). Since I don’t have money for donations (well I do have, but I honestly have/had more important things to spend money on), I decided to contribute by localizing Mozilla projects, like Firefox, Firefox OS, Focus, etc.
I personally don’t like how those projects look translated, probably because I prefer Internet and everything on it to be in English, but I know there are other people who prefer the other way. So this is my contribution to them. This article will be sort of a review of Mozilla Serbia community, what we did during the 2017. and what are our plans for the next year.
Every community has its ups and downs. Our ups would be us, few contributors that still in some way keep this community alive. What are our downs? There are not many of us left. That’s the problem with volunteering. It’s free, so many people are not interested in it. And that’s okay, I understand that. We had couple of people who would contribute from time to time during 2017. Some of them would contribute at certain time, then stop, and then again come back after some time. Some wouldn’t. No matter of that, I would like to thank them all for their contribution, small or big one, it doesn’t matter, everything counts.
In March, my friend Marko Kostić and me attended the L10n Hackathon at Barcelona. Our goals were to translate some of the most important projects at the time and to create new Style Guide for our community. Style Guide is sort of a manual for new localizers who join our community. It contains the most important things that new contributors should know when they start with localization of Mozilla projects on Serbian language. We put the Style Guide under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence and its source code is available here.
The next mayor thing we did this year is translating and releasing Focus for Android app on Serbian language. Focus is an amazing mobile browser designed for better privacy with built-ed in adblocker, created by Mozilla. More information about Focus can be found here
And for the end, after many months (or years, who knows), we finally managed to translate 100% of all currently enabled projects for Serbian language. This is something that I’ve been chasing for a while and I know that very soon there will be new strings to translate or maybe new projects, but still, it is nice to see that everything is translated even for a certain period of time. I am very proud on everyone who contributed in the past days, months and years and I thank you all!
Pontoon Dashboard for Serbian team
Last year as a members of Mozilla Serbia community, former member Vojislav Stanković and I held a speech about online privacy and security (you can read more about it here) and I was hoping that there would be more similar events this year, but as I was busy a lot around personal life and school, I couldn’t manage to organize more of those events, but I hope next year I will have more time (and will).
So yeah, that would be one of the goals for the next year. More events about online privacy and security, maybe even event about Poontoon platform itself, who knows. We will see were path will take us. Until then, thank you all for contribution!