The Mozilla Community in Vietnam

# This is the talk that Nguyen Ha Duong did on AsiaCamp 2011 in Kuala Lumpur

The Mozilla Community in Vietnam

Current status:

Lots of users.

Few contributors (less than 10 people)

We have got some contributing fests/sprints

Featured projects:

Pencil Project:

A GUI Prototyping and simple sketching tool.

Home: http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Home.aspx

AVIM:

A Vietnamese input method editor for Firefox.

Home: http://www.1ec5.org/software/avim/

Difficulties:

People are afraid (and shy) to make mistakes.

So is there lots of ppl like to contribute but afraid of make
mistake? It's not really.

Remind people that software development is all about making
mistakes and learning from them as well as you can. +1

Also, buy asking the question in public they help other people who
may have the same problems but were also too shy to ask

People don't want to get out of their comfort zone.

Few loyal contributors.

Common question: What's the immediate and tangible benefit I could get?

Technology:

Fast-track update (people think it's really annoying).

Compatibility problems.

"High" memory usage (about 120 MB - 300 MB). We face the same
problem when spread in countryside, ex. on netbook, general the memory
in such kinds of pc less then 1G. --> more technical description, file
a bug.

More about this problem: Popular sites in Vietnam use extremely
much flash --> But AdBlock+ and FlashBlock DO help!

Ideas/solutions:

Firefox complaining day (tie in w. test drivers?)

Follow up with a Firefox love day (what is good about firefox,
what is good about open source - try to encourage people to focus all
the amazing things that have been achieved through open source,
community based, software development)

Sprints. (set attainable goals for the sprints - make it easy for
new people to participate and to succeed)

Communication skills in L10n.

Release parties and other events - We gather new contributer
mostly from yearly release party - with the rapid realease cycle every
6 weeks, you might want to try holding events around reaching
milestones in the Vietnamese community (completed localizations or
having added a number of new contributors - or hitting a milestone in
local marketshare)

More Contributing fests - we had monthly gathering and weekly
worknight. that's help. (Laura -- Grace - Berlin - presentation:
release parties without release numbers -> feature-based parties,
local goals)

Setting priorities.

Highlight a contributor of the month - give out a prize - great!

Attach incentives with the completion of projects (parties, etc)

Provide educational opportunities (about Firefox, other
technologies) for local open source community to recruit new
contributors

Would be fun to hook up a sprint or contribution fest on video
with another community (i.e in EU or elsewhere)

Firefox nightly builds: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/

Get data on how many people in Vietnam are on 3.6 and develop an
upgrade campaign

What about Internet cafes? Many Internet cafe manament software
come with Mozilla Firefox. Another similar idea is around
pre-installed Windows/Linux from hardware providers

cf.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/AsiaCamp_2011/Schedule/Skills_Development_and_Community_Growth_Track/mozvn
https://wiki.mozilla.org/AsiaCamp2011/Schedule