Two weeks ago some of the European localization teams met in Geneva to talk about the different approaches European localization teams have taken to support Mozilla users in their countries. It became obvious that there are as many possible ways as localization teams to do that. In Germany for example we have one community per product, mostly for historical reasons. That means that Thunderbird has its own localizer, website, forums, community etc. and Firefox has its own localizer etc, the same goes for Seamonkey, Calender, etc. In Spain everything Mozilla related is concentrated on one website, in France it's split by area, so support is one community, localization is another, developer docs is another one, etc.
But one thing that is common to all is the problem in finding new people to work on the teams longterm. Francesco put it quite bluntly: "always the same faces" And he is right, almost all of the contributors meeting
in Geneva were either founders of the localization teams or had joined years ago, when the project was still in its infancy. This poses a big problem for the local communities, while the number of users is growing
as well as the number of websites to localize for the growing number of marketing campaigns (like the world record) and additional Mozilla services (like amo or sumo) the number of localizers stays mostly the
same. That means more work for the same number of people, and keep in mind, that every single localization team consists completely of volunteers. Volunteers aren't payed, they have to study or work for a living. Of course, localizers do what they do, because they believe in it, but even then the day has only 24 hours.
So we talked about ways to get people interested in the localization work and it became apparent, that it's not about getting people interested, there is a lot of interest, but mostly short term, people stay just long enough to learn, how the work is done and then they are gone, and you start again to teach the next one. It was quite interesting to listen to how people there in the meeting room became interested in Mozilla. Did you know that SUMO superstar David Tenser was drawn in by the cute Gecko icon? My interest was sparked by Beonex, the absolutely secure but absolutely unusable Mozilla fork. The point is: everyone has a unique story, how he (yes it's mostly he) got involved. I guess there are very few people who were actually asked to participate and then just agreed. Most of the time it's either unintentional or by immanent motivation, not external stimulation.
Knowing that is great, but how do you operationalize that theory? It was only when we were talking about the fact that most of the localizers had been there from the very beginning, that I realized, who was sitting next to me. My team mates Michael and Thomas have joined the German localization team less than 2 years ago, and they have been indispensable ever since. So, apparently it is possible to get new volunteers into an established localization team, even longterm. Of course that rises the question, just how exactly we did it. And the short answer is: by accident. The slightly longer is: there are many factors, so it's hard to nail it down, especially if it happened by accident, but apparently the key is to step down and make place for other people. Yes, it seems to be as easy as that.
When the Sumo project started Henrik and I tried to manage it additionally to all of our traditional duties, but it was quite clear that we had no chance of maintaining it by ourselves. Along came Thomas: he started to have a closer look at our work and got involved more and more. Pretty soon he was the most active person on SUMO and I had to ask David to give him approval rights because I couldn't keep up with approving all of his work. Since then he took over SUMO and is now actively responsible for that work and he is doing an awesome job. The same goes for Michael and his work on the website localization.
This is actually a success story, and I think the key points were, that we (1) needed help within a specific area, a transfer of the help documentation from in-product help to SUMO, and that (2) Henrik and I handed over the responsibility for that area completely to Thomas. It's one thing to contribute little bits and pieces to a projects, but it's a completely different thing to own it.
But of course like I said, everybody has his own unique story, and this is no panacea, but it's probably worth a try. Single out a task you need help with, don't ask for general help, be as specific as possible. Then, if you find someone and you are happy with their contribution, offer them to hand that area over. Yes, this does not work without a leap of faith, you have to let go of something that you might have build up, but in then end you'll be better off.
The weather and the Macedonia - Scotland soccer match kept people in their houses, but we still got plenty of visitors. 3 hours of fun on the city square in Skopje and Kumanovo was great. People came, they got to know the Firefox browser, the +5000 addons, Mozilla and the Macedonian promotion team. 
Because the so called "Internet Boom" just recently took over the Republic of Macedonia, things in the IT sphere are just starting up. So a few enthusiasts got the idea to create a Mozilla promotion team here. From the black-board, the idea grew into reality, forming Mozilla Macedonia in 2 cities around the Republic of Macedonia: 
Sorry guys. We owe you one.
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