Review of MoKo 2007

Note: most of links in this article are korean sites.

It’s almost the end of 2007 that there were many activities in Mozilla Korean Community. In this year Korean community was grown up by voluntary participators. Firstly, many local communities was made by them, e.g. content and marketing community and Mozilla Developer Center(MDC) korean community and add-ons korean community as well official community.

Especially the community for MDC and add-ons was very active and there were many local contents in MDC Korean and Korean add-ons sites and official Add-ons site. The number of official community members was 3650 on Dec. 31th and over 100 active members registered in each sub communities.

Various promotional activities were offered in this year. Blogs related to Firefox, Firefox inside, Fox@home and Firefox blog cafe gave a good information to general users. According to Allblog, the famous Korean blog search engine, there were over 14,000 blog articles tagged “Firefox” since March 2007. Although bloggers in Allblog is very technical experts rather than ordinary people, it’s very hopeful signal to grow market share in here.

Personally I had many chances to speak Mozilla’s project and open web strategy in Future Web Forum(en) on March, JCO Open Source Conference(en) on October and various IT companies, Samsung and LG Electronics about Mozilla technical platform.

Especially Mozilla’s new mission statement for open web is very helpful to us. As you know, Gen indicated Korean “closed web” situation via his good article, the cost of monoculture(en) in early this year. Many social costs were paid by Active X based Korean intranet systems by changes of XP service pack 2 and Windows Vista(en). Most of Korean Firefox users suffered web surfing of most of local sites and they must launch Internet Explorer or use IETab extensions in a separate way. (Of course, there has no way in Mac and Linux OS users. They have been warriors in forefront for closed web.)

As a result, there were many many news(en) written by Gen including establishing open web’s legal reaction(en). Many mozilla guys were interested in Korean situation including Asa, Gen, Paul and John. I felt that Mozilla DevDay(en) in Boston on March. There was a episode. Seth recommended standards promotion, so I brought web standards posters over 30 pieces from boston and gave them to requesters with promotion plans.

In this year, many korean web sites became more standardized and XHTML/CSS skills did universal for web developers. Personally I translated DOM Scripting(en) of Jeremy Keith into Korean and published technical report(en) for web standards with CJK’s experts. There were over five books related web standards and over ten books about Ajax skill. Rich web techniques influenced Korean web developers. They were aware of needs of structured separation for user experience between technical platforms and web. Although Microsoft and Adobe’s new technology seems to be popular in here, the independence of platforms will be accelerated in next year.

At last, on Novermber, Korean E-government site started to support Firefox and Safari for using public certificate only based on Active X controls. And a payment gateway introduced open payment, All browser payment service for a transaction of credit card. (In Korea, you need to install Active X control by credit card companies to buy something via online.) In next year, many bank and shopping sites will support Firefox for secure transactions by these efforts.

On December 5th, our community gave a annual party. Over 40 users were participated and they expressed own feelings about Firefox (referring to Gen(en) and John‘s(en) article.)

I was very impression there were general users as like middle school student. It means the mass of people started to use Firefox as well only IT experts. In fact, I minded active marketing for years to general users because there are many mine field in Korean web sites to surf. They easily uninstall Firefox and tend to never install software with bad experiences. But I decided to aggressive community marketing in next year after party.

In next year, MoKo will preserve our efforts for open web environment and try to increase Firefox users over 2% in Korea. (estimated 0.5% right now.) For that, we’ll make community build supported by Naver and Daum with good theme and useful extensions as like IE Tab including Korean whitelist. And we plans many community based marketing promotions and events in one half year related to Mozilla’s 10 anniversary.

Happy New Year and Force and Firefox with you!