Summary

The second meeting of the 2021 Localization Summit confronted questions and challenges related to sustainability in localization. Participants in this session were Localization Lab language team coordinators, developers, funders, and partners from the Internet Freedom localization community. The meeting was held in a roundtable format with breakout groups to facilitate more direct conversation. Attendees discussed opportunities to improve localization sustainability through funding, volunteer community management and engagement, organizational partnerships, and localization resource development.

This report is a summary of those discussions. It doesn’t capture every point made, but includes  the primary ideas, themes, and topics that emerged during the two-hour session. We present it here in hopes that others will engage with these ideas in efforts to build and establish more sustainable models in this space.

Broadly, attendees discussed solutions they’ve implemented, challenges they’ve experienced, and ideas they would like to see explored.

Successes

Recruit enthusiasm first, technical acumen second.

Attendees reported that, in their experience, the team members that were most likely to stay for medium or long periods of time and do quality work are those who have a connection to the work and feel enthusiastic about doing it. Recruiting new team members who may be less familiar with technical concepts but are excited about serving their communities and helping to solve problems is typically a more beneficial and successful approach than recruiting technically savvy contributors who don’t have that level of enthusiasm for the purpose.

Structured incentive programs have worked well for several community members.

While not all participants had experience in establishing or managing these types of incentive programs, a few reported success with them. One team coordinator explained a program they had in place where contributors were able to receive different rewards at different levels, from certificates and swag up to tablets and scholarships. Another discussed a matrix their team keeps, tracking work and contributions. After a team member has been working with the organization for six months, they are eligible to apply for more budget, more work, swag, and more. 

Both reported that these programs helped to incentivize people to stay with the team, and contributed to feelings of belonging and commitment. (Lots of people talked about the benefits of swag!)

Making things as easy and pleasant as possible for contributors increases retention.

Beautiful and easy-to-use interfaces can help make contributing to localization projects less arduous and more pleasant, and make it easier for contributors to stay on. While Transifex and Weblate (platforms that Localization Lab uses for many of its projects) have improved their user experiences in recent years, many contributors still find some of their features and design clunky and frustrating. One team mentioned that, by contrast, Mozilla Common Voice, a project for donating and validating voice datanother localization platform, has been able to recruit and retain Thai contributors largely because of its pleasant web interface and ease of use.

In-kind support can be useful and effective.

While it may run into some of the same challenges we mention below with regard to paying contributors, the right kind of in-kind support can be very helpful to localization projects and teams. Groups often need technical and infrastructural support, like phones, laptops, and tablets. Providing materials like these has at times allowed other funding to be spent on things like paying contributors for their time.

Challenges

Burnout, contributor retention, and turnover.

Contributor burnout -- which happens when team members become disengaged from the work as a result of exhaustion, overwhelm, or frustration -- was discussed as a major concern and challenge for every localization team at the Summit. It can show up in various ways and for various reasons. Some attendees mentioned that very active teams of unpaid contributors seem to be at a particularly high risk of burnout, as team members may not feel like they are seeing any benefit from their hard work. Others mentioned that unpaid contributors may be resentful if others are being paid. And one group mentioned how demoralizing it can be to work hard on a project only to never see it being adopted in one’s own community.

Additionally, high turnover among contributors is costly. It takes time, money, and labor to train and onboard newly-recruited team members, and often this is an ad hoc process, rather than having easily repeatable onboarding procedures established and documented. Retaining contributors for the long term is good for community, and allows resources that might otherwise be used for training new team members to be put to different use.

Funding is essential, but the primary models need to be reevaluated.

Funding for Internet Freedom and localization projects is often distributed along colonial lines. It remains common that organizations based in the West or Global North receive the bulk of the funding while those in the Global South perform the bulk of the work. While conceptually it would seem that money granted to these organizations would make its way to the contributors, this is not always the case, especially given the prominent volunteer-based implementation models. One question that was posed during the session was about what funders themselves can do to establish and promote new funding models among their peers, especially models that will not further entrench harmful structures or practices.

Volunteer-based models risk reinforcing harmful existing structures.

It’s common for localization teams to rely on contributions from volunteers, but relying on unpaid labor can shape one’s community into an unrepresentative one. Specifically, often those who are typically able to volunteer are those who have the time, resources, and bandwidth (both emotional and infrastructural) to contribute for no pay, which can make for a classist, sexist, ageist, and ableist structure. It preferences young people and those who are not caretakers (which biases against women, by and large).

Some attendees noted that this tends to bias the languages in which a tool or resource is localized, as it’s more common for those from Global North countries to have full time work and the time and resources to volunteer, versus those in the Global South who are less likely to be able to spend their time working for no pay.

Paying contributors is important! It can also be complicated.

Attendees were universal in their support for finding ways to pay contributors, but were sure to mention the complications that payments can bring. Logistically, it can often be difficult to wire money to a person or an organization, whether for reasons of politics or otherwise. States sometimes crack down on payment methods (like cryptocurrency) or payments from particular organizations, investigating them for potential money laundering or terrorism support.

Participants also mentioned that they saw resentment among unpaid contributors when others were being paid, which can have a serious negative impact on morale and team cohesion.

Ideas to Explore

Mentorship or Ambassador programs for language contributor communities.

An Ambassador program would designate team members to perform outreach in various communities and actively recruit new contributors, while a mentorship program would have established community members working directly with new contributors to make sure they feel supported and included. Establishing personal relationships between longtime community members and new contributors can help people feel welcome, instill a sense of belonging, and help to mitigate imposter syndrome.

Connecting with youth.

Young people are often the ones teaching their parents and other family members about technology and technical tools. It’s worth exploring reaching out directly to young members of communities to promote localized tools and resources among their groups. This could mean direct partnerships with community primary schools or other youth-focused community programs.

Universities as resources.

A few attendees mentioned that university students could be valuable contributors to localization communities. Students in linguistics, design, and computer science fields may be especially interested in being a part of a localization team, though it needn’t be exclusive to those fields. Options for compensation could include monetary payment or potentially course credit, and it could be a way to introduce a young person to these issues and solutions and inviting them to be a part of a community where they can make change.

A distributed model for Localization Lab.

Some participants expressed interest in establishing official Localization Lab chapters or offices around the world. In many places, formalizing the existing affiliations between language teams and Localization Lab can afford more legitimacy to the groups doing the work, which has potential to help with recruitment, stability, and legal status.