TLDR: We welcome new members to the Common Voice Team and publish Community guidance for establishing variants for languages.
Hello Common Voice Community,
Thank you so much for your feedback on the new designs of the about page. This weeks’ update includes introductions to new members and community guidance for variants.
Establishing variants for Languages on Common Voice
Last year, we published our strategy to make Common Voice more linguistically inclusive.
To make this possible we need your participation. We are inviting communities to take part in working out which variants they’d like supported.
We have created some guidelines to help communities in submitting variants for their languages. Please read the guidelines in full and then discuss with your community groups.
Once your language community has discussed and decided on which variants you’d like to support, please submit your choices via this google form before the 31st January 23:00 UTC.
Update: Thanks so much for the submissions we recieved, the variant feature is now live on the platform. We hope to do another round of submissions in the next quarter. If you would wish to submit variants please share with us in your mother tounge an not in English.
Please find here an example of the variants from my profile.
Further support
- On January 24, 2022 → January 24, 2022 (hover for timezones) we are hosting an AMA with Francis on Common Voice Variants for Languages. You can now pre-submit questions via the thread.
- You can also reach out to Francis via Matrix
New Members of the Common Voice Team
This week the Common Voice Team welcomed three new team members. Please give them a warm and kind welcome 
@zaccolley - Zac is joining as a full-stack developer with focus on the front-end. they are interested in web accessibility, performance, writing about themselves in third person
@gzh - Gabriel is a long time fan of all things Mozilla, joining the Common Voice team as a full-stack developer with a focus on backend tech 
@sabrinang — Sabrina, User experience and interface (UX/UI) designer on Mozilla Foundation’s digital engagement team who will be working with the Common Voice team.
Opportunities and events
- Need help with an idea for your community ? You can get support at the Community Support Desk on Thursday 20th Jan, 11am UTC and 2pm UTC
- 2022 marks the beginning of the UN Decade for Indigenous Languages. Festival of Indigenous Languages (Jan 14 to 23rd) An online gathering to celebrate and connect at the beginning of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032! https://events.zoom.us/e/view/FqwixLGDQQigUmZ0alw8Cg
- New blog post by Kathleen “In preparing articles for our blog, made available in sw and en, I have done some manual translating. This gave me the desire to know how translations from Google Translate would compare to mine.” read more on the blog.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask.
All the best,
Hillary,
Common Voice Community Manager