Supporting upstream open source projects

For many years the MetaBrainz Foundation has wanted to directly support some of the upstream open source projects we use for development. These upstream projects are used behind the scenes by one or more MetaBrainz projects. They often don’t have individual users, and many lack the visibility for getting other funding.

We are starting with a small donation of $1,001, annually. These will be one-time donations to 13 projects, $77 each. The total amount and the list of projects (see below) will be revised every year.

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New MetaBrainz translation platform

MetaBrainz project translation has officially moved from Transifex to Weblate! This is a big step forward, with improvements like single sign-on using your MusicBrainz account, proper attribution to translators, unified handling of glossaries, custom checks for MusicBrainz variable syntax, better integration with our development workflow, and supporting a libre software organization. We also tidied up the documentation and the forums about translation and more generally about internationalization of all aspects of MetaBrainz.

Your central information page for all MetaBrainz internationalization is now: https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Internationalization

Your new translation platform is (MusicBrainz login required):
https://translations.metabrainz.org/

This is also a great opportunity to give translating a go if you’ve never done it before. In the second half of this blog post we will walk you through getting started. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert translator!

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MetaBrainz Summit 2022

The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.

We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!

A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

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