Some thoughts...

Hi Folks,

It's a bit past time for an introduction, but I'd like to say hello and fill you in on a few things we are working towards. I joined Opera two years ago because we are one of the few technology companies that has the opportunity, everyday, to positively affect millions of people's lives all around the globe. I started out in Desktop marketing, then after we combined marketing teams for all consumer products, I moved in to lead the team as director of marketing. Thus far, we've experienced really solid growth. I'm proud to say we have been working with our community more and more to nurture that growth.

You are the reason we've grown from a company of two people in an office in Oslo to a company that is at the forefront of innovation on the Web. Your support has always been vital for Opera. That's why we want to open ourselves more to you. We want you to join us as we continue our mission to transform lives through the power of the Web. We want you to share in our progress as we move forward.

We're busy making changes now that will let us be more open and more communicative about our goals, dreams, our vision for what the Internet can be, and how we believe Opera will be at the center of that picture.

Part of our path forward means improving our Web sites. ChooseOpera.com is our community hub and we are in the process of redesigning it. If you have ideas of what you think should go into the design, feel free to mail me. We are working with a community member to redesign this page and will have more to share soon.

We're also about to unveil a brand new, shiny opera.com in the next month or so. The talented folks on our Web team have worked long and hard to create an incredible new site that helps focus our message towards consumers everywhere. I really do hope you will be impressed.

But this brings me to my most important point. Why have a beautiful website though if only a small portion of the population can read it? (And for that matter this blog post) We need to solve the problem of making our website accessible to those who are more comfortable in non-English environments. Although English may be considered the "international" language, people from all over the world use our products and we want to make as much content as possible available in their language.

In the coming weeks, Opera will launch the Community Driven Translation project. It will be open to people all around the world who would like to participate. It incorporates a peer-review system that allows us to work together to get the content just right. You are the experts. Once we have fully translated sites, we will launch them ASAP based on the new opera.com framework (mentioned earlier).

The program will be based around a wiki-style infrastructure that will allow only one person to work on a particular page at one time. Once someone is done working on the page, others will then have access to it. This requires a lot of coordination so we will most likely nominate a community leader to give us the authorization to make the pages live.

What all of this means is that every page on Opera.com, whether they are help files, changelogs, press releases, anything, will be available in the languages our community wants. We bring our company to you on your terms. It's incredibly ambitious, but that's part of what Opera is all about - pushing boundaries and creating new experiences for the benefit of consumers the world over.

Please stay tuned in the coming month while we prepare to work more closely with you and everyone in our community. In the meantime, feel free to check out the current forum, and get started on existing content if you wish. Help us bring our shared vision of One Web to people all around the world.

Thanks for reading this far and thanks again for choosing Opera.