Hello BSD Certification community and specially Translation Team Members, I would like to start a conversation right now regarding the actual translation efforts and the way we do it.
In the last months there have been some changes regarding how the Web site is maintained. It became mostly static HTML files which are, for sure, easy to translate and deal with. Also, SVN access to change it has been put online. Thus, we have an opportunity to change how we used to work on translations. Since the translation efforts started, I have noticed some difficult issues to deal with. The very first one is that sometimes the work depende don me somehow to happen. I am sure its possibly my fault show somehow, maybe centralized something. So, now we have a chance to change it. I want to discuss with you how to make the translation work the most independant, allowing the groups to work however they wish, and at the sabe time granting the teams the necessary infra-structure to work and communicate. Lets start with the points: 1 - Communication We use today to have e-mail alias @bsdcertification.org which points to the team members. It has proven to be a bad approach. First, because as simple mail alias, we have few to no possibilities of customizations at all. Second because since today, SPF and Microsoft Sender-ID anti-spam stuff is becoming a defacto-stanrd but SRS is not, and relies on both, forwarder and receiver sides to have effect, working with mail aliases has failed completly. Therefore what the BSDCG will provide to the teams, is a mailing list, running mailman. The team or someone (usually the founder, the first member of the group) will be provided with the password to admin that list of the group however they like to. Any suggestions/comments about that approach? 2 - Team Leadership How the teams will work, will be discussed and defined between the teams exclusively. Therefore, if at any event such as the need for better translation revisions, or introduction to new team members, etc, happens to need a local person to explain something, I would like to count on Team Leaders. Therefore I am not sure how we can determine this leadership. I expect people to raise hands and say "I can manager this group". I intend to be the contact between the BSDCG and the Teams. But regarding the team work I would preffer not envolving too much in their decisions. I hope to hear suggestions about that too. 3 - Actually putting things "online" I have to make it simple! Maybe SVN access would not be that simple, therefore someone has, in the past, suggested access to a DAV-enabled webserver where they could send things from. I personally believe that any approach will do. Both, DAV access as well as SVN access require some sort of extra knowledge. And both can be made even mor simple, say, adding SVN client applications (such as front-ends) and using some O.S. and GUI native support for DAV (such as the ones we find on Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X Leopard and Microsoft Windows), or even using 3rd party front ends such as `cadaver-front` or `sitecopy`. If we deal with SVN access, we have do discuss if every team member should have their own username/password to access that directory they are working at, or if one only username per team will do. If we choose DAV, the team will work in a development server, and periodically (crontab job), the stuff on the DAV directory will be commited to the subversion tree and later, become online. This is my idea to deal with that. So, what would be easier and require the less extra learning from people who want only to translate things? 4 - Wiki I intend to maintain the main Wiki instructions and teams will maintain how they wish to, their own Wiki pages in the Wiki site. 5 - Announcements I intend to propose to the BSDCG to send the new announcements to the teams 48hrs before they get online, when possible, to allow it to be available in sync in many languages as we can. If the actual team members and community understand its important to have the announcement available in those languages in sync. 7 - Keeping Things Up-to-date Who will be responsible to keep the localized site up-to-date? One would ask. Personally, the team is the only responsible ones I believe. Therefore I dont believe its a good idea to automatically "move" people to the localized site as well as they access the bsdcertification.org site, using the browser configuration or anything else to determine their language. Instead, I believe that the best aprroach is to keep English always the default, and we add a drop-down <select> box on top of the site to allow people to go to the localized version. 8 - URL Scheming Keep the ISO-CC (Contry Code) and add it as a directory or webserver Alias on the URL, so it can be directly accessed/linked etc, say: http://www.bsdcertification.org/fr-fr http://www.bsdcertification.org/de-de http://www.bsdcertification.org/es-es http://www.bsdcertification.org/pt-br ... ======================================================== I would like to hear suggestions and discuss with everyone about that, in this list. If someone have even more simple (but effective) approaches to suggest, please do. I believe its time to allow translation teams to work more confortably. -- Patrick Tracanelli FreeBSD Brasil LTDA. Tel.: (31) 3516-0800 [email protected] http://www.freebsdbrasil.com.br "Long live Hanin Elias, Kim Deal!" _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
