On Jul 28, 2006, at 4:03 PM, Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
this might be a good chance to bring forward a pet peeve of mine: there is more than just sex as an issue to address when it comes to diversity. The first thing that comes to my mind is the language barrier: while it's perfectly understandable that Apache has been an english speaking community, this nevertheless means we're somewhat leaving a lot of potential outside our fence. I for one know a lot of people here in Italy who are either non or under participating due to their poor (or perceived as such) knowledge of English.
Same here. Spent lots of time in the past few years in Belarus (my native country) and Russia. There is lots of people who are doing or attempting to do open source development, but don't get too far because of the language barrier. Even registering a project on SourceForge turned to be a problem for some guys (who are otherwise extremely smart developers), let alone communication on the mailing lists with the English speaking community.
Another real-life example was Japan - it turned out that a number of big and small companies there used our product, but there was no participation or communication with anybody from Japan, so we likely missed on a lot of feedback and improvement ideas.
Note: I don't have a solution handy, yet it might be interesting to discuss the issue and see if we can do something about it.
I don't have a solution either, but the fact that a solution would bring so much more fresh talent to the open source world should encourage work in this direction. I can think of a few steps that can be taken:
* parallel native language mailing lists for the existing projects that have substantial non-English speaking communities. * make it a matter of policy to accept incubator proposals for the projects in other languages (post this visibly on the Incubator web site, and translate it, to encourage people submitting such proposals). If and when we have such proposal, we'll be able to develop a better insight into what it takes to run multilingual community.
Of course there are problems with that as well. There have to be multilingual people on the PMC to serve as an alias between wider ASF community and the project community. All issues requiring a vote will have to be translated to all languages involved, etc.
Thoughts? Andrus --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
