Ted, My further comments are in-line. Your explanation is helping understand what your goals are.
On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 8:29 PM, Ted Liu <t...@microsoft.com> wrote: > Hi Ted, Yes, we want to establish a bridge or a group (if the idea of > "China Community" seemed to be intimidating or crazy) to help more devs > become contributors and committers to popular projects from the West and to > help incubate more Chinese projects to become popular both internationally > and domestically. This sounds great. > It aims to be a bridge to overcome language barriers and culture > differences so that more talents and projects can exchange. We certainly > hope this bridge or group can use the Apache name, at least in Chinese 阿帕奇, > but not really a MUST if ASF doesn’t support the idea or treat it as a > beast. In this case, we'd probably do it with another name not violating > ASF trademark. > Well, I think that Apache *does* support this in several ways. > Our idea is to set up a few working groups moderated, mentored by > experienced Chinese ASF members, PMC members, committers, contributors, > etc. to achieve the above goals. The working groups may be ranging from big > data, cloud computing, dev language/framework, community development > (including events, meetups, localization, travel assistance...), etc. > One strong suggestion that I would have is that we start with smaller pieces, not with everything all at once. Furthermore, the rate should be determined by the number of people willing to help make it happen. There are a variety of things that can be done. - Herve suggests localized versions of descriptions of how Apache works. There might be an additional descriptive list for questions about how Apache works that is conducted in particular languages. This is very similar to how the Open Office tries to support multiple languages. Policy decisions would, of course, have to remain on the English mailing. - A similar thing can happen with localized documentation and user mailing lists for popular projects like Spark. For instance, there might be user...@spark.apache.org. This would only work, of course, if there are enough people to answer questions. I think that these two sorts of efforts would cover most of what you mention. > > I'm so glad to hear that you were the mentor of Apache Kylin incubation > project and trust that you were also aware of the frustrations from both > side due to language issues (and maybe not-so-obvious culture difference). Yes. I have previously run a development group in China as well. I was very impressed in the Kylin project by how little the problems of language seemed to be. Of course, I might not see the problems and there is always the problem of silent failures from people who didn't show up and describe their problems because of the English-only nature. Whether I was a good mentor, I should not say. Ask Luke or another of hte project members. > Another example is Ali JStorm as an incubation project to the Apache Storm > project. I was a mentor for Storm as well and have seen this very important development first hand. > Both side probably felt frustrated along the way. Even though there are > more English-capable IT people in China nowadays, the pains and > misunderstandings of using non-native languages still exist. > Absolutely. And I feel the same problems, but even more every time I look at a web site in Chinese. Or Japanese. Or Indonesian. Or Hindi. Or Tamil. Even in languages like German, Swedish or Spanish that I can read, I am much slower than in English and it is very frustrating. > Due to the much bigger user and dev base in China, I'd put much heavier > weigh on hot projects from the West, e.g. Spark, Hadoop, etc. over the > Chinese-originated projects like Kylin. So the localization priority is > obvious. > That sounds like a great start.
