Hi all, as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees are native Chinese speakers. I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help make the ASF more welcoming to these communities.
Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on the planet. However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so. In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions and he’s a valuable part of the community. It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures: * WeChat Groups * Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so. Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365. But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me to write in Chinese ;-) ) This got me thinking: We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common mantra). But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what they did. So … what if we question this rule. I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing a new solution into the picture. What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project? Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in any language. If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure there are services out there able to do that) A translated English version could be stored alongside the original. Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, … If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the language he can understand. I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we need inside the foundation. What do you folks think? Chris
