And I am glad I met with them all. There are several problems in process that need to be resolved. Fortunately, I think they can in fact be fixed fairly easily, as everyone wants not only for the Indic localization teams to work more efficiently, but for developers in India to contribute more to the core product.
The primary problems, as I understand them, have to do with issues related to localization of OOo to Indic languages. [add your favourite issues here]
They also have to do with the impression that the process by which code is submitted, evaluated, incorporated is opaque. The overall solution, I believe, lies in making the relevant processes more transparent. The Engineering Steering Committee has been working in this direction but perhaps something more from it would help. The idea, after all, is to promote development of OOo everywhere.
Immediately upon my return to Canada from holiday, I contacted Martin and Stefan and informed them of Sankarshan's requests. Stefan acknowledged that things need to be clarified but also pointed me to the wikis associated with development, accessible from http:// wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page, but fairly buried to the uninitiated. Stefan indicated he or Martin would move the wiki pages somewhere more prominent. I might suggest the Development page, http://development.openoffice.org/, which needs a substantial updating to make it easier to find things that are useful.
As well, the ESC needs to help out by clarifying the processes. I'm sure that members of this list would be eager to translate whatever documents that come out, if not do more than that. Perhaps this post can serve as a means to get things going in that direction, a way to initiate discussions.
Finally, I suggested to Sankarshan that one thing OOo can benefit from is having local mentors who can address questions directly, in person, when possible, and he tentatively agreed. Ideally, substantially discussions will be captured on mail lists or forums or even IRC but that's not always possible. Sometimes it's easier just to talk.
However, we here are all fairly distributed. So, perhaps periodic meetings via IRC with the core developers might be useful...? As many of you know, we use irc.freenode now for constant discussions, and you can usually find many of those core developers on the #OpenOffice.org channel. But having focused discussions--those with an announced topic--might be more productive.
The point is to start dialogue on how we can make it easier for developers to work on OOo and how we can improve the procedures for making meritorious work noticed.
Best, Louis [0] http://www.linuxasia.net/
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