Hi all, I have been advised to write an email to this mailing list to help us resolve the problems of the Slovak translation team.
Due to reasons listed below our team is unhappy with approach and behaviour of current coordinator of team. Recently, I have volunteered for new coordinator by sending email to gnome-sk-list outlining how I would like to change the way team works [8]. I have also asked members of our team to express their opinion on whether they would like to change coordinator. Throughout past three weeks 6 members of our team have voted for myself and 3 members have voted against the change of coordinator (more less all active members of team have voted and expressed their opinions). Marcel has discussed this with me in quite a length, however he did not decided to accept wish of majority of the team and resign. Therefore I would like to ask you to help us resolve this situation, as current coordinator does not want to give up his position. Please see our reasoning below. (I do acknowledge that most of the references provided here are in Slovak, however at least members of Czech team should be able to understand them and verify if necessary). We observe the declining trend in the amount of Gnome translated to Slovak: Gnome 2.20 – 70% Gnome 2.22 – 59% Gnome 2.24 – 56% Gnome 2.26 – 52% Gnome 2.28 – 48% Gnome 2.30 - 46% This happens while there is a quite active team and currently there are 25 modules to be committed and most of them are in this state from Feb/Mar. (I'm convinced that there would even more activity if things would be moving quicker). I see the problem in that the coordinator of the Slovak team, Marcel, focuses solely on perfection and nothing else. While I understand that quality is important, the translation procedure should be organized in such a way that strive for quality is not the factor which decreases the coverage of the translated Gnome. On his side there is no will for any compromise, even though majority of the team voted for change on this[1] and would like to see more translations being committed. He has very little or no wish to try to get more modules translated, unless they are 100% perfect. He has recently said that he had not ignored the wish of the majority of the team, but he had not accepted it, providing only this explanation: "What you wish for is nice, however wishes might not always come true, even if the majority wishes it." [2]. In past year he committed 26 modules (some of them more than once), half of these modules were modules translated by him. Between June 2009 and February 2010 he committed only 2 modules (24.9.2009 damned-lies, 10.11.2009 swfdec-gnome). Two-thirds of commits were done since February 2010, after a proposal to change the coordinator and after a lot of members asked for a change in the work flow. Marcel checks everything after each reviewer and until he checks it whole (including string which are currently translated) and all of his comments are addressed he does not commit the module. He also insists on numerous bureaucratic procedures which are not necessary: - Every new member must sent a registration email with very strict formatting rules, and unless he/she does it, he/she is not accepted to the Slovak team. Even if one provides all information required and he/she fulfills all the prerequisites, he/she would not be accepted as a team member, if the registration email has an extra line, or a line is broken by an email client etc. This causes issues with almost every new member trying to join the team. Marcel considers this as some kind of test! (The only explanation why the email must be in this format was that Marcel wrote a script to check whether the registration email is correctly formatted and another script to get some statistics on team performance). - Until recently, Marcel insisted on using only one's full name, as it is written in the birth certificate !! After a long discussions [9] at gnome-sk-list, he has allowed members to use other forms of one's name (e.g. Joe if your full name is John), however one still cannot use his/her nickname!! [10] (It was even pointed to in the mailing list that this is against a Slovak law which gives the right to use any name or nickname to publish one's work). - Marcel also does not accept translations of modules unless one promises to look after the module in the future. There was a case of somebody out of the team submitting translation of dia, and Marcel refused to include it unless that person would join the team and would look after the module. - Recently, Marcel proposed a new system to accept and change rules governing Slovak Gnome translation team. His first draft of the procedures can be found here [3]. It is extremely lengthy and written in obscure language and the chance is that nobody will be willing to read it at all. - He refuses to allow anybody else except for him to commit translations without specifying sane reasons. The only given reason was "the time has not come yet" and also "there will be transparent rules created when I will get more time, which is not now"[4]. No rules were published up till now. Marcel by himself decides who should translate which module and refuses to give up modules which he has assigned to himself in the past, even though he has not worked on them for a long time. Here, [5], [6], are few examples from recent past where Marcel refused to allow other members of the team to translate module, but he did not updated them by himself. If one wants to start translating a module, he/she must first request it by an email and only when he checks that it is not one of the modules he would like to translate in the future by himself, he then assigns it to translator. It should also be noted that the few improvements, which happened in the past months, happened only after lengthy discussions, a proposal to change the coordinator and pressure from other members of the team. There already were problems with that in the past, and he only started replying once there was discussion about his replacement [7]. Further, I know two former members of the Slovak team who had quit because of the behavior of the coordinator. I hope that you will be able to help us to resolve this. Kind regards [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-March/msg00252.html [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-May/msg00002.html [3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-April/msg00096.html [4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-March/msg00247.html [5] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-January/msg00046.html [6] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-January/msg00073.html [7] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2007-November/msg00038.html [8] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-April/msg00081.html [9] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-February/msg00166.html [10] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-February/msg00346.html
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