Hi Rob, sorry ... I didn't saw that your answer was addressed to me, because of top-posting and ... because of heavy traffic on the lists I had reinstall an email client to see the threads ;-)
Am 16.06.2011 16:39, schrieb Rob Weir:
It might be worth describing how national language projects and the OpenOffce NLC has worked in the past. I think this would be educational for our Apache mentors to understand a little of what they do. It is much more than just translation. They are almost more like affiliate organizations that promote OpenOffice in their countries.,
absolutely right ... - costumer care (mailinglists, FAQ's aso.) - promotion (fairs, events ...) - proactive marketing - press releases, -
They are the "face of OOo" in their respective countries. But you could explain it better than me. A top level question for is is how we see this mapping to the Apache project. The two extremes are: 1) Move all of this into the Apache project. All 100+ translation projects, country marketing projects, etc.
-1
2) Have the national language projects run outside of Apache. Since anyone can modify the code we released and repackage it and distribute it, it should be possible for any party to independently add translations and even rename it for distribution in their country. Of course, while respecting the license and trademark requirements.
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Of course, we can do some intermediate thing to.
yes, IMHO you/we should choose the intemediate way
For example, it might work well to have volunteers who produce material that is directly included in a release, such as translations, localization patches, product help files, etc., be part of the Apache project. But then there would be freedom for external groups to continue distributing, marketing, etc., localized versions outside of the Apache project.
+1
One way to look at this is what your actual experience has been with this in OpenOffice before, in terms of patterns of collaboration and interaction. For example, is there often peer-to-peer coordination required between the German and the Spanish language projects?
It was more or less like Apache works (as far as I can give an opioion of it).
"Don't talk, do it." ... (please observe: I don't talk about what happend in Hamburg. ;-) ) As you can see for example the CD/DVD project in the german community. It was created by a group which would like to offer a CD to the community. But, as André reads here, he can talk a little bit more about. ;-)
Or is it more of a hub-and-spokes model where the language "teams" are semi-autonomous, but coordinate with the main OOo project, receiving releases and submitting patches, etc.?
Yes, as well ;-) - The model you will not find in a textbook. For me as an business economist it was amazing to see how it worked. I was swarm intelligence at it's best.
I'd be interested in hearing arguments either way. -Rob
HTH M. excuse typos, grammer, diction or spelling
