Re: [native-lang] Regional mentors/leads
Hi, and thanks for bringing the proposal to a public list. Louis Suarez-Potts schrieb: * I want to be a Regional Community Lead! I want to be a Regional Community Lead! What shall I do? Simple. Write to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list a proposal and we'll take on from there. Oh, I never even thought of that 8-) About what? That more people want to become Regional Community leads or thet they should ask at a public list about that. While I am looking forward to the first, I hope the latter is obvious ;) If I get all this right, (and sorry for the very German style to get all things in structures), regional Community leads will have similar tasks like Native Lang Community leads have now. Bu they will step in at locations where that language-based "Community-Setup"does not work very well (e.g. Inda, Africa because we have a mix of languages in a given region - or US, Australia, England, because we have only one language in different regions with different cultures)? Looking at the structures those regional leads need to have close contact with the native lang projects (of their region as well as global), correct? You know, sometimes I do presentations about our poject's structures and hw you can join. So I just like to know, where all thiswould fits in. André - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [native-lang] Regional mentors/leads
Hi On 2008-01-11, at 11:54 , Charles-H. Schulz wrote: * I want to be a Regional Community Lead! I want to be a Regional Community Lead! What shall I do? Simple. Write to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list a proposal and we'll take on from there. Oh, I never even thought of that 8-) But i'd modify it by suggesting that for now, I'd like to have just one, the one for India, and see where we go from there. Hope this helps, Charles. Thanks, Louis - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [native-lang] NLP page and project list
Hi On 2008-01-03, at 03:03 , Clytie Siddall wrote: My turn to be confused. Maybe I'm confused about this, but I thought the idea of getting us all to update the wiki list was to have one canonical list from which, if necessary, other lists or information could be updated. Surely we don't have to file a separate issue to get this list in line with the wiki list? Well, the point of an issue is that it reminds us directly. I'm on many many mail lsts and am constantly being asked to do small things, also big; having an issue helps. But I also would rather just have *one* list. I think having parallel lists is (evidently) a pain. from Clytie best louis - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [native-lang] Regional mentors/leads
Louis, all, Apologies for an even longer post... Louis Suarez-Potts a écrit : Hi all, This is not exactly a new proposal--we have discussed it on-list and off and on for years--but I'd like to raise it formally here for discussion. The proposal is to establish a more or less formal role, "Regional Community Lead." One could also call it, as I used to, "Regional Mentor", but the term, Regional Community Lead is probably more descriptively accurate. I would also like to propose that we start with this role in India. * Reasons for the role In some regions, the community needs people local to that region who can ably represent OpenOffice.org to regional Foss groups, universities, government, wherever. The NLC leads do this now and do it well. But they are tied to particular languages--that's the point--and are not regional, though obviously, in practice, for many languages they are. But in places such as India, where there are something like 21 official languages, I and others believe that we need someone who can effectively unify the disparate groups and represent OOo. That person would also work as a regional mentor and help new community members learn OOo; and would also necessarily have a tight connection with the developer and contributor members. Of course, any other community member could establish such connections, and in fact that's the goal--to get more developers, world-wide. But in places such as India (or Africa or North America, and elsewhere), a regional lead who can help unify the local community seems required. And I think it's important to act now. The case of India is the prompt. When we went to Foss.In last December, and used it as our Indian Regional Conference, we were delighted to see that the Foss community in India was eager, friendly, vibrant, but dismayed to discover that there was no coherent OpenOffice.org community. It was atomized; work was being done by the government sponsored CDAC, and by Red Hat, and by a couple of independents, but there was no real community that could reliably share things. What's more, I learned that much of the source that was being worked on by the disparate communities was not coming from OOo repository; and there were many minor forks. There was in short a bit of a mess. The solution, it was impressed upon me, was to have a more visible presence in India. I don't mean Sun; I mean OOo. OOo may be used by millions there, but few work on it, and they don't work on it because for many, the obstacles of working on it are too steep and because there was no real community there. India depends on CDROMs and personal contact, and appreciates the visible efforts of the community. (I'm also trying to form a Sun team in India that can help nucleate the effort; but that is different from this proposal.) That visible presence is substantially achieved by establishing a Regional Community Lead: someone who can knit the various groups together and someone who can help coordinate overall communication among the international and regional groups. So, my apologies for the long post. But I do have a few more points: * Does this add bureaucracy? I hope not. Rather I hope it does the opposite. * How formal is this role? It is formal enough to grant the holder the ability to use it tactically. * Does this mean that regional community members must go through him or her to reach OpenOffice.org? No. Rather, it means if anything that the regional community lead will *help* those who want that help and strive to establish active participant communities. Thank you, Louis. I would also add some other elements: *What do we do with existing "NLC Regional Groups"? Nothing, or rather, the Regional Community Lead is in a way the continuum of what the Regional Group Coordinator was, but with a more formal entitlement. * Are Regional Community Leads supervising Native-Language Project Leads? Not at all, these are two very different roles. One may see this new role as a regional coordination role. *Do we have to have a Regional Community Lead? No, we are not imperialists... :-) *I want to get things done with the native-lang project(s) that happen to work in a region/country/city near me, but I'm not part of that team or I work with a different native-language project as our language is different. How do I do that? Perhaps you could think of having a Regional Group and a regional community lead... * I want to be a Regional Community Lead! I want to be a Regional Community Lead! What shall I do? Simple. Write to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list a proposal and we'll take on from there. Hope this helps, Charles. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[native-lang] Regional mentors/leads
Hi all, This is not exactly a new proposal--we have discussed it on-list and off and on for years--but I'd like to raise it formally here for discussion. The proposal is to establish a more or less formal role, "Regional Community Lead." One could also call it, as I used to, "Regional Mentor", but the term, Regional Community Lead is probably more descriptively accurate. I would also like to propose that we start with this role in India. * Reasons for the role In some regions, the community needs people local to that region who can ably represent OpenOffice.org to regional Foss groups, universities, government, wherever. The NLC leads do this now and do it well. But they are tied to particular languages--that's the point-- and are not regional, though obviously, in practice, for many languages they are. But in places such as India, where there are something like 21 official languages, I and others believe that we need someone who can effectively unify the disparate groups and represent OOo. That person would also work as a regional mentor and help new community members learn OOo; and would also necessarily have a tight connection with the developer and contributor members. Of course, any other community member could establish such connections, and in fact that's the goal-- to get more developers, world-wide. But in places such as India (or Africa or North America, and elsewhere), a regional lead who can help unify the local community seems required. And I think it's important to act now. The case of India is the prompt. When we went to Foss.In last December, and used it as our Indian Regional Conference, we were delighted to see that the Foss community in India was eager, friendly, vibrant, but dismayed to discover that there was no coherent OpenOffice.org community. It was atomized; work was being done by the government sponsored CDAC, and by Red Hat, and by a couple of independents, but there was no real community that could reliably share things. What's more, I learned that much of the source that was being worked on by the disparate communities was not coming from OOo repository; and there were many minor forks. There was in short a bit of a mess. The solution, it was impressed upon me, was to have a more visible presence in India. I don't mean Sun; I mean OOo. OOo may be used by millions there, but few work on it, and they don't work on it because for many, the obstacles of working on it are too steep and because there was no real community there. India depends on CDROMs and personal contact, and appreciates the visible efforts of the community. (I'm also trying to form a Sun team in India that can help nucleate the effort; but that is different from this proposal.) That visible presence is substantially achieved by establishing a Regional Community Lead: someone who can knit the various groups together and someone who can help coordinate overall communication among the international and regional groups. So, my apologies for the long post. But I do have a few more points: * Does this add bureaucracy? I hope not. Rather I hope it does the opposite. * How formal is this role? It is formal enough to grant the holder the ability to use it tactically. * Does this mean that regional community members must go through him or her to reach OpenOffice.org? No. Rather, it means if anything that the regional community lead will *help* those who want that help and strive to establish active participant communities. Thanks Louis - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [native-lang] Resent: Multilingual Wiki Layout
Hi Frank, all, Frank Peters wrote: Resent: Added Reply-to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sorry for crossposting, this may be interesting to multiple groups. --- Native Lang Leads, I have been talking about the layout of the Documentation section in the OOo wiki at OOoCon this year and have been discussing this matter with some of you in person or via email. I would like to describe the problem again in this mail and propose solutions. I would also like to ask you to give your opinion soon so we can move to a multilingual docs approach soon. Thank you for this. We are focussing on implementing a solution on the wiki. I know that there are other options but they would include the usage of other tools and processes and those would require additional setup, maintenance, and learning effort. These may be an option later after we had a chance to go through a thorough evaluation phase. But for now I would like to approach that pragmatically. PROBLEM STATEMENT - The Documentation project created a structured subsection of the OOo wiki that is intended to carry all documentation content to allow easy collaboration (there may be exceptions to the rule but they are out of scope for this discussion). a) Many native language communities have created a rich set of documentation that is not available in other languages. b) The Documentation project contains much content that is not or only partly available in other languages. c) Switching between languages in the wiki is not straightforward PROPOSED SOLUTION - The solution would include having a fixed agreed-upon structure for documentation that would allow to place different doc languages side-by-side. If all languages follow the same, well-defined structure scheme it would be easy to implement a language switcher in the wiki that does the switch programmatically without having to maintain matching tables. This only applies to documentation. The mother native-lang project may still keep its wiki structure as preferred. Ok, IMPLEMENTATION -- The structural scheme of the Documentation wiki content is as follows: wiki/Documentation/$DocTypeOrBook/$SubSections/$SubSubSections Examples for $DocTypeOrBook are - FAQ - HowTos - OOoAuthorsManuals - BASIC Guide Examples for $SubSections are - FAQ/Writer - Howtos/Calc - OOoAuthorsManuals/Getting Started Guide - BASIC Guide/Language $SubSubSections are furthr subdivisions (if required). I think you get the idea. The idea is to maintain a parallel structure for "native languages" alongside the docs, for example: wiki/Documentation/FAQ for FAQs in en, or wiki/Documentation/en/FAQ for FAQs in en (would require move of topics in the wiki) wiki/Documentation/fr/FAQ for FAQs in fr wiki/Documentation/de/FAQ for FAQs in de Likewise, for a particular FAQ, for example: wiki/Documentation/FAQ/Writer/General/HowToFormatACharacter (in en) wiki/Documentation/fr/FAQ/Writer/General/HowToFormatACharacter (in fr) wiki/Documentation/de/FAQ/Writer/General/HowToFormatACharacter (in de) The langugage ISO code after the wiki/documentation part of the path would be the identifier. This approach would allow to use Google to either * search documentation in all languages by searching through wiki/Documentation * search documentation in a particular languae by searching through, e.g. wiki/Documentation/fr (this would require to move all English documentation to wiki/Documentation/en) Switching languages would be handled by a language bar that is easy to be set up and switches languages by changing the language ISO coide in the URL. *However*, this requires the wiki pages to share a common page name. In the current mediawiki version, this page name is also displayed as the page title. I understand that it is inacceptable for a non-English wiki page to display an English page title. With the updated wiki engine (that will hopefully be available soon), however, we will get the DISPLAYTITLE functionality that allows a different title to be displayed. This would allow the pages to share a common page name, but still display a localized title. We would also need to agree upon a wiki page title scheme that makes it easy to handle the URLs. Engslih being the lingua franca of IT, I propose to use English page names for the wiki pages. That means, even if you create a French page inside the French Documentation hierarchy it would need to have an English page name (that would only affect its URL!). This is the difficulty I see here. The wiki is open to every body, how do you do if do not know a word of English? We also need to have a basic migration strategy in place to handle existing documents without too much hassle, meaning moving them to the new hierarchy and possibly renaming them. yes, and take care to update the links added to the OLH. The result of all this would be that a Documentation page contains a language bar marking the c
