Announcement about the set up of the i18n team, sent to the mageia-i18n mailing list
(sent December 1st, 20:18 + 0100 by wobo)
Hi all,
As announced in the latest blog entry [[1]] the founders asked me to start building the i18n and documentation team organisation. As the documentation section is still under construction I will postpone the building of the doc team until open questions are answered (as a preview, Calenco [[2]] will possibly be chosen as collaboration tool for that).
So let's start right away with the procedure (please read to the end to get all infos):
First I want to make a distinction between the translation of application menues/strings translation and floating text translation of documents. As everybody knows there are important differences in the workflow, the tools, etc. between these 2 sections of i18n, although there are many translators working in both areas. I want to focus on the application translation first because text translation depends on the documentation team's work, which is not yet ready to go.
I suggest the following steps:
- Announce team bulding on the i18n list (this mail here)
- Let language teams organize themselves internally, name contacts/team leaders
- First meeting on IRC
The simple task of this team building process is to organize all the different language groups, find a way for general discussions, participate in regular meetings, choose the representatives which will report to the community council and/or be the contact for the council. This will be achieved in several steps:
- setting an organisational structure for each language. This will be done inside each group. The task of the internal groups is to implement short communication ways inside each language group to
coordinate work for the language in question. This way local discussions will not clutter the i18n mailing list. Another task may be to "hire" more people interested in this line of work. There are many translators out there who would help translating documents but not so many who woould do the "string work". We should find ways to improve this situation :)
- Each language group can set up their own mailing list or wiki page (example: French and German) for internal communication. If there is a necessity to set up a mailing list on the Mageia server pls tell me.\\
- Each language group selects 2 "contacts" which may be also the team leaders but not necessary. These contacts will meet regularly on IRC - please only one (1) person per language - with the contacts of other language groups to discuss and report from and to their language group
I discovered that a large number of people who have put their names on the wiki page for translation work are not subscribed to this list. I can't possibly add more than 70 addresses to this mail, so I suggest that those who are subscribed may tell others they know in their language group about all this. We may find a better solution in the first meeting. I will of course copy this information on the top of the wiki page as well.
I'd like to see the internal organisation done by Wednesday next week, at least a "get together" and the selection of the contacts and/or leaders. So, pls stick your heads together and talk to each other :)
First meeting
First meeting should be next week. As time/date I suggest Thursday, December 9, 2010, at 18:00 Paris time (GMT +1).
I know that it is difficult to set a time/date which will suit everybody because we are living in different time zones. We may find a solution during discussing this in the meeting, a possible solution may be a changing time every other week, so everybody will find a time which suits him. Of course there will be meeting logs available in the wiki so everybody can follow the logs and discuss in his language group or in this list here.
Meetings will be held in #mageia-i18n on Freenode.
I will hold the chair for the first meeting, then we will see if anybody wants to do that or if I go on.
Participants will be the contacts of the language groups but, again, - PLEASE - only one person per language. Meeting experiences have shown that there is a limit of participants above which an organized meeting is not possible (see full logs of the founders meetings to understand what I mean with "organized meetings") :)
Suggested topics of the 1st meeting will be:
- setting of team structures (internal per language, overall structure, naming of leaders and contacts to report to community council)
- General i18n wiki page, mailing lists (wiki page should link with documentation wiki wrt i18n HowTos), what do we need?
- collaboration tools for i18n\\
- Transifex is already set on the server. It may be good if somebody who knows it could give a bit of insight during the meeting
Meeting should not be longer than 2 hours, exceptions possible. The first meeting I expect to be a little longer as we will set the first stones.
Then we'll go from there.
Comments welcome.
