Hi Alex,
Particularly the German (de) and French (fr) groups
apparently are very productive.
The question one might ask is why ? Because the English community
documentation was at the time found lacking, and no matter what one says
about an international project that has chosen (very sensibly IMO)
English as the vehicular language, it is clear, at least in Europe, that
English is only "native" to approximately 60 Million speakers, and I say
this with care, because probably at least 30% of the UK population do
not even have a reasonable command of the English language. This does
not mean that they are unable to communicate in English of course :-)
You don't need a masters in English for writing documentation. Most
of the folks I met in Lyon have a sufficient knowledge of the
language to at least write some raw material that can be brought
into shape by native language review. Your stylistic and didactical
skills are probably more crititical.
It does go to show, however, that other language communities had needs
that weren't satisfied by the existing documentation project in English.
The fact that people in these alternative language groups were more
willing to contribute to providing documentation in their own languages
rather than in English is a tribute to the N-l group leads who were
among the initial instigators, and perhaps also to a certain spontaneity
of the participants which seemed to be initially lacking in the
corresponding EN project (critical mass). It may be that this is a
reflection on the English language community as a whole and the way it
interacts (or not) with the other groups, but I digress...
English is the root language for the Documentation project because
it is the lingua franca of IT. There is an imbalance between English
and the "native languages" in that there is no English native
language community. It is the lowest common language denominator
for an international audience. With the effect that
native language communities care for all aspects of OOo for their
language, particularly marketing, and get a lot of momentum out of
this.
On OOoCon I briefly discussed this dilemma with some folks
from Germany when we were thinking about the next conference
location. The fact that there is no English native language community
(or particularly a US/North America community) keeps all projects
in English more separate resulting in less momentum (bold
thesis that is?).
Suffice it to say, that I agree with you that the N-L groups are very
productive because they tend to provide specific solutions to small, but
specific or recurring, problems with which users are faced and for
which they do not find an immediate explanation in the OLH. Let us not
forget that the majority of our users are probably not "power users" in
the sense that macro programming is not normally required of them.
However, they are used to having been shown how to do things with Office
software in a certain way, and when that doesn't work in OOo, they are
completely lost. In this respect, the OLH isn't really extremely
helpful, at least judging from the feedback that I have had from various
It would be interesting to know, when this feedback was given. We are
aware of this issue and were and still are working very hard to move
OLH to concise how to instructions and task based help topics.
user groups, including my own staff. The OLH at the moment is written in
a tech-savvy style that simply turns most people off when they start to
read it. One user said to me that it was about as "easy to follow as the
ramblings of a deranged scientist". This lack of task oriented help has
certainly contributed to the documentation activity on the N-L lists IMHO.
I don't think that we're still that tech-savvy in the OLH style but
I may be wrong. One part of the problem that OOo shows an extremely
wide audience range.
There are beginners who need to get very basic information about
achieving a certain task and are feel left alone if the basic
information is missing.
There are power users that don't want to be bothered with basic
information and may even feel offended.
We need to find the right balance (which is always hard to find :-)
and one way is to get feedback from the users that don't feel
comfortable with the OLH as it is. Unfortunately, this is rarely
the case. This is one thing I wanted to promote at OOoCon. The easiest
way in contributing to OLH is to yell out what you don't like
(and occasionally tell us what you do like, too, so we don't get
overly frustrated :-)
- Should we have someone with corresponding language
skills looking through the repositories and see
where there is room for synergy (buzzz!)?
My own feeling is that it would be better, if at all possible, to set up
a system that would automatically alert the EN doc project when a new
document is produced in one of the native lang doc sub-projects, and
vice-versa. Asking someone to trawl through the repositories is too time
intensive, and depends on that person being around and being in a
position to judge whether the document in question is of interest to
I agree on that one. We should have a common market place
or announcement mechanism for docs.
their community. At least if a notification were automatically posted to
the corresponding doc lists each time a new document was produced,
irrespective of its initial language, that would enable the possibility
that more than one pair of eyes would take a look, and a discussion
could then ensue as to whether or not it was appropriate to do
something. At the moment, very few of us on the French n-l lists use IZ
for documentation work, simply because the interface is in English and
it is clunky, we prefer to use the Docs&Files directories that each
Do the IZists know about that?
group can create and name in its own language so that people aren't
deterred or worried about messing up. One of the gripes I have with
using IZ is that tracking changes in a document is a real PITA. At least
with the Docs&Files system, there is an in-built system of privileges
for reviewing or revising as appropriate, even though, on the whole,
most reviewers tend to submit their corrections directly to the inital
author or via the doc discussion lists.
I guess docs doesn't need to use all processes that development
engineering uses. We have different requirements so that's probably
fine. BTW: Where can I read about the Docs&Files system?
- Talking about other projects: do we also go through
the developer projects to harvest what they write?
Not to my knowledge. The main exception here is probably the Mac porting
project. We are lucky in the French group that we have Eric Bachard
passing down his gems of useful information, and his enthusiasm has been
infectious :-)
Now this is probably something for the writers at Sun here in Hamburg,
we are close to most of the developers, so it should be easier for us
to establish some sort of information flow.
Thanks, I am enjoying the discussion
Frank
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