On 18/06/2008, at 7:13 PM, Zhu Lihua wrote:
It's a pity that I was absent. I really want to join the chat, but I was occupied then.I think the time schedule is a problem. It's hardly to find a suitable time for all the volunteers.and the language is another problem. Many volunteers can't express with a foreign language very well so they might be hesitate.the 3rd problem and the most unimportant problem is some volunteers are not familiar with IRC, many people use IM, such as QQ or msn around me, so they almost don't know what IRC is. But frankly, IRC should be the most convenient way to contact for us.
I run into these problems, too. Meetings are often set in European time, and I'm at UTC +1030 at this time of the year (South Australia). However, for the l10n IRC meetings, we managed to compromise on 1100 or 1200 UTC. That was viable for both European and Asian timezones. Would that work for you?
As for the language, it is certainly more difficult for users of other languages to respond in real-time than it is to write email in their own time. However, IRC meetings aren't demanding on the user: you have time to read the messages and decide what you want to say.
Also, modern IRC clients are very easy to use. Look for one with a user-friendly interface. Those actually look like IM clients, so there's no real difference in use.
An IRC channel can be viewed as a chatroom. Just like in IM, you have different chatrooms on different servers. You see a list of users, just like a buddy list. The conversation shows in the main pane, and you type in your message at the bottom, and hit Return. Just like in IM.
I suggest we set up a test IRC meeting, just to try out the IRC clients, say hello and get a feel for the process. Lihua, could you help organize our new Chinese QA project members to attend?
Once people have attended one IRC meeting, they see how easy and undemanding it is. So they'll come to another one.
This first one will be informal, just to talk about using IRC and anything else that occurs to us. It's a chance for us to meet each other. Maybe we can squash a bug or two as well.
What does everyone here think? :) from Clytie Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n
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