Dear Marcel, For the last couple of weeks, the GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team has closely followed the discussion about the current state of the Slovak translation team. We have kept a very open mind and unbiased attitude as we followed all of the emails that were sent by members of the Slovak team as well as members of the GNOME community in general.
We, the members of the GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team, are very keen on getting everyone from the Slovak team back to doing their amazing work, so we took upon ourselves to derive a possible plan of action that may help iron things out. We can honestly say that every single comment was thoroughly considered and our team as a whole arrived at an unanimous, impartial proposal. Even though you have been delivering great quality translations through the years, we feel that your approach at managing the Slovak team as a whole is a bit too rigid compared to other teams. The general consensus is that people should feel comfortable addressing anyone from the Slovak team without having to adhere to a standard format of expressing themselves or going through many layers of bureaucracy before getting the response they are after. Instead, we would prefer that a more open, format-free channel of communication be used. Both "old timers" as well as new collaborators should be able to exchange information in a worry free environment. Also, we feel that having a single person responsible for committing the translations generated by the entire team creates a bottleneck. Translations should obviously be reviewed by an experienced translator, but one person should not block an entire team from pushing their work back to the upstream repository. So we would like for you to delegate some of the responsibility of final reviewing and committing translations with at least one other member of your team. This would not only help you with the massive load that you surely experience right before a GNOME release, but would also help other members become more involved, feel more motivated, and prepare them to one day lead the team, the day you decide to pass the torch, so to speak. Also, this surely could not block you doing post-commit reviews and changes, if you choose so. We would highly appreciate if you could implement the aforementioned changes to the Slovak team work flow within four weeks, as we regard this time frame to be of reasonable duration. Please note that it is our only purpose to improve the situation with the Slovak team and help you all get on the same page, so we would very much like to hear back from you with your comments as soon as possible. We would, of course, be alongside you for the upcoming weeks and months, to provide you with support and guidance until we feel that the team is ready to thread on its own, that no further intervening in the Slovak team is required, and that the experience for everyone is as pleasant as possible. We thank you Marcel for the wonderful job you have done so far and are looking forward to working with you to resolve this situation once and for all. Sincerely, The GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
