2008/10/19 Savvas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Regarding when to allow Greek/Turkish being spoken at the forum and > how to control them furthermore.. any ideas or anyone with similar > experience? The simple way we tried to make it work in Belgium is the following.
We take our hands off anything that is not related to the physical location. The critical mass of language based groups is an enormous advantage. We deemed it wise not to try and divide that. As a consequence, we refer people to the ubuntu-fr forum (for France and all french speaking people!) and the ubuntu-nl forum (for the Netherlands and all Dutch speaking people). It took quite a bit of effort to convince ubuntu-nl to redefine itself from "for the Netherlands only" to"for the Netherlands and the entire nl (Dutch) speaking community". The french speaking within ubuntu-be.org are an even smaller minority compared to ubuntu-fr, so there we didn't even try very actively. Online documentation in the native languages of our country was very simple too. We pushed almost 100% of it to ubuntu-nl.org and ubuntu-fr.org respectively. The only exception was online banking with Belgian banks. Live person-to-person support, an install party, a poster campaign, distributing folders at the railway station, a physical meeting for organising ubuntu activitiets are nice examples of things we do keep to ubuntu-be.org. Trying to understand each other is key there. We encourage eachother to use of English and/or Dutch and/or French where it makes most sense. An activity for NL speakers users far away from the FR speaking part of the country will probably be announced on the mailing list in NL, with a short summary in EN. A general assembly style meeting will be announced in EN or (NL and FR). If you decide to take this route, good relations with the language bound groups you trust much of your web activities to (mainly nl, fr in our case) are key. Web presence requires much less effort to maintain, and it's so much more visible online than a real life event that you can easily be eclipsed by them. Good luck! Mark -- Mark Van den Borre Noormannenstraat 113 3000 Leuven, België +32 486 961726 -- loco-contacts mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
