A strong +1 - this is consistent with my memory of what was discussed three months ago.
On Oct 20, 2011, at 12:04 PM, Rob Weir wrote: > This question came up a few months ago, when we initially started the > podling. The legacy OOo project had many mailing lists which were for > non-English list traffic. This included user lists as well as project > lists (marketing and translation mainly). Many of these lists are > showing up in my survey of the most-used lists in OOo, the list I'm > using for migration planning. We've deferred resolving this question > so far. I think we've run out of time. We can't delay figuring this > much longer. > > So.... what do we want to do with these lists, and more importantly, > with the community on these lists? The native language communities > are an important part of the vitality of the OOo community, and we > need to agree on a good way to integrate them into the AOOo community. > > On the other hand, we don't want to fragment the community into very > many small compartments, were we are ineffective in combining our > strengths together to solve larger problems and undertake larger > initiatives. So we need some sort of balance. OOo, with its 300+ > mailing lists, probably did not achieve the optimal balance. Let's > see if we can do better. > > Proposal: > > 1) Create a single user-language list for each native language where > there is an active user list today, and where we can identify three > committed moderators, preferably at least one from the PMC. We might quibble with the number. For some two might be sufficient. > > If there is currently a discuss list as well as a user list in that > language, combine then into the user list. > > Currently, that would mean the creation of the following new lists > (assuming we find moderators), like: > > ooo-users-de (German) > ooo-users-fr (French) > ooo-users-it (Italian) > ooo-users-es (Spanish) > ooo-users-br-pt (Brazilian Portuguese) (or can we generalize this to > pt in general?) > ooo-nl (Dutch) > ooo-ja (Japanese) While the forum people aren't ML people they will certainly have a sense for the languages that they support. Someone made a comment about Vietnamese being a problem right now. I'd like to know which Languages might be abandoned. I know that in the website there are two levels of support described. The range of NL projects with more than a placeholder for a website would be interesting. > > There may be other language we want to cover as well. The list > above is intended to illustrative, not exclusive. The important thing > is that when dealing with users, we need to meet them on their terms, > not ours. The request for at least three moderators is because a user > list needs more than just spam protection. We need moderators > committed to actively participate on those lists. A user list that > has been abandoned is very bad for the image of the project. Since > the PPMC cannot easily monitor what is happening on a non-English > mailing list, we will need to have high confidence that there are > sufficient volunteers on the list to make it succeed. > > 2) For project-related (as opposed to user-related) lists, align them > with the closest existing AOOo list. > > For example: > > de.business --> ooo-marketing > nl.marketing --> ooo-marketing > fr.dev --> ooo-dev Here is what people might debate, but I like the inclusive direction. > > and so on. We're a single Apache project with a single product. > Although there may be local marketing efforts, there should be a > single marketing conversation. Ditto for other aspects of the > project. > > The net result will be take 300+ existing OOo mailing lists and map > them to a much smaller number of AOOo mailing lists, maybe a dozen > total in the end. This will require understanding and good will from > all. Non-native English speakers and native speakers will need to > adjust how they interact, and in general be more understanding. > > So that's my proposal. I have my asbestos underwear on. Feel free to > start the flaming, Regards, Dave > > -Rob
