I want to encourage all that you say here. I am not so confident that the openoffice.org approach (that is, what Sun allowed and supported) is applicable here because the ASF as a foundation must operate differently than a commercial enterprise.
That can be a minor thing, once the guidelines are clear. Do you have suggestions on how affiliation with ASF and the Apache OpenOffice project can be reconciled? Need there be any? If there is coupling between an NL community and AOO, what arrangement do you request? - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Paolo Pozzan [mailto:pa...@z2z.it] Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 11:34 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Dealing with a large and diverse project - Native Languages and project teams [ ... ] Reading to all other messages in this thread, I think many missed the point. The problem is not about what language to use, but how to manage the to-be-volunteers which don't or wouldn't have the same skills as ours. Volunteers are a big marketing weapon; is like happy workers that freely advertise the company they work for. OTOH rejected volunteers (even for difficulty of access - e.g. language) will feel the final product less theirs, so they will be less willing to marketing that. [ ... ] What I understood in my experience with italian volunteers is that people love to contribute in a hassle-free maneer, this means that someone else have to show them the way, letting them just do. I know this may sound disappointing, but it is not a limit of freedom if someone choose by his/her own to follow some rules. I think that it would be useful to write some basic guidelines for the native language teams to know what to do and what not. Letting them know it would eventually lead to the birth of local communities, where "basic" contributors will eventually will go there. Maybe many of us have still in mind the old OpenOffice.org structure, which worked fine for the language teams and to which we can consider copying from. Paolo
