Louis Suárez-Potts wrote:
I've kept in touch with what is going on. But my interest is in
learning what you have to say and would have me say.
Assuming you are already familiar with all topics you listed (and of
course you are!) I'd say the numbers Rob gave already provide solid
facts on which to base upon. So I'm just contributing a couple of casual
observations (nothing new, just stuff I find interesting to say) below.
* Status of project: how are the NLCs doing?
The structure at Apache is not hierarchical as it used to be in the old
OpenOffice.org projects, so we don't have Native-Lang project leads or
similar titles; instead, we have a good mix of old and new volunteers
who jumped in and decided to help with translations and materials in
languages other than English.
Active mailing lists are listed here:
http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/native-lang.html
and a lot of activity happens on the forum (10 languages):
http://user.services.openoffice.org/
We are distributing OpenOffice in fewer languages than before, but this
is merely a choice of this project: we decided to distribute only
languages where we have active volunteers involved and where translation
is 100% complete and possibly verified. Nothing is preventing us from
building OpenOffice in the 100+ languages previously supported
(including those that haven't been updated for several years and those
with very limited coverage of the application strings); we can include
them at any moment, but the choice so far was to focus on quality. We
will stick to this choice for 3.4.1, then we may (or may not) adopt a
different approach.
The project is open and welcoming towards new translators.
* Status of community: what can be done in the community to improve?
- communication efforts? - regional outreach? - other?
The project reputation is very good, but we still can't get the message
out in the most effective way. I don't have any criticism or solutions,
but I feel we could benefit from a communication-oriented group of
volunteers: there are more good things done in this project than those
that reach the media.
Regards,
Andrea.
