[Mageia-i18n] Setting up i18n team

Wed Dec 1 20:10:28 CET 2010

Hi all,
+
+As announced in the latest blog entry (http://blog.mageia.org/?p=271 )
+the founders asked me to start building the i18n and documentation
+team organisation. As the documentation section is still under
+construction I will postpone the building of this team until open
+questions are answered (as a preview, Calenco (http://www.calenco.com)
+will possibly be chosen as collaboration tool for that).
+
+So let's start right away with the procedure (please read to the end
+to get all infos):
+
+First I want to make a distinction between the translation of
+application menues/strings translation and floating text translation
+of documents. As everybody knows there are important differences in
+the workflow, the tools, etc. between these 2 sections of i18n,
+although there are many translators working in both areas. I want to
+focus on the application translation first because text translation
+depends on the documentation team's work, which is not yet ready to
+go.
+
+I suggest the following steps:
+
+ - Announce team bulding on the i18n list (this mail here)
+
+ - Let language teams organize themselves internally, name contacts/team leaders
+
+ - First meeting on IRC
+
+
+The simple task of this team building process is to organize all the
+different language groups, find a way for general discussions,
+participate in regular meetings, choose the representatives which will
+report to the community council and/or be the contact for the council.
+This will be achieved in several steps:
+
+ - setting an organisational structure for each language. This will be
+done inside each group. The task of the internal groups is to
+implement short communication ways inside each language group to
+coordinate work for the language in question. This way local
+discussions will not clutter the i18n mailing list. Another task may
+be to "hire" more people interested in this line of work. There are
+many translators out there who would help translating documents but
+not so many who woould do the "string work". We should find ways to
+improve this situation :)
+
+ - - Each language group can set up their own mailing list or wiki
+page (example: French and German) for internal communication. If there
+is a necessity to set up a mailing list on the Mageia server pls tell
+me.
+ - - Each language group selects 2 "contacts" which may be also the
+team leaders but not necessary. These contacts will meet regularly on
+IRC - please only one (1) person per language - with the contacts of
+other language groups to discuss and report from and to their language
+group
+
+I discovered that a large number of people who have put their names on
+the wiki page for translation work are not subscribed to this list. I
+can't possibly add more than 70 addresses to this mail, so I suggest
+that those who are subscribed may tell others they know in their
+language group about all this. We may find a better solution in the
+first meeting. I will of course copy this information on the top of
+the wiki page as well.
+
+I'd like to see the internal organisation done by Wednesday next week,
+at least a "get together" and the selection of the contacts and/or
+leaders. So, pls stick your heads together and talk to each other :)
+
+
+2. First meeting
+
+First meeting should be next week. As time/date I suggest Thursday,
+December 9, 2010, at 18:00 Paris time (GMT +1).
+
+I know that it is difficult to set a time/date which will suit
+everybody because we are living in different time zones. We may find a
+solution during discussing this in the meeting, a possible solution
+may be a changing time every other week, so everybody will find a time
+which suits him. Of course there will be meeting logs available in the
+wiki so everybody can follow the logs and discuss in his language
+group or in this list here.
+
+Meetings will be held in #mageia-i18n on Freenode.
+
+I will hold the chair for the first meeting, then we will see if
+anybody wants to do that or if I go on.
+
+Participants will be the contacts of the language groups but, again, -
+PLEASE - only one person per language. Meeting experiences have shown
+that there is a limit of participants above which an organized meeting
+is not possible (see full logs of the founders meetings to understand
+what I mean with "organized meetings") :)
+
+Suggested topics of the 1st meeting will be:
+
+ - setting of team structures (internal per language, overall
+structure, naming of leaders and contacts to report to community
+council)
+
+ - General i18n wiki page, mailing lists (wiki page should link with
+documentation wiki wrt i18n HowTos), what do we need?
+
+ - collaboration tools for i18n
+ - - Transifex is already set on the server. It may be good if
+somebody who knows it could give a bit of insight during the meeting
+
+Meeting should not be longer than 2 hours, exceptions possible. The
+first meeting I expect to be a little longer as we will set the first
+stones.
+
+Then we'll go from there.
+
+Comments welcome.
+
+-- 
+wobo
+