[OSGeo-Board] localization of OSGEO website for China

[Jo Walsh]

dear Kevin, all,

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 10:26:01PM -0400, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> >This is Kevin Zhu from Autodesk China. We are introducing MapGuide 
> >OpenSource to Digital China company, which is Autodesk GIS distributor 
> >here. Digital China is glad to work with us to promote MG OpenSource in 
> >China, and they think the localization of the website is the first step, 
> >because most of Chinese GIS users have difficulties to read/write 
> >English. And Digital China is willing to help us localize the osgeo.org 
> >website, especially  http://mapguide.osgeo.org/ .

This seems like an excellent suggestion and I'd concur with Frank in
approving of this heartily on a personal basis.
 
> Per the Terms Of Service of on the www.osgeo.org web site, the content of
> the OSGeo web site is under the Creative Commons license. 

All OSGeo subdomains also link to the same terms and conditions
pointing out the CC license, and so implicitly they should be covered
by the CC-BY-SA license, by fiat.

I'd suggest the following:

* OSGeo projects have autonomy in terms of what goes on their
  subdomains of [project].osgeo.org ; offers of help with
  translation and maintenance for subdomains can go through the 
  Project Steering Committees and shouldn't need Board approval.

> However, I would encourage you to cooperate with the Web Committee (chaired
> by Daniel Brookshier) to work out details of where translated
> content should go
 
Definitely; Daniel is responsible for maintenance of the CollabNet
platform currently used to host the osgeo web presence, and the Web
Committee would be a good place to ask, though it's not technically
responsible for non-project web presences - https://webcommittee.osgeo.org/
It would be a good place to ask about process for making sure that 
translations of English pages are up to date.

Technically, I don't know to what extent CollabNet will support
internationalisation of pages that need Unicode fonts. Collab builds pages
from a repository of static files that is held in subversion, to which
the managers/developers of each project have access. If you
wished to have a http://mapguide.osgeo.org/cn/ Chinese section of the
site, then CollabNet as it is set up now, would still show the links to
mailing lists, forums etc in English with links to English pages.
It would be desirable to redirect to the right language version by
looking at the Accept-Language headers that a web browser sends, or
testing for language support in javascript, but again I have no idea 
whether CollabNet supports this as-is. Daniel is on this list and may 
be able to offer enlightenment here.

Sorry to nit-pick technically, it's a nice offer, thankfully received,
and I hope we can find some straightforward way to work it out.

best wishes,


jo