[OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support

[Lorenzo Becchi]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>
>  does
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport seem
> like an appropriate way to enocurage people to seek help? Does my
> suggestions for how to handle lack of speaking a language make some
> sense?
>   

I think this is a good initiative.
trying to be a bit critic, it is the kind of page that a person who 
knows a little of English doesn't need because they can write to the 
international list.
a person who knows nothing of English cannot understand all that text, 
probably.

To make it easy, we can maybe add links to the automatic translation to 
many different languages, ex:
------------------
Version en Español, linking to:
http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftrac.openlayers.org%2Fwiki%2FGettingHelp%2FForeignLanguageSupport&sl=en&tl=es&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
------------------
better would be to create human translations of your text but it will 
take more time.

I think that using the language chapters as reference is a good idea. I 
would put a bigger emphasis on them.
Talking about the Spanish Language Chapter List, I can say that there 
are already some good expert on OpenLayers (and not only).
I would suggest other projects with small/medium communities to do the same.

A little note about "Interested in English Language List". I would avoid 
to live this part here. If a lot of people starts to add his name there, 
that page will convert soon in a mess, loosing the target of the message.
I would leave to local chapters the organizations of list request if the 
traffic on a single project (ex: OpenLayers) starts to be aggressive.

thx
lorenzo