[OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support

[(Orkney)Toru Mori]

Japan may have been located in one of the most distant place from English 
community both in geographically and in language :)

There are many users of OpenLayers here already, but we do not have had 
any specific local language support communities yet.

In the FOSS4G local conference here in Japan last week, several 
presentations referred to source code improvements. If nobody cares about 
them, then they would become one of fork and nothing might be integrated 
into mainstream.

As Chris pointed out, our OSGeo local chapter discussion list could be the 
place to communicate. However, mailing list is sometimes difficult to view 
summary of discussions, I would prefer wiki typed page in local language.

Lastly, most important part is how and when to relay local issues to the 
mainstream. Who takes care of them? This is a HR issue, cannot be solved 
by just mailing lists or wiki pages though. What we are facing is here.

Mori @ OSGeo Japan Chapter


Lorenzo Becchi <lorenzo at ominiverdi.com> wroteF

> > Also, I've seen too many cases where people have fixed bugs and never
> > mentioned anything about the bugfixes back to the OpenLayers community
> > to trust that the same wouldn't happen with local chapters. 
> >
> >   
> 
> you're probably right.
> anyway there's no good system to avoid people not contributing fixes.
> IMO, a part of the community will sadly remain insensible to this thread 
> anyway.
> 
> 
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean by this. Essentially, this is a way to 
gaurge
> > the interest and abilities of people to pariticipate in a local 
language
> > list for the project> I don't see a way that can be gauged without
> > *some* kind of list -- most people will always be quiet if something
> > requires activve participation with an existing community. (The 
barrier
> > is simply too high.) Editing a wikipage is lower cost, and gives a
> > record of people interested in a particular language community for a
> > project -- that 'hard copy', so to speak, seems valuable  to me,
> > especially in comparison to something which (to me) seems more
> > transient, like sending an email to the italian or spanish mailing 
list. 
> >   
> 
> mumble mumble
> we all know that the "lazy" part of a community doesn't read wiki pages. 
> The could thing that a wiki is not enough "official" or they are just 
> too lazy to read but they have no problem to post on a list.
> maybe chapter involvement should be something like:
> "I can't understand your question or you cannot understand my answer, 
> try to relate to your local community"
> 
> I see it is complicated to rely on local chapter as extension of a 
> project community but when there's no way to understand each other 
> decently it could be an effective resource.
> 
> lorenzo
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