Re: Notes from the Desktop Architects Meeting

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

(Disclaimer: I'm certainly not a specialist about Asia)

Le mercredi 17 mai 2006 �6:35 +0200, Quim Gil a �it :
> Some comments with a GUADEC perspective (I'm capable of having other
> perspectives but apparently these months I'm a one-topic guy)  :)

:-)

> On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 08:34 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> >    - we should try to send people in asian regional events to show that
> >      we're interested in what's happening there (they don't seem to know
> >      that we're interested in that)
> >    - inviting some managers from asian projects to events such as GUADEC
> >      might be a good idea
> 
> We have a Farsi team very active in GUADEC 2006, we have also a Novell
> team from Bagalore and Sun is sending 2 developers from Beijing. Iran,
> India and China have possibly just one common denominator, being Asian
> countries, but we could have a BOF session lead by them during the AHW
> to see how an Asian coordinated effort can be addressed. Apart from
> GUADEC there is at least a GNOME Korea local group, many translation
> teams and advisory board companies' offices there (you know this much
> better than me).

The "cooperation with Asia" item was more related to some efforts that
we don't know about. For example, there are people working on
distributions in Thailand, Malaysia, China, India & Korea and we nearly
don't know anything about them. What do they need from us? Is there some
parts of what's they're doing that we should integrate? etc.

I believe the Farsi team is a good example of what we should aim to
achieve for this since they're doing a lot of fantastic work with us
(where "us" is not only GNOME, but the upstream authors). 

One thing that was highlighted by some of the Chinese people during the
discussion about this is that there is, unfortunately, a cultural
difference that makes it hard for lots of Asian people to contribute.

> What is clear to me is that any real move in Asia or wherever needs to
> be promoted mainly by the local gnomers of these countries, with
> assistance of the rest of the Foundation. Starting dynamics i.e. dealing
> directly with the board without counting with the locals or counting
> with them when everything is arranged and agreed is not a desirable
> practice.

Of course. I certainly didn't want to imply "we don't care about the
local groups". We should definitely encourage them to continue.

The "solution" discussed at the meeting (and proposed by one person
working at the United Nations on those kinds of issues) is to create
relationships between the people who manage the governmental open source
efforts and the upstream projects. These would be some formal
relationships, which require action from the Foundation.

There are two different (although related) things here:

 + get feedback from and try to cooperate with the open source efforts,
   that are mainly governmental efforts
 + build an even bigger community in Asian countries than what we have
   right now

(FWIW, I believe we should also look at Africa, but this might be even
more difficult)

Vincent

-- 
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