Re: Problems with the French team

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

Hi Christophe,

thanks for taking your time to answer the comments made. I have some
questions and comments of my own; I hope you will find the time to
answer them:


1) As I understand it, your policy was (and still is) that almost all
contributions have to be reviewed and subsequently committed by you
yourself (except for maybe a few exceptions). You have admitted
yourself that this has in some cases taken several weeks or even
longer (and now we're not talking about the time you were
hospitalized). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Now, my question is: Why has everything to be reviewed and committed
by you in person? I fully understand that you want to maintain a high
quality, but surely there must be some other experienced translators
in the team that you trust by now; people that have been translating
for a long time and that you know have the same set of high standards
as you?

The French team is a rather big team with many contributors, compared
to many other teams in the GTP, and still many smaller teams in the
GTP have more than one reviewer and committer. This relationship is
based on trust, and provides for automatic redundancy: When someone
doesn't have time, some of the others will.

Furthermore, as I understand it, all new contributions have to be sent
for review to you in personal mail. Why not use a mailing list for
this, and ask all contributions to be reviewed publically on the list?
When you or one of your "approved" translators have reviewed it and
changes have been made, then you or they can just commit it, and send
a mail to the list to that effect. This would provided for an openess
and transparancy that is important in the free software world, and
extremely important for newcomers, since it provides answers
automatically for many important questions, and avoids the "what
happened to my work (or the work of others in a similar situation),
did we send it to a black hole" type of questions.

As I see it, the French team official policy and process for reviews
and commits is an unecessarily closed and non-delegated one, and has
an inherent flaw, which is that it collapses and stalls almost
everyone's work the times when you do not have as much time to devote
to such things as usual.
Not having as much time as usual is completely natural, and happens to
everyone of us. Noone is blaming you for that. What people are
complaining about is that you seem to refuse to recognize the fact
that everything is so dependant on you, and that you seem to not want
to do anything about it (at least not in action).


2) To continue, there is the issue of duplicated web sites, irc
channels etc. One of the fundamentals of free software work is that
when people get the impression that something has very strong
deficiencies and they aren't in the position to change it, they will
start thinking about workarounds. (The non-ability to change things
doesn't have to be the actual case, an impression of this is often
enough).
This doesn't have to be a bad thing, however. On the contrary, it is
often a good thing; it allows people to continue work in an efficient
way, and it highlights the problems that may have been existing, so
that they can eventually get fixed.

As I understand it, you are the only one with access to change the
official website, or at least noone else knows how to do that. Then it
seems quite logical that when you were away, and people started to get
the impression that the official site wasn't as updated as it needed
to be, and they got the impression that they weren't able to update
it, that they started using another site which they could keep
updated.

This happens all the time and to everyone of us -- I know some docs
that I have once written myself, and that I haven't had the time to
keep updated. Now I discover that other people have duplicated those
docs, in order to update them so that they reflect the current
reality. Am I angry over that? No. Should I learn a lesson from it?
Most probably yes, and the lesson to be learned is that either I
should update my docs more frequently, or allow others to edit them
more easily. That way I would avoid both the duplication and the
confusion arising from conflicting instructions.

Have you taken any steps to incorporate the kind of information from
the unofficial website to the official one? Clearly, some thought that
information to be necessary information. How will you make it more
easy for trusted translators to update the information when you're
away?


3) The third issue is the issue of attitude. As evidenced in this
thread, there has been several conflicting sources of information: One
official website and one "unofficial" one, one listing an official
policy and process, and the other one listing other policies and
process, and these instructions often being in conflict with
eachother.
Clearly, this would result (and has resulted) in a lot of confusion. I
think that's entirely understandable.
One can go about this in two ways: Either recognizing the fact that
the confusion is understandable, and admit that and look into ways of
improving the situation, or go like a bully and tell people that they
are wrong, or even worse, stupid. But noone wants to be told that
they're stupid, especially not after acting in good faith. RTFM isn't
a good response, especially not if there are two FM.
Seeing some of the responses in this thread, makes me convinced that
there is room for a lot of improvement in the attitude area.


Christian