Re: Slowness in farsi translation

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 6/26/08, Mohammad Foroughi <mf 417 ir> wrote:
> Mr. Hesabi:
>
>   Roozbeh Pournader has made a significant contribution to persian
>  translation, farsi fonts, and fribidi and many other projects.

Yes.


>   He was active till 2006, but I do not know why he become inactive
>  during 2006-2008:
>
>  http://tinyurl.com/4o2p5x

Well, a Google search for mailing list traffic has little evidence
value. A person can be a good contributor and commit lots of stuff to
SVN and be active on other forums, without it ever showing up as
activity on another given mailing list.


>  He just become re-active by my emails to the list.
>
>  But it seems that he is very monopolist, and do not let others to join
>  his team. He think that gnome is his father's inheritance, and he and
>  his guys are representation of All Iranians In The World!!!

So far all communication I have seen from Roozbeh and Behdad and
others has been positive in regards of wanting to accept new
volunteers. From what I can see, there's nothing stopping you or
others from joining the existing Persian team.


>  I wanna know how many hands he have?
>
>  Can a person manage all these:
>
>  Developer on FriBiDi
>       * Contributor on Fedora Project
>       * Contributor on Pango
>       * Contributor on GNOME i18n Project
>       * Contributor on Translation Project
>       * Contributor on GNOME
>       * Contributor on GTK+
>       * Contributor on Mozilla
>       * Contributor on Evolution
>       * Contributor on FarsiTeX
>       * Lead Developer on Sharif Linux
>
>  http://www.advogato.org/person/roozbeh/

A static Advogato page says little to nothing about a person's current
activities. One can be a frequent contributor to one project one year,
and spend one's contributions on another project the next year. An
Advogato page tells you nothing of the sort, apart from possibly some
selected historic contributions.


>  This causes that all things are blocked and in domination of a single
>  group.
>
>  It is better to take coordination from him and give it to an
>  organization in iran, and that organization decide he DESERVES
>  coordination?

Coordinatorship is given to *individuals*, never to companies nor
other organisations. You can be an employee of any company or a member
of any organisation you like, but your contributions and duties will
always reflect on you as an individual. If person X is a coordinator
and at the same time an employee for company Y, it is still X who is a
coordinator. Company Y has, for all purposes, nothing to do with it,
other than perhaps paying the salary for X. If X decides to leave
company Y and instead join organization Z, or no organization at all,
we wouldn't care less. It is still X who is coordinator.


>  Roozbeh says that I do not deserve attention,
>
>  I SAY that HE DO NOT DESERVE COORDINATION?
>
>  Witch one is true?
>
>  How you can decide?
>
>  Can gnome boys that are not Native persian Speakers decide?
>
>  No, iranians should deciude?

Yes, we can decide. GNOME is no different than most other free
software projects. Almost everything is based on trust, respect and
merits (contributions).
If a person has been a long time contributor and active in the
community for a long time, he naturally has earned some respect and
trust. If he has been contributing a lot, the contributions tell that
this person is contributing for real and not just producing words.

If another new person starts showing up, and instead of showing merits
(contributions) just produce flames, rants, insults, personal attacks
and accusations and generally behaving rude on a mailing list, we
would have the other end of the scale -- a person that cannot be
trusted and is worthy of no respect.

That being said, of course persons that speak Persian are in general
in a *much* better position to judge on translation quality and the
quality of contributions. That's why we defer to the teams to review
the translations. But when it comes to judging the amount of
contributions and people's general attitude, and who do we trust more,
we certainly can decide for ourselves.


>  I propose, you (gnome founders and admins) make an email to an Iranian
>  institute that is responsible for translation (or similar things) and
>  aks them: "If roozbeh is a competent person?" Or make a connection to
>  sharif university and ask them about roozbeh.
>
>  I strongly insist that roozbeh and his team must change and the new team
>  coordination should be given to an institute instead of a single person.

As I said, coordinatorship is never given to an organization, it is
given to an individual. That's how our community works.


>  this way, an arrogant person can not play with a nation's benefits.

Calling a person "arrogant" is not exactly the way to move forward.


Christian