Re: Resolution of the Slovak Translation Team Issue (please ack)

[Laco Gubík <lacogubik gmail com>]

Hi Peter and rest of the coordinators,

It is now more than 4 weeks and after the deadline you set for Marcel
to implement changes and he does not seems to be bothered too much.

I would like to ask you what do you plan to do next to resolve this
and whether you still think that your proposed resolution is going to
improve situation? (Especially considering Marcel's comment that he
does not see any bureaucracy - see these 8 pages of full text[1] which
are supposed to be Rules of translation to Slovak language created by
him in May).

Activity in team is very low, and nothing was committed in past month.
3 new members have tried to joined and only one was accepted by Marcel
to our team. The other two guys have sent registration emails few days
ago and still no blessing from Marcel.

Roman Matyus, member of our team, have sent email to our ML[2] asking
what has changed and when there will be any visible changes in place.
He points out that some of his modules are waiting to be checked by
commiter since February and asking whether this is how it supposed to
be and who is responsible for that.

I would have one more question for coordinators. Do you think that it
is OK when Marcel as coordinator sends emails, where he asks potential
members of team to do various things in order to be accepted to  team,
privately without copying team's ML? (see bottom of this email [3],
this was not sent to Slovak ML and Marcel says there if steps
mentioned by him will not be completed by some date, applicant will be
removed from the team. Peter Kovar should be able to read it and
confirm this, as email is in Slovak).

Please try to help us to resolve this in reasonable time so we can
start improving Slovak translation (percentage of translated strings
decrease by another 2% in past months ...).

Thanks for your help and support

Kind regards

Laco

[1]http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-May/msg00060.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-July/msg00002.html
[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-June/msg00036.html

On 30 June 2010 23:27, Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk> wrote:
> Hi Petr,
>
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:06:34AM +0200, Petr Kovar wrote:
>> Hi Marcel,
>>
>> On June 7th we had sent you an email discussing a possible resolution
>> for the issues raised by members of the Slovak team. As we haven't
>> heard back from you since then, we would like to kindly ask you to
>
> Yes. I received the email.
>
>> acknowledge receipt of our email and to provide us with your point of
>> view on that matter.
>>
>> The original message with the Resolution follows.
>>
>> We thank you in advance for your reply.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> The GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Dear Marcel,
>>
>> For the last couple of weeks, the GNOME Translation Project Coordination
>> Team has closely followed the discussion about the current state of the
>> Slovak translation team. We have kept a very open mind and unbiased
>> attitude as we followed all of the emails that were sent by members of the
>> Slovak team as well as members of the GNOME community in general.
>>
>> We, the members of the GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team, are
>> very keen on getting everyone from the Slovak team back to doing their
>> amazing work, so we took upon ourselves to derive a possible plan of action
>> that may help iron things out. We can honestly say that every single
>> comment was thoroughly considered and our team as a whole arrived at an
>> unanimous, impartial proposal.
>>
>> Even though you have been delivering great quality translations through the
>> years, we feel that your approach at managing the Slovak team as a whole is
>> a bit too rigid compared to other teams. The general consensus is that
>> people should feel comfortable addressing anyone from the Slovak team
>> without having to adhere to a standard format of expressing themselves or
>> going through many layers of bureaucracy before getting the response
>> they are after. Instead, we would prefer that a more open, format-free
>> channel of communication be used. Both "old timers" as well as new
>> collaborators should be able to exchange information in a worry free
>> environment.
>
> Recently, a new member joined our team (Juraj Kapsz). The scenario was
> following:
>
> 1. Juraj joined our team at http://l10n.gnome.org/users/team_join/ (this
> happened about 2 months ago).
> 2. Nothing else happened for few weeks.
> 3. On June 14th I sent an email to Juraj asking him to follow our
> "joining rules" at our wiki page. You can see the email at
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-June/msg00036.html (at
> the end of the page). Sorry the email is in Slovak language, but I am
> sure you personally are able to understand it.
> 4. Juraj replied after few days and completed the team join steps:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-June/msg00031.html
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-June/msg00035.html
> 5. Now, Juraj is full member of our team.
>
> This is an example how the "many layers of bureaucracy" works in real
> life. I think Juraj had no problem with "to adhere to a standard format
> of expressing themselves".
>
> Maybe I misunderstood your feeling about "many layers of bureaucracy"
> and "to adhere to a standard format of expressing themselves". If so,
> please explain what is behind those words. Thanks.
>
>> Also, we feel that having a single person responsible for committing the
>> translations generated by the entire team creates a bottleneck.
>
> I agree. OTOH, there are many teams with one commiter only (assuming the
> coordinator is the commiter for a team), for example:
>
> sq, am, en_AU, en_CA, an, hy, as, ast, az, az_IR, bal, my, eu, bem, bn,
> be, bs, bg, ... and many others
>
>> Translations should obviously be reviewed by an experienced translator, but
>> one person should not block an entire team from pushing their work back to
>> the upstream repository. So we would like for you to delegate some of the
>> responsibility of final reviewing and committing translations with at least
>> one other member of your team. This would not only help you with the
>> massive load that you surely experience right before a GNOME release, but
>> would also help other members become more involved, feel more motivated,
>
> I agree this would help. Who is/are the best candidate(s) for this
> delegated responsibility? Please help me to decide how to select such a
> member(s). Thank you.
>
>> and prepare them to one day lead the team, the day you decide to pass the
>> torch, so to speak. Also, this surely could not block you doing post-commit
>> reviews and changes, if you choose so.
>>
>> We would highly appreciate if you could implement the aforementioned
>> changes to the Slovak team work flow within four weeks, as we regard this
>> time frame to be of reasonable duration.
>>
>> Please note that it is our only purpose to improve the situation with the
>> Slovak team and help you all get on the same page, so we would very much
>> like to hear back from you with your comments as soon as possible. We
>> would, of course, be alongside you for the upcoming weeks and months, to
>> provide you with support and guidance until we feel that the team is ready
>> to thread on its own, that no further intervening in the Slovak team is
>> required, and that the experience for everyone is as pleasant as possible.
>>
>> We thank you Marcel for the wonderful job you have done so far and are
>> looking forward to working with you to resolve this situation once and
>> for all.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> The GNOME Translation Project Coordination Team
>
> --
> +-------------------------------------------+
> | Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel telka sk  |
> |                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
> |                jabber:   marcel jabber sk |
> +-------------------------------------------+
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-sk-list mailing list
> gnome-sk-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-sk-list
>