Re: Complaint of the Slovak coordinator

[Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk>]

Hi all,

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 09:30:01PM +0200, Peter Mraz wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have been advised to write an email to this mailing list to help us
> resolve the problems of the Slovak translation team.
> 
> 
> Due to reasons listed below our team is unhappy with approach and behaviour
> of current coordinator of team. Recently, I have volunteered for new
> coordinator by sending email to gnome-sk-list outlining how I would like to
> change the way team works [8]. I have also asked members of our team to
> express their opinion on whether they would like to change coordinator.
> Throughout past three weeks 6 members of our team have voted for myself and
> 3 members have voted against the change of coordinator (more less all active
> members of team have voted and expressed their opinions). Marcel has
> discussed this with me in quite a length, however he did not decided to
> accept wish of majority of the team and resign.


The Slovak Translation team have 16 members now. Three of them are with
team for long time (more than one year): Paľo, Pavol and me. Other 13
members joined the team in last year (approx.) - since March 2009.

These 13 members are either somehow active (9: Marián, Miroslav, Laco,
Robert, Ivan, Roman, Peter, Jaroslav, Tomáš V) or not active (4: Jozef,
Ján, Martin, Tomáš Z). Not active means that they did not submitted any
translation since the join and their mail activity is very low too.

All members who "voted" for the coordinator change are with team for
less than a year, in many cases less than a half of year. All "old"
members are against the change.

Most of the members who "voted" for a change sent their "vote" right
after the Peter's proposal.

After the Peter's proposal I started to discuss his ideas and we found
that these proposals fits to several categories:
- just do it. You do not need to be the coordinator to have these done
  (for example, to write some wiki articles)
- no change. After the detail explanation we found that the real change
  would be none or insignificant.
- unclear change with potentially more overhead. For example the change
  with module assignments.
- change with potential impact on quality. For example time limits for
  reviewers to do their job.
- something else (maybe I forgot something that does not fit to any of
  the above categories)

As I said above, most of the "for change votes" came before the
discussion and maybe some voters changed thier mind (but nobody
expressed it, so I am not sure, we can ask).

Peter finished the discussion with this sentence (rough translation):
I'll do all possible steps for the coordinator change.

I feel this Peter's campaign is more personal than technical.

> 
> Therefore I would like to ask you to help us resolve this situation, as
> current coordinator does not want to give up his position. Please see our
> reasoning below.
> 
> (I do acknowledge that most of the references provided here are in Slovak,
> however at least members of Czech team should be able to understand them and
> verify if necessary).
> 
> 
> We observe the declining trend in the amount of Gnome translated to Slovak:
> 
> Gnome 2.20 – 70%
> 
> Gnome 2.22 – 59%
> 
> Gnome 2.24 – 56%
> 
> Gnome 2.26 – 52%
> 
> Gnome 2.28 – 48%
> 
> Gnome 2.30 - 46%

The above is true. During that period (for long time till beginning of
2009) the tam had 3 regular members with occasional help from some other
people. They often just sent a translation (sometimes bypassing the
team) and never returned back for the module translation maintenance or
updates. In that time the quality and quantity suffered. The quality
suffered because most of the translations and updates were not reviewed
by someone else.

When Claude and his team (big thanks!) integrated the Vertimus to the
Damned Lies we had a chance to formalize a bit the translation process
by leveraging the Vertimus. So we started to do the translation reviews
using Vertimus workflow.

> This happens while there is a quite active team and currently there are 25
> modules to be committed and most of them are in this state from Feb/Mar.
> (I'm convinced that there would even more activity if things would be moving
> quicker).

Yes. That's true. Because most of the team members are new to the team
we need to carefully reviewer their translations before commit to make
sure the translations are correct and consistent. Most of these
translations comes from members who joined the team about Christmas
2009. 4 active members joined the team between November 2009 and
Februrary 2010. There are also some other inactive members joined during
that period, but I do not count them. So this generated somehow bigger
load of new translations in our queue.

To have this achieved I upgraded the status of all team members, who
asked for that, to reviewers. We now have 4 reviewers. But as I said
above, most of them are newcomers and/or their konwledge of either
English, or Slovak, or GNOME internals,... is not well enough, so I
decided to finally check all of the already reviewed translations. In
most cases I found important mistakes, so this workflow proved to be
better than just commit the already reviewed translation with suffering
quality.

Because of this situation: a lot of new translations with not enough
quality after the review we have the bottleneck where many translations
are waiting for my review. To be honest, this is understandable. When
you have about 6 active translations with 4 reviewers the rate of new
translations income for my final review is really huge.

I asked team members several times for patience with explanation that
when the current translations and reviewers will be more skilled my
"final review" role will be eliminated. I believe some of them are able
to understand that.

> 
> 
> I see the problem in that the coordinator of the Slovak team, Marcel,
> focuses solely on perfection and nothing else. While I understand that
> quality is important, the translation procedure should be organized in such
> a way that strive for quality is not the factor which decreases the coverage
> of the translated Gnome. On his side there is no will for any compromise,

The current model used in our team have a big potential to rise up
translation percentage significantly for GNOME 3.0.

> even though majority of the team voted for change on this[1] and would like
> to see more translations being committed. He has very little or no wish to
> try to get more modules translated, unless they are 100% perfect. He has

Not true. "100% perfect" is just simply not true.

> recently said that he had not ignored the wish of the majority of the team,
> but he had not accepted it, providing only this explanation: "What you wish
> for is nice, however wishes might not always come true, even if the majority
> wishes it." [2].
> In past year he committed 26 modules (some of them more than once), half of
> these modules were modules translated by him. Between June 2009 and February
> 2010 he committed only 2 modules (24.9.2009 damned-lies, 10.11.2009
> swfdec-gnome). Two-thirds of commits were done since February 2010, after a
> proposal to change the coordinator and after a lot of members asked for a
> change in the work flow.
> Marcel checks everything after each reviewer and until he checks it whole
> (including string which are currently translated) and all of his comments
> are addressed he does not commit the module.

Because of the quality. As I explained several times.

> 
> He also insists on numerous bureaucratic procedures which are not necessary:
> 
>    -
> 
>    Every new member must sent a registration email with very strict
>    formatting rules, and unless he/she does it, he/she is not accepted to the

When we found that to sent a mail where a template can be easily
copy'n'pasted from http://live.gnome.org/SlovakTranslation/NewMember is
the problem, one member of the team voluntered to create a web application
where a new member can easily fill all information and the web app will
sent an email on behalf of him.

>    Slovak team. Even if one provides all information required and he/she
>    fulfills all the prerequisites, he/she would not be accepted as a team
>    member, if the registration email has an extra line, or a line is broken by
>    an email client etc. This causes issues with almost every new member trying
>    to join the team. Marcel considers this as some kind of test! (The only
>    explanation why the email must be in this format was that Marcel wrote a
>    script to check whether the registration email is correctly formatted and
>    another script to get some statistics on team performance).
>    -
> 
>    Until recently, Marcel insisted on using only one's full name, as it is
>    written in the birth certificate !! After a long discussions [9] at

Nobody never checked the name against any paper, even birth certificate
or something else.

When I developed the registration system I had no feeling that anybody
would complain about real name. In that time all team members used the
real name.

>    gnome-sk-list, he has allowed members to use other forms of one's name (e.g.
>    Joe if your full name is John), however one still cannot use his/her
>    nickname!! [10] (It was even pointed to in the mailing list that this is
>    against a Slovak law which gives the right to use any name or nickname to
>    publish one's work).

This is not against the Slovak law. Maybe it is against the Peter's
interpretation of the law. IANAL. AFAIK, Peter is not lawyer too.

>    -
> 
>    Marcel also does not accept translations of modules unless one promises
>    to look after the module in the future. There was a case of somebody out of
>    the team submitting translation of dia, and Marcel refused to include it
>    unless that person would join the team and would look after the module.

These one time translators are big problem for quality. You cannot
achieve quality with random translators.

>    -
> 
>    Recently, Marcel proposed a new system to accept and change rules
>    governing Slovak Gnome translation team. His first draft of the procedures
>    can be found here [3]. It is extremely lengthy and written in obscure
>    language and the chance is that nobody will be willing to read it at all.

The proposal is just a draft now. When there is an idea how to improve
it, I always incorporate the idea into the document.

There are several team members who read it and accepted it (some of them
had good suggestions for improvements). There are some other members who
denied to read it because it is just long (according to their feeling).
Peter is one such member.

It looks like when I came with something new to the team, the idea is
denied by default by Peter. This supports my feeling that his fight is
more personal than technical.

>    -
> 
>    He refuses to allow anybody else except for him to commit translations
>    without specifying sane reasons. The only given reason was "the time has not
>    come yet" and also "there will be transparent rules created when I will get
>    more time, which is not now"[4]. No rules were published up till now.

This can be considered as example of Peter's anti-bureaucracy agenda:
Please create new rules. :-)

OTOH, Peter suggested some rules for new commiter: A reviewer who
translated at least 5 modules with more than 100 messages each.

Also, here are Peter's "rules" for the new reviewer:
- basic knowledge about work with po files (writing comments, marking
  fuzzy)
- be able to file a bug into bugzilla
- to compile a module from git

> 
> 
> Marcel by himself decides who should translate which module and refuses to
> give up modules which he has assigned to himself in the past, even though he
> has not worked on them for a long time. Here, [5], [6], are few examples
> from recent past where Marcel refused to allow other members of the team to

There are still many free modules. So if somebody wants to translate,
there is option to select something valuable. As I explained in our team
mailing list, when my untouched modules will be the real stoppers for
complate GNOME translation I'll transfer them to some other translators.

> translate module, but he did not updated them by himself. If one wants to
> start translating a module, he/she must first request it by an email and
> only when he checks that it is not one of the modules he would like to
> translate in the future by himself, he then assigns it to translator.

The main purpuse for this is not "he checks that it is not one of the
modules he would like". The assignmet is just about to avoid conflicts,
to not assign too hard modules for newcomers, etc. Yes, sometimes the
request reveals that there is some old my mudule I have not placed to
the assignment table, but now it is rare.

The response time for such "request for assign" is less than one working
day, so no big deal, I hope, for translators.

> 
> It should also be noted that the few improvements, which happened in the
> past months, happened only after lengthy discussions, a proposal to change
> the coordinator and pressure from other members of the team. There already
> were problems with that in the past, and he only started replying once there
> was discussion about his replacement [7].
> 
> Further, I know two former members of the Slovak team who had quit because
> of the behavior of the coordinator.
> 
> 
> I hope that you will be able to help us to resolve this.
>

Sorry for making this loundry public. I wanted to avoid that but
apparently some members of our team are fighting against me. Personally.

I expressed some direct answers to Peter's sentences above. I did not
went into deeper details and for now because I hope it is not required
to do so. If a better explanation is needed, please let me know, but I
do not will to open other cans of worms and fight against Peter or few
other team members.


Thanks. 

-- 
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| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel telka sk  |
|                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
|                jabber:   marcel jabber sk |
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