Re: Complaint of the Slovak coordinator

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hi all!

Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>, Thu, 13 May 2010 17:33:09 +0200:

> Hi!
> 
> (This is my personal view, if solving this should prove difficult we
> might need a meeting of the coordination team to discuss this in
> detail.)
> 
> After reading through (the English part of) the mails I came to some
> conclusions what is wrong in this team:
> 
> * Trust: To me it seems that there is a lack of trust between the team
> members and the team coordinator. I think when you have some reviewers
> you should trust in them to make a final review. People will always make
> mistakes but it's better to "release early, release often". There are
> scripts that usually fix all the release critical bugs. If you find bugs
> later you can still fix it. But as long as a translation isn't public
> there won't be any users and thus no bug reports. So, I would encourage
> you to drop the final review stage (now).
> 
> * Positiv attitude towards newcomers: First, nonetheless how it is
> implemented, a formal mail is not the way to go. We already place a good
> amount of hurdles in the way of new translators by having to get used to
> git/damned-lies, po-files, etc. This is not like launchpad where
> everyone can start translating and that's done on purpose.
> That means that everybody who got that first step will already have at
> least some understanding of the workflow and put effort in solving a
> steep learning curve.
> Of course translation quality might be poor in the beginning but
> everybody was a newcomer first. Usually it's good to setup some kind of
> rules for consistent translations were people can stick to. 
> 
> * Long-term vision: You will almost never find someone who will clearly
> state that he will be able to maintain a translation for the next few
> years. This is a volunteer project and life changes sometimes. But it is
> not a problem when different people translate the same module, neither
> for consistence nor for quality if done right.
> Reviewers will notice when there is an inconsistency within the strings
> and are able to point that out. I think most teams have no problem in
> sharing modules between different translators.
> => Assigning modules to a single person without giving others the chance
> to step up is a bad thing.

I generally agree with all what Johannes outlined, just a brief comment on
the module assignment thing: we have had discussions on the matter here
in gnome-i18n for several times, and yes, it's quite tangential with
regard to the discussion on Slovak coordination, however, having only a
basic DL support for workflow that many teams are following anyway might
negatively contribute to the bottlenecked DIY-like team workflow policy we
may observe here.

Nevertheless, streamlined liberal solution in terms of team members
responsibilities and team collaboration rules is the way to go within
groups of volunteers.

As Jiri has already mentioned during the discussion, we implement much
"softer" approach to the module assignment in our Czech team, understanding
the fact we all do it in our spare time and for free, and I'm sure this is
the case for the vast majority of teams, given all this, we try hard to find
a good compromise between acceptable quality and quantity. As for the
review process, making use of convenient tools like the pofilter technical
review automation is may also help, indeed. 

And last, but not least, in teams with non-trivial number of contributors,
there should probably be at least two committers to make sure the
bottleneck factor is minimized, especially when a coordinator admits he has
lots of other things to do than solely committing, and therefore uploaded
contributions in Vertimus are, after many weeks, months or even year of
waiting, brought to naught, so to speak.

>From a coordinator point of view, he may have a good will to find solution
in-house, and it's surely quite difficult for the international community
here to decide what has been done, what hasn't been done and what should be
done without deep knowledge of the team internals, particularly due to the
language barrier (having said that, I can surely provide other GTP members
assistance with some source translation, if needed), nevertheless, the team
rules seem to be too formal, which doesn't seem to be appropriate in the
current situation, furthermore, and not to overestimate or underestimate
this particular factor, translation statistics are falling down steadily,
several team members have agreed to the coordination style change, so it
looks to me like fundamental changes are unavoidable now.

Just my 50 hellers, as always.

Best,
Petr Kovar