Re: BoF item 3/14: Outreach

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

BTW, this page:

https://launchpad.net/gnome

may have a better (or at least larger) list of Gnome associated
projects in LaunchPad than my spreadsheet.  I focused only on those
packages included in Quantal, while this list also includes older
packages, some of which may be deprecated though.

In any event, I would suggest that language team leaders may want to
run down the links on that page and check to see if there may be some
L10n effort present on LaunchPad that has not been upstreamed to your
languages on DL.  Reaching out to the LP team if you find that
situation, might improve the "weak uplink" situation and result in
less duplication of effort by your DL team.

cjl

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As I said in previous mails, let this mail be a kickstart for giving
>> feedback about the items that are defined on
>> https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012
>>
>> In this mail please give feedback about the Outreach item.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> --
>> Gil Forcada
>
>
> GUADEC 2012 BOF follow-up
> https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012#Outreach
>
> Outreach plan
> https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Outreach
>
> . . .  quoting from link above
>
> Just reaching out to local communities
>
> Talk with marketing team about marketing materials to encourage local
> languages to do translations.
>
> If other langs have teams in LibreOffice and KDE, talk about GNOME
> translation. This is politically sensitive, because this could look
> like poaching. Better to contact translation coordinators and
> downstream translators (particularly Ubuntu translators).
>
> . . .  </quote>
>
> There are many good reasons to pursue closer coordination and
> cross-polination with the LaunchPad-based Ubuntu L10n community, in
> particular.  They are a large community with a wide variety of
> languages and they co-host a large number of Gnome originated
> packages.  Significant levels of (DL and LP) "dual citizenship"
> already exist.
>
> I would like to make a couple of specific proposals about methods that
> could be pursued in the outreach effort with regard to the LP-based
> Ubuntu L10n community.
>
> 1) Provide a DL - LP cross mapping
>
> I suggest the creation of a "LaunchPad co-hosted Release Set" on the
> Damned Lies server, similar in function to the "OLPC Release Set" that
> was created by Claude Paroz and that I maintain.
>
> http://l10n.gnome.org/releases/olpc/
>
> The purpose of this is to provide a quickly visible set of summary
> statistics and quick links to packages that are hosted on both the
> Damned Lies server (DL) and Ubuntu LaunchPad (LP).  Ideally, this
> release set should be maintained by someone involved in coordinating
> Ubuntu translation efforts on LP (at an overall Ubuntu level, not
> necessarily at a language-specific level).
>
> What would this accomplish and why is it a win-win?
>
> DL-based localizers (particularly those with an Ubuntu affinity) can
> easily prioritize Ubuntu dependencies for completion in their DL work.
>
> LP-based localizers can easily identify opportunities to upstream
> their work to DL and thereby reach a larger audience (e.g. other
> Gnome-using distros) and leverage their efforts more widely.  This
> should particularly appeal to "language loyal" localizers, although
> I'm sure the notion of sharing "Gnomey ngoodness" will also motivate
> some.
>
> LP-based localizers can benefit from working on the DL master branches
> of packages as a means of "pre-localizing" packages that, when
> released as stable, will make make their way into LP and Ubuntu.  Even
> though the Ubuntu focus may be on an older stable release, by working
> on a DL master branch, they are "getting ahead of the game", which
> will allow them more time to focus on Ubuntu-specific strings that
> change within an Ubuntu release cycle.
>
> I have attached a spreadsheet that is a first pass at mapping Gnome DL
> project pages to Ubuntu (Quantal) LP project pages.  I have not done a
> drilldown to the specific release level.  I think the focus should be
> on master as the issues of version lag are pretty much a wash after a
> few cycles as long as you focus on the master branch.  The one
> exception is where it looks like LP tracks a Gnome2 version separately
> from a Gnome3 version, in those cases, I've left a blank cell
> following the Gnome package name in the first column and added both
> links in the LP column.
>
> I did this match by scanning:
>
> http://l10n.gnome.org/module/
> and
> https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal/+templates
>
> I would welcome it if someone else would review these links and the
> spreadsheet to correct any mistakes and add anything I may have missed
> in this quick and dirty review.  BTW, this sheet is more-or-less the
> start of the "LaunchPad co-hosted Release Set" list.
>
> 2) Exchange diplomatic delegations and credentials.
>
> Having a formal (or informal) back-channel for DL coordination team to
> LP coordination team communications would be very useful.  This is not
> meant to be the only channel of communications and does not replace
> filing tickets in each others bugtrackers, etc., but it could be very
> useful for planning higher-level joint activities or drawing focused
> attention to specific issues of mutual interest.
>
> One such example might be:
> To her Excellency the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Empire of
> Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and outlying islands from the Legation of
> the People's Republic of Gnome. "Hey you folks have a lot of African
> language projects that don't have glibc locales yet.  Can we work
> together to fix that?" Regards and Felicitations. Your Loyal Servant,
> etc. etc. etc.
>
> 3) Address identifiable language team level opportunities for better
> cooperation (specifically, weak uplinks from LP to DL)
>
> I can tell you from looking through the coverage of a few packages on
> DL and LP, I can already identify a few languages where it appears
> that there is an active LP-based localizer (or team) that have not
> been as timely about upstreaming their L10n to DL as would be ideal.
> Localizers are free agents and free to do their work with the tool of
> their choice, but st the same time they should be no less bound by the
> social conventions of FOSS software development and the morays of the
> gift-economy it embodies.
>
> Gentle and private reminders (ideally between co-linguist team
> leaders) could be made to attempt to encourage the common FOSS
> cultural practice of timely upstreaming where the projects are mor
> ecomplete on LP than they are on DL.  This will help minimize
> duplicated effort.  I will not name names in public, but I may send
> private messages to DL language team leaders about contacting their LP
> counter-parts where I think it might be merited.
>
> That's all I have for this message, but I would be interested in
> hearing what you think of these notions.
>
> cjl