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India — Let’s get together and be all right
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Reporting live from Pune of beautiful India, with a heavy stomach from the tons of spices eaten the past days, your host would like to warmly welcome you to yet another adventurous (read: long) post on this peaceful blog sailing calmly in the vast blogosphere sea.
Bangalore, IndiaFOSS.in 2007 is now over. Now I can honestly say that it was fantastic. You can get a feeling of it from the stories on Planet FOSS.in or a glimpse of it from the flickr photos with foss.in, foss.in tags.
Lightning talkConsidering it’s a community-organized event, the people behind it have my admiration. The accommodation (droog house) was cozy (as Sankarshan also mentioned), the transportation and the food were very good, and not having to worry too much about them gave me the opportunity to discuss more with people and get a lot of work done. A big thanks (again) to all the folks behind the event. You guys rock.
[rewind a week back]
Arrived in Bangalore at 5am. The first image once one exists the airport are like 100+ people holding and waving papers with names (hand)written on them. After a couple of somewhat embarrassing model-like up and down walks, I found myself in the unfortunate position to not find the person waiting for me. I arrived at the hotel 2.5 hours later, after a dreadful ride in a 3-wheeler through some very bad neighborhoods trying to look for the hotel. Strange-looking people walking to me from low-lit alleys, dogs barking. Arriving at the hotel, I realized I got charged around 10 times more than the normal amount (in a European setting that could be like paying 500 euros instead of 50). Very creepy experience, not recommended.
Letting bad dreams behind! On to the technical stuff.
Runa BhattacharjeeRuna’s talk (Bengali maintainer in a handful of FOSS projects, including Fedora) on GNOME’s translation project was interesting and raised some interesting political issues with the Indian languages, which count up to 24. Not dialects, 24 different languages! Very interesting setting, somewhat comparable with Europe’s, with some challenges emerging when you start discussing about a unified localization effort. Interesting stuff. At least one question that came up had to do with the process of contributing translations to GNOME as an upstream project, and Transifex was proposed as the answer, referring to the talk about it the next day.
My talk focused on the community aspect of the whole idea behind Transifex and the exciting opportunities opening up with it. Transifex does try to solve some challenging technical issues, but at the same time tackles overheads in collaboration and maintenance and proposes enhancements to QA. Around 100 people attended the talk and probably 40 the lightning talk (3 minutes, no slides).
Christian Perrier from Debian L10n fame brought to our attention that they are facing similar problems and Transifex not only seems like an elegant solution for them, but also opens up a path for having both communities collaborate under a single instance of Transifex. Achieving having a common gateway to multiple projects across communities would be just awesome — psyched just thinking about it. OpenID anyone?
Of course, each bridging attempt brings the possibility of conflicts. With more stuff and people, entropy is bound to increase. People have different opinions on how a phrase should be presented in a different language, and so this is an issue that might come up at some point. In any case, the upstream community will always have the final word, and having an authorization layer for special cases wouldn’t be hard at all. Let’s hope a discussion will always bring an answer, make everyone happy, and make the new gate work constructively. :-)
Had a good discussion with Runa about QA in translations. Currently in Fedora we pay minimal attention to it, both in processes but also in enabling tools. We leave it up to each individual translator to practice (or not) high standards in correctness (orthography, grammar, etc), consistency (same translations in different applications), preciseness (unambiguous translations) and completeness. There are many ways to improve L10n QA, including collaboration, text auditing, specialized corpus creation and maintenance, tools for statistical analysis of quality, etc. I’m glad in Fedora we have already started working on increasing collaboration by moving stuff closer to the community and getting together in teams instead of working individually. More tools to help with QA will come with time.
With Axel Hecht of Mozilla L10n and Jens Petersen of Red Hat i18n we had a lengthy and deep discussion on future localization platforms. Ideas for runtime, context-sensitive interface localization and complicated PO-alternatives lie around, waiting for a working group to get them off the ground. Sounds like a good idea for a workshop. Will discuss it offline and probably propose something.
During the event, and at evening escapes, got to know a lot of cool Fedora people like Lennart Poettering (Pulseaudio/Avahi), Rahul Sundaram, Debarshi Ray, Kushal Das, Rahul Bhalerao, Ramky and Sankarshan among others.
Had some interesting meetings in the next days with folks from upstream projects like OOo, MySQL and various independent developers about efficient translations and community expansion. Also had the opportunity to present my ideas to Red Hat’s internal translation teams in Pune, India and the next day to the one at Brisbane, Australia. Seems that everyone agrees there’s a great opportunity for collaboration here. It does still a lot of work to do it right, but the path is in most of the cases pretty clear: “Let’s get together and be allright”.
Future plans? You bet. I’ve written some stuff down over at the Fedora wiki. More like a TODO list rather than a proper roadmap. More to come.
Exciting times ahead.
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νωρίς το απόγευμα, Τετάρτη 12 Δεκεμβερίου 2007
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Εύγε! ;-)
Just to say:
Great!!!
Congratulations dude.
:)
Cya…
Good job!
Hope you had nice journey back home :)