[opensuse-marketing] General question about engaging asian communities
I hope this isn't entirely off-topic, but I wanted to ask for some advice and maybe some of the history when engaging asian (specifically Japanese) communities/users. In other OSS projects I'm involved in we have hit the challenge that openSUSE has with engaging non-English speaking users and I'm wondering how you tackle it, specifically overcoming some cultural barriers. The openSUSE team localizes communications outward to the various communities but what about bringing contributors from those non-English speaking (in this case japanese) contributors back into the project? Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead? - R. Tyler Croy -------------------------------------- GitHub: http://github.com/rtyler Twitter: http://twitter.com/agentdero
On Sunday 19 September 2010 19:40:15 R. Tyler Croy wrote:
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
Definitely. Although, I would not presume that they are small :) English is very important for people active in software development, but to be developer you have to know very little if it happens that you live in the country that has developed educational system for IT related skills. Books, developer communication, all is in local language. The consequence is that we miss a lot of people with skills and motivation for open source development, just because we don't give enough importance to language based communities and connection between them. Currently, information exchange does not exist as organized effort. We don't have information who speaks what language, nor to what level, and when we are at this, we don't have information about other skills either. Without that we can't to connect people that need help in their activities with people that can help. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
On Sun, 19 Sep 2010 20:40:40 -0500, "Rajko M."
On Sunday 19 September 2010 19:40:15 R. Tyler Croy wrote:
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
Definitely. Although, I would not presume that they are small :)
English is very important for people active in software development, but to be developer you have to know very little if it happens that you live in the country that has developed educational system for IT related skills. Books, developer communication, all is in local language. The consequence is that we miss a lot of people with skills and motivation for open source development, just because we don't give enough importance to language based communities and connection between them.
Currently, information exchange does not exist as organized effort. We don't have information who speaks what language, nor to what level, and when we are at this, we don't have information about other skills either. Without that we can't to connect people that need help in their activities with people that can help.
I work at a college with a large international community. Their English skills can vary, but casual conversation and tech skills are usually very proficient. I wonder if these students might provide a connection back to their home countries. Jon Cosby -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
On Monday 20 September 2010 09:52:43 jc wrote: ...
Currently, information exchange does not exist as organized effort. We don't have information who speaks what language, nor to what level, and when we are at this, we don't have information about other skills either. Without that we can't to connect people that need help in their activities with people that can help.
I work at a college with a large international community. Their English skills can vary, but casual conversation and tech skills are usually very proficient. I wonder if these students might provide a connection back to their home countries.
Yes. That would be good way to activate some of our "dead" or half dead wikies. I was wondering about the way to announce that we have some stuff that needs attention; couple of wiki servers used to serve translations are practically abandoned. Problem is that I don't know anybody that speaks those languages, so I can't ask him to look for Linux communities and ask for volunteers.
Jon Cosby
-- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Hi Tyler, R. Tyler Croy wrote:
I hope this isn't entirely off-topic, but I wanted to ask for some advice and maybe some of the history when engaging asian (specifically Japanese) communities/users.
Did you call me ? ;-) At the beginning, SuSE was little-known distro amongst Japanese. In 2002, one of the SuSE developers who had studied in Japan dedicated himself to launch mailing list for Japanese. As far as I remember, it was the start point of SUSE Japanese community. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2002-09/ He also was doing his best to localize SuSE distribution and launched M17N (Multilingualization) project as well. After SuSE was bought out by Novell, Novell Japan once sold some "SUSE Linux Boxed Set - Japanese Edition" with commercial input method and fonts for Japanese. However, they didn't succeed in sales and IIRC, 10.1 was the last Japanese Edition. After the openSUSE project launched, some Japanese contributors took effort to organize Japanese Wiki (ja.opensuse.org), but they are not active right now. We have now a very active translator in Localization team and most of the Japanese translation of openSUSE distribution is done by him. But this means, on the other hand, there are few contributors who are willing to help and collaborate with him in translating. :-( And this year, some of the users took efforts to organize Japanese forum and we have it now. But it is not yet very active now. Now, we Japanese have Wiki, -ja list, #openSUSE-ja IRC channel on Freenode and Japanese forum as official channels, and threads on 2ch (the most famous BBS in Japan) as unofficial channel where we can communicate with each other in Japanese. And, there are some users who are writing blog posts on openSUSE in their own blog sites. Besides, there's a site which is sponsored by Novell Japan. http://www.geeko.jp/ But I'm sorry to say that due to the BAD operational policy of Novell Japan, it is not active and few takes care of it now. Those are the brief history and situation of Japanese community. There certainly are a fair amount of openSUSE users in Japan. But most of them are interested only in using openSUSE, but not interested in how we can improve openSUSE. For example, opensuse-ja list has around 600 subscribers ATM. http://lists.opensuse.org/stats/opensuse-ja/opensuse-ja.html#Subscribers But when I asked the subscribers to test and provide feedback on input method for Japanese which might affect all the Japanese users, only few gave feedback to me. :-( http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2010-08/msg00062.html They use openSUSE as long as openSUSE satisfies their needs, but once they feel openSUSE doesn't meet their requirements, they will silently leave openSUSE and go to other distros, instead of trying to improve openSUSE. So I regret to say that the situation of Japanese community is not so good. I'm also wondering how are the situations in other countries.
In other OSS projects I'm involved in we have hit the challenge that openSUSE has with engaging non-English speaking users and I'm wondering how you tackle it, specifically overcoming some cultural barriers.
I suppose you have some knowledge about Japanese culture. And, yes, there definitely are cultural (in particular, language) barriers between Westerners and Asians. Additionally, since Asia is so large that each country/ethnic group has its own unique culture and language. In the eyes of Westerners, Japan, China (and Taiwan) and Korea may appear to be almost same, but most Japanese can't speak Chinese nor Korean, and vice versa. And you may know that in IT area, Japanese market is often called "Galapagos". Most Japanese are not confident of their English ability, even if they are highly-educated. Therefore, when they find bugs in openSUSE or have wishes, they will tend to tweet or blog about them in Japanese, instead of reporting bugs to Bugzilla or requesting features to openFATE in English. And as I mentioned above, since most Japanese users are just interested in using openSUSE, they are rarely interested in what are going on in and around global openSUSE community. That's why I translate openSUSE Weekly News into Japanese. I'm always willing to let Japanese users know what are going on and that we can make openSUSE much better if we wish and make efforts for that. But we still have a long way...
The openSUSE team localizes communications outward to the various communities but what about bringing contributors from those non-English speaking (in this case japanese) contributors back into the project?
Of course some don't hesitate to communicate in English, but I think liaison for each language might be helpful. Liaisons will translate global news and announcements about openSUSE into their language for local users, and translate feedback from local users into English for global community, so that people who are not good at English can be more involved in our project/community.
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
There certainly are needs to organize small subcommunities per-language, but whether it will be very active or not depends on efforts of contributors and users of each language. By the way, why are you interested in "specifically Japanese" ? :-) If you live/lived in Japan or understand Japanese, please be involved in Japanese community as well. ;-) -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:12 AM, Satoru Matsumoto
Hi Tyler,
R. Tyler Croy wrote:
I hope this isn't entirely off-topic, but I wanted to ask for some advice and maybe some of the history when engaging asian (specifically Japanese) communities/users.
Did you call me ? ;-)
At the beginning, SuSE was little-known distro amongst Japanese.
In 2002, one of the SuSE developers who had studied in Japan dedicated himself to launch mailing list for Japanese. As far as I remember, it was the start point of SUSE Japanese community. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2002-09/ He also was doing his best to localize SuSE distribution and launched M17N (Multilingualization) project as well.
After SuSE was bought out by Novell, Novell Japan once sold some "SUSE Linux Boxed Set - Japanese Edition" with commercial input method and fonts for Japanese. However, they didn't succeed in sales and IIRC, 10.1 was the last Japanese Edition.
After the openSUSE project launched, some Japanese contributors took effort to organize Japanese Wiki (ja.opensuse.org), but they are not active right now.
We have now a very active translator in Localization team and most of the Japanese translation of openSUSE distribution is done by him. But this means, on the other hand, there are few contributors who are willing to help and collaborate with him in translating. :-(
And this year, some of the users took efforts to organize Japanese forum and we have it now. But it is not yet very active now.
Now, we Japanese have Wiki, -ja list, #openSUSE-ja IRC channel on Freenode and Japanese forum as official channels, and threads on 2ch (the most famous BBS in Japan) as unofficial channel where we can communicate with each other in Japanese. And, there are some users who are writing blog posts on openSUSE in their own blog sites.
Besides, there's a site which is sponsored by Novell Japan. http://www.geeko.jp/ But I'm sorry to say that due to the BAD operational policy of Novell Japan, it is not active and few takes care of it now.
Those are the brief history and situation of Japanese community.
There certainly are a fair amount of openSUSE users in Japan. But most of them are interested only in using openSUSE, but not interested in how we can improve openSUSE.
For example, opensuse-ja list has around 600 subscribers ATM. http://lists.opensuse.org/stats/opensuse-ja/opensuse-ja.html#Subscribers But when I asked the subscribers to test and provide feedback on input method for Japanese which might affect all the Japanese users, only few gave feedback to me. :-( http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2010-08/msg00062.html
They use openSUSE as long as openSUSE satisfies their needs, but once they feel openSUSE doesn't meet their requirements, they will silently leave openSUSE and go to other distros, instead of trying to improve openSUSE.
So I regret to say that the situation of Japanese community is not so good. I'm also wondering how are the situations in other countries.
In other OSS projects I'm involved in we have hit the challenge that openSUSE has with engaging non-English speaking users and I'm wondering how you tackle it, specifically overcoming some cultural barriers.
I suppose you have some knowledge about Japanese culture. And, yes, there definitely are cultural (in particular, language) barriers between Westerners and Asians. Additionally, since Asia is so large that each country/ethnic group has its own unique culture and language. In the eyes of Westerners, Japan, China (and Taiwan) and Korea may appear to be almost same, but most Japanese can't speak Chinese nor Korean, and vice versa. And you may know that in IT area, Japanese market is often called "Galapagos".
Most Japanese are not confident of their English ability, even if they are highly-educated. Therefore, when they find bugs in openSUSE or have wishes, they will tend to tweet or blog about them in Japanese, instead of reporting bugs to Bugzilla or requesting features to openFATE in English.
And as I mentioned above, since most Japanese users are just interested in using openSUSE, they are rarely interested in what are going on in and around global openSUSE community.
That's why I translate openSUSE Weekly News into Japanese. I'm always willing to let Japanese users know what are going on and that we can make openSUSE much better if we wish and make efforts for that. But we still have a long way...
The openSUSE team localizes communications outward to the various communities but what about bringing contributors from those non-English speaking (in this case japanese) contributors back into the project?
Of course some don't hesitate to communicate in English, but I think liaison for each language might be helpful. Liaisons will translate global news and announcements about openSUSE into their language for local users, and translate feedback from local users into English for global community, so that people who are not good at English can be more involved in our project/community.
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
There certainly are needs to organize small subcommunities per-language, but whether it will be very active or not depends on efforts of contributors and users of each language.
By the way, why are you interested in "specifically Japanese" ? :-)
If you live/lived in Japan or understand Japanese, please be involved in Japanese community as well. ;-)
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Satoru, Is Turbo Linux big there, I have Version 4 in Japanese. -- ----------------------------------------- Discover it! Enjoy it! Share it! openSUSE Linux. ----------------------------------------- openSUSE -- en.opensuse.org/User:Terrorpup openSUSE Ambassador/openSUSE Member skype,twiiter,identica,friendfeed -- terrorpup freenode(irc) --terrorpup/lupinstein Have you tried SUSE Studio? Need to create a Live CD, an app you want to package and distribute , or create your own linux distro. Give SUSE Studio a try. www.susestudio.com. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
On Mon, 2010-09-20 at 17:12 +0900, Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
And as I mentioned above, since most Japanese users are just interested in using openSUSE, they are rarely interested in what are going on in and around global openSUSE community.
Satoru, Thanks for a very enlightening post. This is interesting, because it also translates the Portuguese reality. I know some people who use openSUSE or used heavily in the past, and a whole horde of people who use Linux, mainly sysadmins, and some of them, are people which were deeply committed in bringing Linux out of the obscurity around 10 years ago. Much was done with 'distribution' support, based only on enthusiasts motivation. Now even with nearly full distribution support, people don't want to get enrolled. Most people I know (including myself) use Linux because it's a great tool, most of them have very high skills on networking, programming, etc... things we could use, but have no time and no motivation to get enrolled with FOSS, in fact many of them really don't like the 'linux geeks' from distributions. In a way I could place it easily as this: * The traditional Portuguese linux user is a fan of DJB (DJ Bernstein) and really don't care about RMS (Richard Stallman). That's an interesting approach. If there's anything we can help the Japanese community, though we're far away, we can always try to help. I know situations where European Portuguese localization also depends on mainly 1 contributor (that is the case of GNOME, through Duarte Loreto (happyman) and Fedora by Rui Gouveia). Localization is one of the key points in which every localized community should improve and develop to their best. I know distributions are more concerned about high tech skills, and often miss efforts in those fields, but time will show them that localization is a key factor to building a stronger community. Good to know there is openSUSE in Japan and that it's widely used. Nelson. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Hi Nelson, (2010/09/21 0:39), Nelson Marques wrote:
If there's anything we can help the Japanese community, though we're far away, we can always try to help.
Thanks an awful lot! Although I can help the Portuguese community little, I'm always ready to do so, too. :-) People think that there're few things they can contribute. But everyone can say "Thank you" to others efforts, at least. I believe that's the easiest, but most important contribution. I hope to see our community is filled with "Thank you". ;-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Moin Satoru! Satoru Matsumoto schrieb am Montag, den 20. September 2010:
Hi Tyler,
R. Tyler Croy wrote:
I hope this isn't entirely off-topic, but I wanted to ask for some advice and maybe some of the history when engaging asian (specifically Japanese) communities/users.
Did you call me ? ;-)
Yes indeed! Thank you so much for your response, it's *very* useful.
At the beginning, SuSE was little-known distro amongst Japanese.
In 2002, one of the SuSE developers who had studied in Japan dedicated himself to launch mailing list for Japanese. As far as I remember, it was the start point of SUSE Japanese community. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2002-09/ He also was doing his best to localize SuSE distribution and launched M17N (Multilingualization) project as well.
After SuSE was bought out by Novell, Novell Japan once sold some "SUSE Linux Boxed Set - Japanese Edition" with commercial input method and fonts for Japanese. However, they didn't succeed in sales and IIRC, 10.1 was the last Japanese Edition.
After the openSUSE project launched, some Japanese contributors took effort to organize Japanese Wiki (ja.opensuse.org), but they are not active right now.
We have now a very active translator in Localization team and most of the Japanese translation of openSUSE distribution is done by him. But this means, on the other hand, there are few contributors who are willing to help and collaborate with him in translating. :-(
And this year, some of the users took efforts to organize Japanese forum and we have it now. But it is not yet very active now.
Now, we Japanese have Wiki, -ja list, #openSUSE-ja IRC channel on Freenode and Japanese forum as official channels, and threads on 2ch (the most famous BBS in Japan) as unofficial channel where we can communicate with each other in Japanese. And, there are some users who are writing blog posts on openSUSE in their own blog sites.
Besides, there's a site which is sponsored by Novell Japan. http://www.geeko.jp/ But I'm sorry to say that due to the BAD operational policy of Novell Japan, it is not active and few takes care of it now.
Those are the brief history and situation of Japanese community.
There certainly are a fair amount of openSUSE users in Japan. But most of them are interested only in using openSUSE, but not interested in how we can improve openSUSE.
For example, opensuse-ja list has around 600 subscribers ATM. http://lists.opensuse.org/stats/opensuse-ja/opensuse-ja.html#Subscribers But when I asked the subscribers to test and provide feedback on input method for Japanese which might affect all the Japanese users, only few gave feedback to me. :-( http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2010-08/msg00062.html
They use openSUSE as long as openSUSE satisfies their needs, but once they feel openSUSE doesn't meet their requirements, they will silently leave openSUSE and go to other distros, instead of trying to improve openSUSE.
So I regret to say that the situation of Japanese community is not so good. I'm also wondering how are the situations in other countries.
In other OSS projects I'm involved in we have hit the challenge that openSUSE has with engaging non-English speaking users and I'm wondering how you tackle it, specifically overcoming some cultural barriers.
I suppose you have some knowledge about Japanese culture. And, yes, there definitely are cultural (in particular, language) barriers between Westerners and Asians. Additionally, since Asia is so large that each country/ethnic group has its own unique culture and language. In the eyes of Westerners, Japan, China (and Taiwan) and Korea may appear to be almost same, but most Japanese can't speak Chinese nor Korean, and vice versa. And you may know that in IT area, Japanese market is often called "Galapagos".
Most Japanese are not confident of their English ability, even if they are highly-educated. Therefore, when they find bugs in openSUSE or have wishes, they will tend to tweet or blog about them in Japanese, instead of reporting bugs to Bugzilla or requesting features to openFATE in English.
And as I mentioned above, since most Japanese users are just interested in using openSUSE, they are rarely interested in what are going on in and around global openSUSE community.
That's why I translate openSUSE Weekly News into Japanese. I'm always willing to let Japanese users know what are going on and that we can make openSUSE much better if we wish and make efforts for that. But we still have a long way...
The openSUSE team localizes communications outward to the various communities but what about bringing contributors from those non-English speaking (in this case japanese) contributors back into the project?
Of course some don't hesitate to communicate in English, but I think liaison for each language might be helpful. Liaisons will translate global news and announcements about openSUSE into their language for local users, and translate feedback from local users into English for global community, so that people who are not good at English can be more involved in our project/community.
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
There certainly are needs to organize small subcommunities per-language, but whether it will be very active or not depends on efforts of contributors and users of each language.
By the way, why are you interested in "specifically Japanese" ? :-)
The other major open source community that I'm involved in is the "Hudson continuous integration server" (http://hudson-ci.org / http://hudson-labs.org) which was started by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a japanese transplant to northern California. We have a completely separate japanese community that we have been trying to find a way to engage in some of the work that I do evangelism/marketing-wise.
If you live/lived in Japan or understand Japanese, please be involved in Japanese community as well. ;-)
I haven't been to Japan yet, but through Kohsuke I've learned a decent bit about some japanese social customs, quite interesting :) Again, thanks for the response, this is invaluable. - R. Tyler Croy -------------------------------------- GitHub: http://github.com/rtyler Twitter: http://twitter.com/agentdero
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:12 AM, Satoru Matsumoto
Hi Tyler,
R. Tyler Croy wrote:
I hope this isn't entirely off-topic, but I wanted to ask for some advice and maybe some of the history when engaging asian (specifically Japanese) communities/users.
Did you call me ? ;-)
At the beginning, SuSE was little-known distro amongst Japanese.
In 2002, one of the SuSE developers who had studied in Japan dedicated himself to launch mailing list for Japanese. As far as I remember, it was the start point of SUSE Japanese community. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2002-09/ He also was doing his best to localize SuSE distribution and launched M17N (Multilingualization) project as well.
After SuSE was bought out by Novell, Novell Japan once sold some "SUSE Linux Boxed Set - Japanese Edition" with commercial input method and fonts for Japanese. However, they didn't succeed in sales and IIRC, 10.1 was the last Japanese Edition.
After the openSUSE project launched, some Japanese contributors took effort to organize Japanese Wiki (ja.opensuse.org), but they are not active right now.
We have now a very active translator in Localization team and most of the Japanese translation of openSUSE distribution is done by him. But this means, on the other hand, there are few contributors who are willing to help and collaborate with him in translating. :-(
And this year, some of the users took efforts to organize Japanese forum and we have it now. But it is not yet very active now.
Now, we Japanese have Wiki, -ja list, #openSUSE-ja IRC channel on Freenode and Japanese forum as official channels, and threads on 2ch (the most famous BBS in Japan) as unofficial channel where we can communicate with each other in Japanese. And, there are some users who are writing blog posts on openSUSE in their own blog sites.
Besides, there's a site which is sponsored by Novell Japan. http://www.geeko.jp/ But I'm sorry to say that due to the BAD operational policy of Novell Japan, it is not active and few takes care of it now.
Those are the brief history and situation of Japanese community.
There certainly are a fair amount of openSUSE users in Japan. But most of them are interested only in using openSUSE, but not interested in how we can improve openSUSE.
For example, opensuse-ja list has around 600 subscribers ATM. http://lists.opensuse.org/stats/opensuse-ja/opensuse-ja.html#Subscribers But when I asked the subscribers to test and provide feedback on input method for Japanese which might affect all the Japanese users, only few gave feedback to me. :-( http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ja/2010-08/msg00062.html
They use openSUSE as long as openSUSE satisfies their needs, but once they feel openSUSE doesn't meet their requirements, they will silently leave openSUSE and go to other distros, instead of trying to improve openSUSE.
So I regret to say that the situation of Japanese community is not so good. I'm also wondering how are the situations in other countries.
In other OSS projects I'm involved in we have hit the challenge that openSUSE has with engaging non-English speaking users and I'm wondering how you tackle it, specifically overcoming some cultural barriers.
I suppose you have some knowledge about Japanese culture. And, yes, there definitely are cultural (in particular, language) barriers between Westerners and Asians. Additionally, since Asia is so large that each country/ethnic group has its own unique culture and language. In the eyes of Westerners, Japan, China (and Taiwan) and Korea may appear to be almost same, but most Japanese can't speak Chinese nor Korean, and vice versa. And you may know that in IT area, Japanese market is often called "Galapagos".
Most Japanese are not confident of their English ability, even if they are highly-educated. Therefore, when they find bugs in openSUSE or have wishes, they will tend to tweet or blog about them in Japanese, instead of reporting bugs to Bugzilla or requesting features to openFATE in English.
And as I mentioned above, since most Japanese users are just interested in using openSUSE, they are rarely interested in what are going on in and around global openSUSE community.
That's why I translate openSUSE Weekly News into Japanese. I'm always willing to let Japanese users know what are going on and that we can make openSUSE much better if we wish and make efforts for that. But we still have a long way...
The openSUSE team localizes communications outward to the various communities but what about bringing contributors from those non-English speaking (in this case japanese) contributors back into the project?
Of course some don't hesitate to communicate in English, but I think liaison for each language might be helpful. Liaisons will translate global news and announcements about openSUSE into their language for local users, and translate feedback from local users into English for global community, so that people who are not good at English can be more involved in our project/community.
Is it better to cultivate small subcommunities per-language instead?
There certainly are needs to organize small subcommunities per-language, but whether it will be very active or not depends on efforts of contributors and users of each language.
By the way, why are you interested in "specifically Japanese" ? :-)
If you live/lived in Japan or understand Japanese, please be involved in Japanese community as well. ;-)
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Sorry, I didn't mean to hit send, but it got sent. Anyway I remember that Turbo Linux was big in the late 90's in Japan. I have a Japanese Version of Turbo Linux 4, the only other one I have used, was Vine Linux. I am using SLE with a Japanese Company in Miami, I had to set up Canna, and Japanese Input (SCIM) and switch KDE to use Japanese. That lasted about a year, I kept getting calls that when they try to write stuff they were getting Ghost Kanji, a term I have learned meaning it not translating the right way. They asked me to switch back to English. I did noticed that Tokyo Linux User group is in English. I wish I live there again, I lived in Japan from 90~93 on the isle of Shikoku, in Takamatsu. http://www.turbolinux.com http://www.vinelinux.org/ http://tlug.jp/ -- ----------------------------------------- Discover it! Enjoy it! Share it! openSUSE Linux. ----------------------------------------- openSUSE -- en.opensuse.org/User:Terrorpup openSUSE Ambassador/openSUSE Member skype,twiiter,identica,friendfeed -- terrorpup freenode(irc) --terrorpup/lupinstein Have you tried SUSE Studio? Need to create a Live CD, an app you want to package and distribute , or create your own linux distro. Give SUSE Studio a try. www.susestudio.com. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
Hi Chuck, (2010/09/21 1:25), Chuck Payne wrote:
(...) Anyway I remember that Turbo Linux was big in the late 90's in Japan. I have a Japanese Version of Turbo Linux 4, the only other one I have used, was Vine Linux. I am using SLE with a Japanese Company in Miami, I had to set up Canna, and Japanese Input (SCIM) and switch KDE to use Japanese. That lasted about a year, I kept getting calls that when they try to write stuff they were getting Ghost Kanji, a term I have learned meaning it not translating the right way. They asked me to switch back to English.
I did noticed that Tokyo Linux User group is in English.
you have a good memory ! :-) Until the early 2000s, there were only few distros where we can easily set up Japanese environment. That's why charts of distributions on Distrowatch site have "Asian Language Support" low. See for example: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=suse The first SuSE version which supported Japanese was 7.1, released on 2001/01/24. But nowadays, most major distros support Japanese as well. So, people in Japan (I mean, consumers) tend to use major distros rather than distros of Japanese origin.
I wish I live there again, I lived in Japan from 90~93 on the isle of Shikoku, in Takamatsu.
You are always welcomed. ;-) I suppose you yearn for Sanuki-Udon. :-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
participants (6)
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Chuck Payne -
jc -
Nelson Marques -
R. Tyler Croy -
Rajko M. -
Satoru Matsumoto