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