Re:Translation Stagnation, part 1

[Anas Al-Moosa <anees_joe at yahoo dot com>]

al-salam..
well,after reading your letter,i got the following in
my mind:
   it is impossible for the project to work in the
same speed, if it has the same guys working for it.it
is usual for guys to have different circumstances with
time.due to the project being so large,people working
on it come and go. the number of people must be large
enogh,so the project speed will be constant.so, the
problem here is the lake of people,as i think it is.
so lets take about this one.

first, i have to note that me, my self is not an
active translator, nor developer. I just help with
advertisement for now.

I will talk about the lake of subscriptions for the
site, not the retreat of the work in the project. Also
I don’t have experience with project management, so I
may be wrong or right, but don’t take my suggestions
as criticizes. Every thing down there is just an
analyzation.may be good and may be stupid analyzation

First, let’s divide the problem into smaller parts:
lake of developers (strictly computer science
students) , & lake of  ordinary people, witch mainly
will just translate


Lake of ordinary people: .(witch for most, hardly have
seen any thing but windows)

1- There is some thing odd about CVS, (download winCVS
from the original site, install it, BOOM, 
the program warned the man to download python & perl,
he never heard about them. any way  
browse for any file you want … download… work … see if
there r any updates for the file ... then 
you upload the file.),  ????!!! Come on, that is not
any ones work, we are not talking about (object
oriented programming) procedures & change management,
we are talking about, person x, who 
always used windows. & just want to
translate(participate with work), we must make it easy
for him….
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I suggest a simple CVS interface, for ordinary users. 
I don’t mean a whole project, just any interfacing
Method we can get up with,even a humanoid one
(look at the second suggestion)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

2- do you remember couple of days ago, when that guy
sent: “you are just sending emails for me,if you don’t
have any tasks I will go”. Well, even nobody liked his
way, it seems that he didn’t know how to really help,
and I mean really help, not just what can he help
with.
He(like me at the beginning ),went to the mailing list
expecting to be told to (do that , and do this with
somebody ,..etc)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I suggest a tasking method, I mean teams, e.g. every 
Knowledgeable guy takes responsibility for a punch 
Of guys, and give them Strict TASKS (PO files, for
example)
And tell them what to do 
-----------------------------------------------------------------

3- Have you seen commercial sites, they put a big
Banner …(new user? sign Up now).
I think that will be enough push for some body to know
where he can sign for a CVS account 
to help, even if he don’t know what is a CVS for. or
at least that HE will (catch) the first part of the
twine. ;)

4- Any way, why those guys doesn’t bother to look at
the whole site? So they can see every thing and learn
every thing they need?.well, they don’t have time :)
,probably any  Arab citizen is online from a Dial-up
account (and, his parents are yelling wants the
telephone line) or from  an internet café  (witch is
not a comfortable  place to read every thing from),

--------------> that’s why i won`t use the Qamoos
online DB heavily
--------------> and that’s why, any download bigger
than 3 Megs needs consideration

5 -  may be some guys are getting lost in the
homepages of the needed programs,(e.g. cygwin ).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
why sending the user to the homepage or to the
sourceforge
of the program they need, why not a direct link or
mirroring the file
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6- I`m not sure yet, but is the Qamoos  is a program
for off-line (Qamoosing) , it will be great, because I

downloaded  the 1.4 ver  from the SORCEFOURGE,I didn’t
know how to run it,(if it can be used  by 
windows) ??? 

7- I think that ordinary people need (algorithmic)
guidance
e.g : do that then do this,after that do those.so you
can get what you want….(like a manual)

8-  the following is  just reasoning, for the lake of
popularity of linux in the arab world,with no
suggestions:

for almost any arab citizen, the word FREE, for
describing linux is (bla- bla), because he can get any
thing, including the high priced windows XP
professional with about  1 $,…or even 30 cents (if he
has a cd-RW , and a Korea-made CD),not only windows,
but every software he wants, from the most famous
GAMES  -walking through ms-office ,to any thing he
wants….. So why bother with the harder  to use,(less
beauty)-linux.,,(i'm talking from THEIR viw-point
here) 

even worse, cause of the (Dial-up) problem, getting
linux is harder than getting others,you Don’t find
linux in the computer shops ,…except for the
somehow-spread redHat, nothing there.(I’m talking
about Jordan, where I study) 

*******************************************


lake of developers (strictly computer science
students):
---------->  to be continued in part 2

                                                


                                        Yours, Anas

=====

Yurs, Anas   


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