QAC, Chapter 2: The Official Re-Institution

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <aalarfaj at gmail dot com>]

Salam to all Arabeyes members,

For what seems like ages now, there has been growing concern, and
sometimes even dismay and anger, at the status of QAC, the official
Arabeyes Quality Assurance Committee. This committee's activity has
been stalled for months now. Originally meant as a body to ensure all
linguistic-related issues of Arabeyes are taken care of, and that our
translation projects can function quickly and without hinderance, now
almost nothing has remained of what that committee had achieved except
the concepts and abstract ideas.

Well, no more! The time has come when we wipe the dust off of QAC, and
get it off the ground. Translation projects are stalled. New
inexperienced translators find the things they have to learn so
scattered and inconcrete that they are quickly overwhelmed. It is time
for us to make sure this committee can stand on its own, with or
without us.

I believe that one of the main reasons for QAC's failure the last time
was disorganization, and an absolute freeze in decision making. We
needed to meet before we made any decisions, and there were six of us.
We never did show up all at once. Every decision needed a vote and
until we had enough voters decision making was just delayed, delayed,
delayed and you know the results.

What I have in mind now is a different management model. Instead of
six members of equal weight, we will have an arbitrary number of
members, between 3 and 6 maybe, plus in addition a supreme QAC
uberlord, or a manager if you find that term too scary :-).
Centralized decision-making == FAST PROGRESS.

That manager will probably be me, but if anyone else wants to
volunteer this is your chance! If you just want to volunteer to be a
member of QAC, say so now please. Ayman and Arafat, you have already
been drafted ;-)

QAC will responsible for all translation and linguistic related tasks
here on Arabeyes. I can cite a lot of examples of such tasks, but no
need for that now. What I want is for Arabeyes translation teams to
work like well-oiled machines, never breaking down for silly reasons
that should have been taken care of a long time ago. I hope to see to
it that QAC will be the translation teams' scout, removing all
obstacles from their way before they reach them.

We will be meeting once a week, and then after we get some actual work
done, it will be once every two weeks. But we do have to get off the
ground first. We will also be using wiki heavily, unless the members
opt to put QAC related material on CVS instead. Either is fine with
me.

Our most important project will be creating the technical dictionnary.
Well, guess what? I have the whole thing planned out already. Read
about it here:

http://www.arabeyes.org/~alarfaj/techdict_plan.html

There are still a few things to work out. Nadim wrote a script to help
us with this dictionary but it still has bugs in it. I would like
other QAC members to try and use this script and help Nadim in ironing
out the problems.

You can find the script here:
http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/scripts/translate/list2po.pl

And the list it uses and a README file here:
http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/tech_wordlist.list
http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/README

If your finding all this information confusing and overwhelming, dont
worry, just try to familiarize yourself with the above info regarding
the dictionary and I promise to answer any questions promptly.

I believe thats enough QAC-related stuff for now. What I want for now is:

1. A list of membes who want to enlist
2. The times they can come to meetings

And thats it! I'll ask for more stuff as I remember it... :-)

This time around, QAC will make it. Thats a promise. I'm making this a
top priority and I'll keep pushing this thing until it gets off the
ground. Please dont let the disappointing history keep you from
joining this time around. :-)

Salam, and thank you all.

Abdulaziz,