Thanks, Christian, for your explanation. :)I did find that out, a bit late, but since we translators are expected to sub to debian-devel, I assumed voting announcements there concerned us, too. ;)
On 02/04/2006, at 3:48 PM, Christian Perrier wrote:
What's hidden in your statement is another topic: what about Debian contributors, such as translators, who are not official Debian developers....
Yes, indeed. There are people in translation and documentation, for example, or bug-triaging, who put in a huge amount of effort. This denigrates that effort, IMHO. It deserves recognition when voting is done.
Well, in short, the project hasn't find the Right Way, currently, to allow them to influence the project and, for instance, be recognized similarly to official DD's. However, the New maintainer Process is now more friendly to people who aren't contributing code, but are contributing in other areas, such as documentation, translation, etc.... There are good example of such people in people who became DD during last year...one of them is now even the Debian Installer release manager...:-) There is still room for better recognition, though...this is a topic of recurrent debates and discussions...:-)
This has since come up on other lists where I mentioned the vote. Mary, from linuxchix, said:
On Sun, Apr 02, 2006, Clytie Siddall wrote:This certainly restricts the voting to a small pool. What about all the other people who contribute their time and effort to the project? I feel a protest coming on... ;)
[Mary then said:]
This has been raised as a concern by other people before, see forexample Benjamin Mako Hill at http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/2005/Jul/ 19 . That argument is, I believe, much of the reason that applying for Ubuntu*membership* and Ubuntu *maintainership* (for example) are separateprocesses. See also criteria for voting in GNOME Foundation elections athttp://foundation.gnome.org/membership/ . (Typically, there is usually *some* level of involvement required before being given voting rights, or it's too easy to rig elections or 'steal' a project's resources.) The most effective protest would probably be working within Debian to amend the rules to either allow (some) non-developers to vote, or to change the criteria for a developer. I suspect from Mako's blog entrythat there are some ideas other people have that would be useful. On theother hand, there's only so much time in the day... ;)
I am a Gnome translator, and member of Gnome-Women, do ongoing work on the G-W wiki and the GTP and GDP wiki presence, so I found I was entitled to vote in the Gnome elections. I think something similar to the Gnome arrangement, where you have to show a significant contribution to the project, would also work for Debian.
I'd be willing to put effort into establishing a more equitable access to voting in Debian. Where do you think is a good place to start?
And what do other translators here think? Would you like to have more of a say in how Debian is run?
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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