On 04/01/2007, at 5:12 PM, Christian Perrier wrote:
I had exactly this "Debian I18N Task Force" in mind when I wrote the initial mail. I know that Christian used this term often but I never (really!) understood what team he referred to! I know about the NMUprocess initiated by him and assumed that he refers to a special group of people helping with it, but I never found (or remember) a definitionWell, from my memory, back in early September 2006 in Extremadura, I was not alone in Casar de Caceres. We were something like 20 people, who can easily define selves as "part of the i18n TF". And the NMU campaign was discussed during that meeting which report has been announced here. For sure, some parts of the work were done by me but I still regard it as a team work (given the number of translation updates we incorporated at that moment, it's pretty obvious).
We certainly worked as a team in that case, and we do pretty much all the time, AFAIK.
Ditto for the people who participated in the i18n sessions at the Debian Conference on Oaxtepec back in May 2006. Here, as well, I don't remember being alone even though I acted later as a spokeperson (my usual way, as you all know: by making as much noise as possible). I perfectly understand that this may be a little more difficult for people who didn't participate in such events to define themselves with regards of what seems to be a self-appointed group of persons. I guess this is what's behind your words (and partly those of MJ Ray who seems to not support the concept of an i18n team in favor of a more generic and vague terms of "contributors").
I don't have any chance of meeting anyone here in real life, but I do consider myself part of the team. I like the concept of teamwork: working together, helping each other, benefiting from each other's experience, working towards common goals. I believe we do those things here.
For sure, part of the people here in this very mailing list have been lucky enough to have opportunities to meet up in the real life, which makes cohesion easier. It's quite natural the other people feel somewhat excluded from this and I regret it....I can only hope that all of you who are in that situation will find opportunities to get in closer touch and develop that feeling of being part of a "team".
It is a great feeling. If you contribute to Debian i18n, then you _are_ part of this team. It's certainly a team we can feel proud of. We have achieved a great deal together.
And, just to be clear about it, I would of course define you guys (Jens, MJ, Holger, many others I forget here) as part of the i18n team...just because you participate here in the list and you already contributed significantly to the i18n/l10n efforts in Debian. Anyway, for what is worth, I've personnaly felt like being part of the D-I "team" even before meeting up with Joey and the other guys for the first time back in 2004. Indeed, as soon as I began working with the other D-I people I would then define myself as part of that team even though we never ran any formal process for this. I bet that my friend Frans would say the same for his own contribution to D-I.
As do I, even though I can't meet people in person.
Therefore, I find this argument about the i18n "crowd" being a team or not a little bit rethorical... (we could of course use funnier alternatives like "i18n crowd", "i18n junkies")
;)It might be better to avoid idiom. "Team", I think, should be fairly safe. People should be familiar with the concept from school, sport and work. In its informal state, a team is simply the fact of working together.
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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