Jonas Sundström wrote:
I've never enjoyed forums much personally. Bad for hanging out with friends, bad for publishing/finding information. The way I see it those two are the main things: socializing and getting the right info. IRC and mailing-lists for social- izing and wiki/svn/etc for good solid information. I would like to see a host of localized loose-topic mailing- lists: haiku-jp, haiku-se, haiku-fr, ...
Everybody has his/her personal preference; in general terms, different means can also be considered more appropriate than others depending on the application (ie., mailing lists are good to push info; forums may be better structured for discussions and archival purposes; IRC provides real time communication, so it may be better suited for socializing, etc.). But regardless of your or my preference, in the end you will probably end up with all (or most) of them to cater to the widest audience possible; and that's OK IMHO.
That being said, forums/mailing lists/IRC were more of an afterthought rather than the focus of this thread though; it may be that I have not articulated this well enough, so let me try.
In addition to the documentation, support through the forums, blogs and other services that it provides, the website is also where the project articulates its "raison d'être" to the world. For newcomers, whether this articulation is compelling enough or not can be what determines whether somebody wants to look more into what Haiku is all about -- and potentially become part of it -- or disregard it as just another project and move on.
When conveying such a fundamental message, using your audience's native language will be much more compelling and thus potentially effective. Given the increased exposure that Haiku has been getting since alpha 1 was released, I believe this would be a good time to start catering to such non-English speaking audience as a way to embrace them and to create the basis for further expansion of the various local communities. This and the fact that groups of translators are building around the User Guide translation project, were the basis for me starting this thread.
What I had envisioned, as a start, was a limited set of pages per language along the lines of:
What is Haiku? General FAQ Project History Haiku Inc. Community links Getting Involved Donating to HaikuThe above being open to discussion, I think it would provide a good basis for conveying what Haiku the project and the OS are about in clear terms, with the added bonus of having the official stamp on it, giving it more credibility. And since the information is mostly static, we are looking more at a one time translation project, so there is no major issues of long term maintainability.
Technically, this is all possible with Drupal; languages can be enabled, permissions can be assigned on a language basis, and a moderation system can be enforced to allow for review prior to publication.
On the organizational side of things, the basis already exists from the User Guide translation project, so not much to do there.
Eguchi-san has told me he is interested in working with me to create content in Japanese; so maybe we could use Japanese as a pilot test, and if it works, then extend it to other languages as translation teams come forward.
Cheers, Jorge/aka Koki
