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Posted to dev@community.apache.org by Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de> on 2023/10/26 07:42:08 UTC
Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Hi all,
as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees are native Chinese speakers.
I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help make the ASF more welcoming to these communities.
Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on the planet.
However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so.
In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions and he’s a valuable part of the community.
It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures:
* WeChat Groups
* Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu
I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so.
Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365.
But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me to write in Chinese ;-) )
This got me thinking:
We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common mantra).
But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what they did.
So … what if we question this rule.
I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing a new solution into the picture.
What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project?
Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in any language.
If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure there are services out there able to do that)
A translated English version could be stored alongside the original.
Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, …
If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the language he can understand.
I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we need inside the foundation.
What do you folks think?
Chris
Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by Gláucia Esppenchutz <g....@gmail.com>.
Hi folks,
About the non-English speakers, this was a discussion we had in the BoF of
diversity. There are folks from countries that, unfortunately, don't have
the opportunity to learn English, and the language becomes a barrier. We
could have "channels" written in their native language and translated into
English.
For this, do we need to build our own solution, or could we search for
something to help us?
best,
Glaucia
Em sex., 27 de out. de 2023 às 08:38, tison <wa...@gmail.com> escreveu:
> For holding translated content, the FSF hosts translations for its licenses
> as "Unofficial translations"[1].
>
> The reason can be that it's somehow legal terms so it's at risk if
> different versions imply different meanings. But for the "policy" where we
> generally have the understanding "Whether those constitute "policy" or just
> best practice is left as an exercise for the reader.", if there are ASF
> members maintain the content, I agree that we can mark the translated
> content as official.
>
> Best,
> tison.
>
> [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.en.html
>
>
> tison <wa...@gmail.com> 于2023年10月27日周五 11:46写道：
>
> > FWIW, I ever wrote a (Chinese) blog about communication tools for an OSS
> > community[1], that has a section to talk about mailing list.
> >
> > I enter the OSS world with the Perl 6 (a.k.a. Raku) community so it's
> > native to me for working with mailing list and even IRC. But it's quite
> > unfamiliar for especially new contributors even from a worldwide
> > perspective.
> >
> > > What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a
> > project?
> >
> > Convey/Forwarding to the mailing list is the current solution. I'm
> > prototyping a community tool to archive activities and will be glad to
> > collaborate. As Orbit or CommonRoom does, saving all the activities from
> > different channels so that we can be both (1) archive (2) searchable, and
> > (3) even _analyzable_.
> >
> >
> >
> > Best,
> > tison.
> >
> > [1] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/395057453
> >
> >
> > <rb...@rcbowen.com> 于2023年10月26日周四 22:20写道：
> >
> >> On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 07:42 +0000, Christofer Dutz wrote:
> >> > We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen
> >> > (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s
> >> > just a common mantra).
> >>
> >> It's written here:
> >>
> >>
> https://community.apache.org/newbiefaq#NewbieFAQ-IsthereaCodeofConductforApacheprojects
> >> ?
> >>
> >> And here: https://incubator.apache.org/guides/committer.html
> >>
> >> Whether those constitute "policy" or just best practice is left as an
> >> exercise for the reader.
> >>
> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@community.apache.org
> >> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@community.apache.org
> >>
> >>
>
--
Gláucia Esppenchutz
-----------------------------------------------------
Twitter: @lyuric19
Linkedin: https://br.linkedin.com/pub/gláucia-esppenchutz/47/81a/312
Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by tison <wa...@gmail.com>.
For holding translated content, the FSF hosts translations for its licenses
as "Unofficial translations"[1].
The reason can be that it's somehow legal terms so it's at risk if
different versions imply different meanings. But for the "policy" where we
generally have the understanding "Whether those constitute "policy" or just
best practice is left as an exercise for the reader.", if there are ASF
members maintain the content, I agree that we can mark the translated
content as official.
Best,
tison.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.en.html
tison <wa...@gmail.com> 于2023年10月27日周五 11:46写道：
> FWIW, I ever wrote a (Chinese) blog about communication tools for an OSS
> community[1], that has a section to talk about mailing list.
>
> I enter the OSS world with the Perl 6 (a.k.a. Raku) community so it's
> native to me for working with mailing list and even IRC. But it's quite
> unfamiliar for especially new contributors even from a worldwide
> perspective.
>
> > What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a
> project?
>
> Convey/Forwarding to the mailing list is the current solution. I'm
> prototyping a community tool to archive activities and will be glad to
> collaborate. As Orbit or CommonRoom does, saving all the activities from
> different channels so that we can be both (1) archive (2) searchable, and
> (3) even _analyzable_.
>
>
>
> Best,
> tison.
>
> [1] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/395057453
>
>
> <rb...@rcbowen.com> 于2023年10月26日周四 22:20写道：
>
>> On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 07:42 +0000, Christofer Dutz wrote:
>> > We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen
>> > (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s
>> > just a common mantra).
>>
>> It's written here:
>>
>> https://community.apache.org/newbiefaq#NewbieFAQ-IsthereaCodeofConductforApacheprojects
>> ?
>>
>> And here: https://incubator.apache.org/guides/committer.html
>>
>> Whether those constitute "policy" or just best practice is left as an
>> exercise for the reader.
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@community.apache.org
>> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@community.apache.org
>>
>>
Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by tison <wa...@gmail.com>.
FWIW, I ever wrote a (Chinese) blog about communication tools for an OSS
community[1], that has a section to talk about mailing list.
I enter the OSS world with the Perl 6 (a.k.a. Raku) community so it's
native to me for working with mailing list and even IRC. But it's quite
unfamiliar for especially new contributors even from a worldwide
perspective.
> What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project?
Convey/Forwarding to the mailing list is the current solution. I'm
prototyping a community tool to archive activities and will be glad to
collaborate. As Orbit or CommonRoom does, saving all the activities from
different channels so that we can be both (1) archive (2) searchable, and
(3) even _analyzable_.
Best,
tison.
[1] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/395057453
<rb...@rcbowen.com> 于2023年10月26日周四 22:20写道：
> On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 07:42 +0000, Christofer Dutz wrote:
> > We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen
> > (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s
> > just a common mantra).
>
> It's written here:
>
> https://community.apache.org/newbiefaq#NewbieFAQ-IsthereaCodeofConductforApacheprojects
> ?
>
> And here: https://incubator.apache.org/guides/committer.html
>
> Whether those constitute "policy" or just best practice is left as an
> exercise for the reader.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@community.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@community.apache.org
>
>
Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by rb...@rcbowen.com.
On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 07:42 +0000, Christofer Dutz wrote:
> We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen
> (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s
> just a common mantra).
It's written here:
https://community.apache.org/newbiefaq#NewbieFAQ-IsthereaCodeofConductforApacheprojects
?
And here: https://incubator.apache.org/guides/committer.html
Whether those constitute "policy" or just best practice is left as an
exercise for the reader.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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AW: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>.
Hi Roman,
Well, I guess stuff like the content from Apache-legal wouldn’t be what I would feel comfortable with having auto-translated.
But for most other stuff, I could imagine that storing the original and then maybe using the openAI API to have it translated to English and then storing that alongside on the incoming part, would be one option.
Then I could imagine that there must be some sort of JS plugin, we could integrate into our websites that checks if there’s an original in that language or to use the same API to dynamically have it translated.
But I understand that currently this is sort of a theoretic question.
I would doubt MS/OpenAI would appreciate us asking up to 2 questions for everything that happens at the ASF:
* Is this content English?
* Please translate this content to English
Also could I imagine that this service would not be available to everyone and in all countries, so probably for the ad-hoc translations a pluggable mechanism probably would be required.
But I think it would be worth digging deeper, if there’s a general consent here, that something like that would make sense.
Chris
Von: Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org>
Datum: Donnerstag, 26. Oktober 2023 um 13:05
An: dev@community.apache.org <de...@community.apache.org>
Betreff: Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 10:42 AM Christofer Dutz
<ch...@c-ware.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees are native Chinese speakers.
> I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help make the ASF more welcoming to these communities.
>
> Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on the planet.
> However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so.
> In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions and he’s a valuable part of the community.
>
> It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures:
>
> * WeChat Groups
> * Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu
>
> I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so.
>
> Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365.
> But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me to write in Chinese ;-) )
>
> This got me thinking:
> We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common mantra).
> But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what they did.
> So … what if we question this rule.
> I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing a new solution into the picture.
> What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project?
> Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in any language.
> If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure there are services out there able to do that)
> A translated English version could be stored alongside the original.
> Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, …
> If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the language he can understand.
>
> I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we need inside the foundation.
>
> What do you folks think?
Yes, and... ;-)
...I've been thinking along the same lines given that I have recently
helped OpenAtom Foundation get to a point where they have native
translations/explanations of portions from
https://www.apache.org/legal/
The translations are done and have been reviewed by two of our long
standing, bi-lingual ASF members. So they are as good as it gets.
Now, the question I have is: how can we promote this to our
communities who may benefit from it?
The reason I'm asking is not to hijack this thread ;-) but rather to
figure out what would be our attitude towards non-english content
(like what you're suggesting Chris). Would we be comfortable putting
it some place on apache.org ? Would a better option be simply linking
to some other resource? Would a parallel, web property managed by
folks affiliated with ASF, but not officially ASF be a better option?
But to get back to Chris' question: my answer would be "YES -- let's
collect all things that can be helpful (regardless of the language)",
but my followup question would be: how should we manage/expose/promote
it?
Thanks,
Roman.
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Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules?
Posted by Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org>.
On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 10:42 AM Christofer Dutz
<ch...@c-ware.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees are native Chinese speakers.
> I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help make the ASF more welcoming to these communities.
>
> Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on the planet.
> However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so.
> In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions and he’s a valuable part of the community.
>
> It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures:
>
> * WeChat Groups
> * Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu
>
> I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so.
>
> Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365.
> But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me to write in Chinese ;-) )
>
> This got me thinking:
> We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common mantra).
> But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what they did.
> So … what if we question this rule.
> I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing a new solution into the picture.
> What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project?
> Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in any language.
> If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure there are services out there able to do that)
> A translated English version could be stored alongside the original.
> Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, …
> If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the language he can understand.
>
> I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we need inside the foundation.
>
> What do you folks think?
Yes, and... ;-)
...I've been thinking along the same lines given that I have recently
helped OpenAtom Foundation get to a point where they have native
translations/explanations of portions from
https://www.apache.org/legal/
The translations are done and have been reviewed by two of our long
standing, bi-lingual ASF members. So they are as good as it gets.
Now, the question I have is: how can we promote this to our
communities who may benefit from it?
The reason I'm asking is not to hijack this thread ;-) but rather to
figure out what would be our attitude towards non-english content
(like what you're suggesting Chris). Would we be comfortable putting
it some place on apache.org ? Would a better option be simply linking
to some other resource? Would a parallel, web property managed by
folks affiliated with ASF, but not officially ASF be a better option?
But to get back to Chris' question: my answer would be "YES -- let's
collect all things that can be helpful (regardless of the language)",
but my followup question would be: how should we manage/expose/promote
it?
Thanks,
Roman.
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