Hi ichat,
thank you for your comment. I understand your point of view. However, I have the feeling that there is some kind of misunderstanding about "us" trying to control the community or limit its level of involvement. I would like to sort that out first, before replying to your message.
At Zentyal there is no Business vs Community clash. None, at least that I am aware of. Me, as well as my colleagues, consider ourselves members of the community. And as such, we follow and respect the rules of the community. As in any community, responsibility and power are assigned by meritocracy, which means that whoever contributes the most, gets more privileges and power to take decisions. We (as an organization) happen to be the main contributor and that is the only reason why we lead the project. We have been trying for a long time to get other people involved and share its leadership but, believe me, it is much harder than it seems. Forum moderators are the first successful step in that direction, and hopefully not the last one, but the reason why this is mostly a company-led project is not because we want to keep full control on it, but because it takes time for other members to step in and get involved.
what i mean to say is... no you cant stop it, and i believe, even if you could you dont even want that...
Like I said, no one wants to stop it. It just needs to start moving
i also beleave that its impossible to help people based on unofficial documentation... thats why im saying provide US the comunity with means (and possible motive) to get setup with some directions, lets call it a default translation profile, protocol or method ...
The community DOES have the means. There is a
community documentation repository that can be edited by any forum member. Contributions can be then linked from the
community documentation by anyone with administration privileges (currently Zentyal staff and forum moderators). Following Zentyal release cycle, most valuable contributions will be merged into
official documentation once it is updated. This is currently the procedure.
We can then discuss about whether official documentation could be modified anytime by anyone (instead of following a strict release cycle) or whether we should spend a lot of effort preparing the wiki and the required processes to handle a flood of contributions (instead of, for example, investing that effort in debugging 2.1 version and publishing a really polished 2.2 next month). But, in my opinion, the current level of contributions does not justify a large modification in our infrastructure or procedures.
make sure that the english documents are vesioned.. so that when i translate, i can refer to that specific version of that document....
They are versioned. Official documentation refers to a particular version of Zentyal and all the howtos contributed during the last three months follow a template indicating date and version.
hopefully it could lead to multiple zentyal websites ... with multiple forums wiki's etc all on the same system, and a global login system... all in thair own laguage (fully translated)...
i would be willing to help setting up nl.zentyal.org (or zentyal.nl) for example... i also wouldn't mind translating other people's work from english to dutch or visa versa...
I hope so too. It is just a matter of choices, as resources are limited: if we knew that there were actually going to be throngs of people helping translating and contributing with new documentation, then we would invest whatever it takes preparing all the infrastructure and procedures needed. But if we don't know that, then it is hard to justify (and probably counterproductive for the project too) to deviate efforts from debugging or from the English documentation update, where developers are focused now.
also localized websites will allow you to spotlight local zentyal partners, and zca professionals and that could also be valuable...
Definitely, I agree completely, and I wish we could do everything at the same time.
Regards,