Yes. me too. I run the Malaysian support site community. I think the suggestion to open private forums for local site staff and xoops.org. At least, we (local site representative) know what IS & WILL going on in dev xoops. Instead, we can know each other.

Summing up what we are getting at:

We should set down a team that is responsible for the communication between local support sites and the XOOPS organisation (both ways and cross-site)

The tasks involve:

1) Maintain the Local Support listing and setup some criteria for being listed
2) Moderate local site forums here on xoops.org where site representatives and XOOPS organisation members have access - before creating the forums, it should be investigated, what the local sites need and desire from xoops.org so the right forums are created
3) Maintain the user access to aforementinoed forums
4) Maintain the World Of XOOPS (WOX) newsletter with news from local sites, module development and core development. The goal is a monthly newsletter, but could be more frequent if resources and incoming information allows

Who wants to be involved in this? Brash and jdseymour have stepped up to at least 4) but I'm sure we need more people to cover everything. Shine? Do you want in?

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Yes. I agree definitely agree with Mith... Local site must be informed first what WILL and IS going on.

Yes, I agree.

But I don't like what you are doing here.

I made a XOOPS Slovenian support site. I translated many modules, I wrote few tutorials in my language, I help on forums and I am translating your news from xoops.org to my language. And you don't want to change the logo of our site in Local support. I opened a forum about this and wrote a PM to you Mith, but nobody still didn't change it.

I know you have a lot of work, but I did a lot for Xoops, too!

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I am terribly sorry. I forgot. I do have your image here and will upload immediately.

See why we need the local support team?

In a project this size, communication is essential. So is willingness to embrace change.

I'm just a user. I don't ask many support questions primarily because I can search the forums and find most of my answers. If a private forum is created, there will be a lot less people there to answer questions and the vast majority of users (people like me) will never see the answers. That seems like a very big step in the wrong direction....

I see talk of informing the local support sites of upcoming changes. That is a very good thing. That allows everyone to be prepared when changes happen. It allows local translations to be available on release days.

I really appreciate the open discussions around the recent patches. Those posts gave a lot of insight into the development process. I'm hoping that this process becomes more commonplace.

Mith mentions updated road maps. I think they are essential. EVERYONE needs to know what is happening and what to expect. We don't need specific dates, but rather concepts and general time frames. If things get pushed back, change the time frame. If there is ongoing discussion DURING the development and testing processes, then everyone will be understanding and aware of delays.

I see a lot of progress being made. Communication is something that seems really obvious but is actually hard to accomplish. It's a constant challenge.

I have a fairly strong organizational background and will assist in this however I can be best utilized.

I would also like to add:

1) Make the Local Support criteria simple enough to not deter potential contributors.

2) It seems to me that the forums/site should be enabled for multi-lang even though a good bit of the content posts may (permanantly) reside in native languages... This would make it easier for Local Support team members to create a structure where multiple people can commit information and only a single entity would be necessary to perform translations on vital posts and act as the lead for that geography.

If this would create issues for the existing infrastructure of xoops.org or dev.xoops.org I suggest creating a new multi-lang site 'team.xoops.org' or something similar. As to the nuiances (user reg. etc) this could all be ironed out one way or another.

3) Maintaining user access will be necessary regardless of how this is implemented. I would suggest a bit more discussion of how to 'maximize the benifit' prior to actually adding additional resources that may or may not provide the desired functionality in a long term scenario.

4) Newsletter:
This would be simplified by the structure created by suggestion 2 (above) as the moderators of the newsletter could pull directly from the posts which have been translated by the 'in geography' lead (on the new site/forums) due to importance. EG: there could be a single forum (WOX) for posts which Local Support site Leads wish to see appear in the WOX.

If we were to make a forum specific to the newsletter, it would take the responsibility for posting timely, important entries AND translation out of the moderators hands, and place the responsibility on the local administrators. This way the accountability chain seems to be better defined and at a local level.

Summarizing:

If we are to better inform and unite XOOPS contributors and local support site users, we should make every effort to meet today's and tomorrow's needs the first time.

We should attempt to make the system as self actualizing as possible from both an accountability and procedural vantagepoint. Creating the tools is one thing, but management is another... the closer we can tie the two together the less legwork any one person need do.

Personally I think the language barriers are the root of most of the communications voids. If this is the case, it is imperative that the structure of this project be geared toward dealing with, or breaking down, the language barriers if not by technology then by administration. Otherwise we will find ourselves expending effort and not resolving the issues we hope to address.

While reading the posts on this topic I noticed that many people are under the assumption that Q&A forums would exist in this environment and may detract from the existing forums. I see no reason for this project to have that type of functionality, and would imagine that this endeavor would serve as a method of keeping the entire XOOPS community abreast of future plans, changes, announcements and development news.

But that's just my 2cents...

Good post, tripmon.

I am not entirely following you on the language thing, though.

The forums are not (in my idea) for intra-community discussions, but for inter-community discussions. That means that the language will be English.

News from the XOOPS organisation could be posted so that the local support teams can translate them and announce it on their own local sites.
In the other direction, local support sites that have something to announce, will write it in English so everyone else can understand it.

I may have misunderstood you, though, so don't hesitate to correct me.

I think we're talking about the same thing, but the reason I would opt for multi-lang follows:

IFF multi-lang forums exist, any user so inclined could log in and post what THEY consider to be a worthy announcement, news item, post, etc in their native language (it's easy to navigate and post due to multi-lang).

Now you have 1 'lead' in geography moderate those posts which are in his/her geography in his/her native language. This lead translates any necessary posts and also performs reverse translations (or assigns that to someone else on their Local Support team).

This lead is basically responsible for their geography's information in regards to the remainder of the site (eg. to XOOPS organization and cross geo) and would use english outside of their Local Support forum...

In esssence what I envision is that this type of freedom of posts in native languages would make it easier for the actual people 'making' the news to post it.

The benifit is that the onus for information updates and translations becomes a responsibility of the Local Support site Team Lead as opposed to a xoops.org function.

So for example each of the Local Support Sites would have it's own forum with posts either in english OR native lang. This forum (for each geography) would allow any user or contributor from that geography to post news in their native language. As needed, the Local Support team lead would translate those posts which had international significance and move them to the proper forum (WOX for example). All of the remaining posts in any given geography's forum could then be used by the team lead to generate a Local newsletter, including the active WOX posts.

The remainder of the site (aside from the forums by geography) would work as you describe.

The big benifit being, if we task an individual with both gathering and translating news it is a far more difficult job than moderating. Additionally, we are to a larger degree putting the power in the hands of the people by allowing an easier and more open form of communication. The forums I describe are SOLELY for the purpose of submitting news, changes, dev reports, etc. and the remainder of the site's business could be conducted in english.

Let me know if that does not clarify it enough... basically I agree with you that the lang should be english for the site proper, but if the admin headache is not significant, I see real benifits in information availibility in structuring the tool set and administration this way.

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I don't follow this. That's what the local sites are for.

If we have forums here for French, Japanese, Portuguese and German support, what is the role of xoops.fr, www.xoopscube.jp etc.?