[Mageia-discuss] UK user community?

[Marc Paré]

  Le 2010-09-20 07:41, Patricia Fraser a écrit :
> Hi,
>
>> Other countries seem to be organising user communities, but I've
>> not seen anything for the UK. Perhaps it is easier for some other
>> countries as they already had active Mandriva user communities - I
>> never managed to find one for the UK, so perhaps it never existed!
>>
>> Has anybody set up anything for UK Mageia users? If not, would
>> anybody from the UK be prepared to help me to start something?
> I'd help! I'm in Poland, but I'd be interested in helping with any UK
> English localisation, and supporting and following UK group
> activities - including any marketing, because it's my nearest
> English-speaking country and my English is UK English, not US
> English. I use a UK keyboard, I use Euros and GBP, I use EN-GB
> dictionaries and thesauruses...
>
> While I agree that a complete repo is a good thing, local user/action
> groups make it possible to actually organise a large number of
> people, and to receive ideas from them in manageable chunks...
>
> Just an idea...
>
>
>
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I don't think there is anyway around this. Community and Language based 
domain sites will exist as these do also cover cultural and 
nationalistic boundaries. Human nature being what it is, we all want to 
belong to a piece of where we come from. It just depends on how we view 
or define ourselves.

In a perfect world, the Mageia organisers (core group) would have 
pre-registered all important domain names and permutations considered 
important to the project. Even if "Mageia (Linux)" is called a 
community-based project, you still have to approach it from a "business" 
model. Organising the domain situation should be (should have been) top 
priority. Coordinating the registration of the localised (country-based) 
domains for any internet based endeavour (for-profit or non-profit 
organisation) should always figure in the initial planning stages. 
However, this would have required a considerable amount of financial 
outlay at the onset of the project as well as a great amount of 
coordination worldwide with cooperating partners -- you cannot register 
a country-based domain unless you are a citizen of that country or you 
risk being challenged on your ownership and risk losing your domain.

It would then be reasonable to say that the Mageia project will need, 
after all of its initial organizing, to try to coordinate the 
cooperation of language and local websites. Being a community-based 
distro, it would be imperative on our parts to lend a hand at helping 
the project in this way in a non-discriminating way. That is to say, if 
we own a domain that is considered a TLD  (top level domain) for this 
project, we should coordinate closely with the flag-ship Mageia domain 
(http://www.mageia.org).

Most of the "mageia" domains and permutations that matter have pretty 
well been registered. The ones that mattered were well registered by the 
end of the day on Sunday. I would suggest that a further name change in 
the near future may be necessary if the coordination under the "Mageia" 
banner is too difficult to manage for the project.

In my opinion, the localised magiea.country domains, should, for now, 
point to the main site, unless the localised site requires special 
language consideration with an obvious link to the main mageia website. 
The main Mageia site should make every effort to support language 
translation of important materials and organise language support fora 
for the different language groups. This, language support fora, should 
then be well coordinated so that a clear path of information makes it 
way back up to the Mageia structure for policy making. Making all work 
together regardless of language barriers is important. The use of Fora 
for the project is important, as for most users today, accessing a 
"forums" board is quite easily done and the feeling of belonging to the 
group is easily achievable. Mailists and NNTP (Usenet) are a little more 
difficult to maintain from a practical view for most users. Making it 
easy to participate to the community will attract a larger amount of 
users. Let's make it easy for users to join and participate.

This then leads to the topic of the one overriding official language for 
the dissemination of Mageia information. We all know that, in the real 
intenational business world, the lingua franca is English. I would 
propose English as the unifying language for the site for all involved. 
This is not to disparage other languages as contributions could still be 
done in the particular fora on the site. The dissemination would then, 
of course, have to be done as much as possible in all languages 
supported by Mageia.

Marc Paré
Canada
http://www.mageia.ca
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