UGJ dates (draft)

[Stephen Michael Kellat]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2014 10:21:37 +0000
Alan Pope <alan.pope at canonical.com> wrote:

> Hi Stephen,
> 
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 5:15 AM, Stephen Michael Kellat
> <skellat at sdf.org> wrote:
> > [ubuntu-lococouncil] Develop plan for AskUbuntu Patrol
> > game/project/exercise including challenge coins for UGJ 1 to 2
> > during 15.04 cycle: TODO [ubuntu-lococouncil] Cooperate with
> > Canonical Community Team in developing developing AskUbuntu
> > documentation for Patrol game/project/exercise: TODO
> 
> I love the idea of improving our answers on Ask Ubuntu! This will only
> benefit the English speaking world which will be exclusionary for LoCo
> teams which have significant non-EN userbases. Has this been
> considered?
> 
[snip]

It has been considered.  While you may regard it as exclusionary, I would regard it instead as fertile ground for working on foreign language reading proficiency in a specific subset of language.  Triaging the tagging facets alone to clarify the "aboutness" of questions would be a tremendous leap forward in improving things.

When it comes to working in a foreign language, you need practice.  English is one of the more difficult out there.  While it is the common trade language among many of the peoples of the Pacific simply as it renders mutual understanding easier, it also is the dominant language spoken by our governance bodies.  One of the bigger fears I have heard expressed when people look at the "Verification" process with LoCo Council is worries about English language fluency/proficiency.  My usual calming response is that English or Spanish is acceptable as English is the general working language of the project and Spanish is spoken by the majority of LoCo Council members except myself.  After that I usually remark that machine translation by Bing Translator has worked well for me and to just let us worry about that on the back-end.

LoCo Council *may* have to abandon this idea for this cycle due to countervailing factors I may not go into here.  As a way to build bridges in proficiency to learn the language used by the various Release Managers as well as the Archives Administrators and Technical Board, a limited effort may be worthwhile.  It isn't exclusionary in my view to improve our use of the common working language we use at UOS and elsewhere in Ubuntu.

As an aside, I note that eventually I will bring my French fluency back up to what it was too...

Stephen Michael Kellat