Policy proposal: Translation team coordinator e-mail address

[David Planella]

Hi translators,

I've been meaning to ask you for your opinion on this for a while.
Having just spent 10 minutes looking for the e-mail address of a
language team coordinator has actually prompted me to do it now.

So the question is:

      * Should we request translation team leaders to have a visible
        e-mail address in Launchpad?

And the background is:

I believe translation team leaders should be people that are easily
contactable, both by the Ubuntu Translations Coordinators team and by
other translators, and having a hidden translation address in Launchpad
does not make things easy. As a reminder: having a visible e-mail
address in Launchpad makes it only visible to other people who have
logged in with a valid account in Launchpad - so it's not just visible
to anyone.

Now if it took me a non-trivial amount of time to find someone's address
today, I could imagine that it would be even more difficult for a new
translator not familiar with our workflow. One could argue that he or
she could use the "Contact this user" link, but that has its drawbacks:
you cannot have a record of the message sent, and it can be used only 3
times a day to prevent spam, IIRC.

This is not something new: other translations systems (GNOME, KDE,
Translation Project, etc.) request coordinators to have a known and
stable e-mail address, and in some of them it's even a policy.

If the majority of you think it's a good idea, I'd propose to make it a
policy. To most of the translation team leaders, it will not make a
difference. To the few that have got a hidden e-mail address, they would
simply have to tick a checkbox to make it visible.

Let me know what you think. +1/-1/comments/concerns...?

Regards,
David.

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
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