Making Communication Easier

Making Communication Easier

One hot topic that was discussed alot were a few of the communications issues the French team is having. I have a nice long laundry list of some things they would like to see changed or that can be done better.

The number one complaint was a lack of history on the Fedora Planet blog. Reading through English posts can be time consuming, so it's quite common for people here to push that off to a once a week event. Since most articles disappear after two to three days, most articles are missed. I cannot stress enough that I heard this complaint *alot*.

On a more positive note, several people told me how happy they were to hear about gregdek's translation bot and would love to see this put into production use. Let's hope it doesn't turn into a bikeshed issue on how to integrate it with our regular channels.

The rest of the issues centered around making Fedora Planet more accessible. There was one proposal to make it a requirement to provide at least a one sentence summary in English with each blog post. Another proposal was to provide automatic 'translate this post' links for every single post. Optimally, this could be available in the RSS feed too. (One person mentioned that he doesn't see the translate links in Paul Frield's posts.)

One final proposal was to turn it into something approximating a full web application, where the user could access the stream through any number of filters. Some of these filters could be 'french blog posts only', or 'all posts, but through a translator', and a few others. I suppose this would take more work to implement, though.