DSC09483

Tokyo view from 40th floor of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office

We already had a number of blog posts regarding how Globalization (G11n) Fedora Activity Days (FADs) went. After all of these reports, it makes sense to have one post discussing the achievements from our Activity Days.

Impact section of G11n FAD proposal

  • Fedora G11n activities are happening silently. Will FADs dedicated to G11n help create a buzz and help get more activities and contributions to this domain?
    1. We had over 20+ blog posts and a number of social media posts. It definitely helped to create a buzz of Fedora G11n.
    2. To increase contributions, we decided to have more sprints, mostly small and dedicated towards particular tasks.
    3. Rewarding new contributors by recognition, badges, and sponsoring for conferences, sprints, and activity days.
  • Synchronization between four groups: I18n, Zanata, L10n, and FLTG under the globalization initiative
    1. With all groups member together, this was the natural outcome.
    2. During detailed discussion, we understood each of the sub-groups have further challenges, and we need to get them resolved at the sub-group level itself.
    3. Specifically, if we talk about Localization with over 80+ languages, their group has a number of different translation tasks, including GUI, Docs, Release notes, and Magazine post.
    4. We came to the conclusion that rather than trying to group all things together, let us collaborate on common points and handle different things at the sub-group level. There, we started talking about a Globalization Steering Committee. It could be a Working group as well. We drafted a proposal for it.
  • Getting mentors and creating a quick start guide will attract new contributors to G11N
    1. The first day, we worked on Wiki improvement and created simple presentations to provide a quick understanding for new contributors.
    2. Started new process from Fedora 24. We are drafting all improvement plans for any particular release. New contributors can simply go through list and request to join any activity and can identify mentor quickly.
  • Test day improvement. Better planning, more relevant test cases, and more contributions on test day
    • What part can we do automate?
      • GTK IMs, missing translations in UI, font coverage
    • What tools can be used / what features are missing?
      • dogtail, a11y, gnome-desktop-testing
      • Modules (gtk, pango), menu model
      • Migration of the existing test cases into automated recipes
      • Recipes should be human-readable like behave
  • Globalization plans for Fedora products (Workstation, Server, and Cloud) by understanding their requirements
    • Unfortunately, we were not able to work on this project due to limited time. We even dropped Fedora 23 release celebrations due to limited time.
  • Completion of long-time pending tasks from Globalization

Other activities

  • Initial discussion on Next Generation G11n architecture
  • Language spins: Started work trying to enable langpacks in kickstart and generating images
  • Plans for new directory structure for Fedora project in Zanata
  • Work on emoji input in IBus core and IBus Fbterm improvements
  • Decided to simply provide list of languages supported in Fedora, rather than complex matrix with all components
  • Prototype for Hunspell dictionary management
  • Idea on creating course on OpenLearning.com for newcomers
  • Completed Glibc locale sub-packaging prototyping and testing
  • Determined important packages for localization and QA
  • Most important planning for Fedora 24 🙂

More details about this are available in the Google Docs summary.

Feedback from G11n FAD attendees

What went well?

  • Support from everyone
  • Good discussions

What needs improvement?

  • More community members participating
  • Too many topics – a more focused FAD (but this FAS was okay – this was the first G11n FAD)
  • More collaborative topics
  • Better to mirror the laptop and projector screens