Managing distributed volunteer communities
From My Wiki
Managing Communities of Volunteers
09:15
Contents |
Introductions of the projects present and their needs
Alice: People at Global Voices use a wordpress trackback system, about 60 volunteers all over the world, meta communication through mailman lists, one big list for all volunteers and one list per language. One initial challenge was integrating the new Lingua community with the existing global voices volunteer community. We have done well so far because, of course, there is a main Global Voices list. Not sure we can afford many more lists though as we want to avoid list fatigue and email overload.
Daniela: iCommons.org is a place for people to upload articles, stories, events and other resources about the commons. A2K, etc etc, and its open to anyone to add, and there are regular writers who are a core volunteer set. Posts are about once a month, a voting process to get on the front page, and managed through mailing lists and a lot of 1on1 with me. People respond better to personal contacts. I'm hoping for more volunteers, especially during the CC summits.
[Off topic but addressed later in discussion]Adam: Quick question. Contacting people directly is interesting; in Apache Foundation there isn't any off-list communication. The balance between individual and collective communication is interesting.
Dave: OpenFontLibrary.org needs translation, eg in its comments
Ed Zad: dotSUB has volunteer translators, and professionals, and I'm used to paying people and getting quality
Hinde: SELF Platform. We have materials that ought to be in Spanish and other languages, and I'm doing the translation a little bit myself and I'd like.
Taco: I'm involved in Libervis, and we dont do translation yet, but we do want to do it in the future. We are more about communities than trsnaltion. And also I'm working on a translation tool.
Adam: FLOSS Manuals. We have free software manuals, and we're setting up franchises of our site. So people who are in a language community who are interested in our work can take all the work and manage it. we're hoping to get people paid to do initial versions and then have a community keep it up to date.
Danilo: GNOME is very translated, there is a huge community there. There's a lot of work to do, we've gone form a few core volunteers to a coordinator team. We want teams to manage themselves ideally.
Jerzy: I work at Open Society Inst and we fund translation of free software. Georgia have decided to use free software in schools. Why? Microsoft never localised Windows for Georgian! So we funded camps, a nice place near the sea, connectivity and pizza, and we knitted together a community in this way that did translation at the camp.
There's a guy who introduced himself on the list, Alex, who was involved in the translation of a Lessig book that went on to be published but was translated purely by volunteers.
Dimitris: I'm in Fedora, we have 2000 translators, 300 are very active, we translate 80 core projects in 30 languages, we have problems of big translation communities.
Goran: Croatian translation project, we have a dozen or so contributors.
Tomas: I've written technical books for developing countries (wdnw) but we just have a wiki and there is no management, no quality assurance, no time frame. What we can fund we do professionally, and that's it, to date. The whole book was done with $5,000. Its CC-BY-SA licensed, its a book because we want to do printed offline content because its a book about how to get connectivity.
Recruitment, volunteer-swapping and potential synergies
Alice: So, recruitment. What works and what has not?
Here is the Lingua experience: - Global Voices had a volunteer community doing from other languages into English, and curating what was happening in their blogospheres to write new posts, directly in English, but then these summaries needed to be translated into other languages too. Why just English we were asked?
- Our existing Lingua volunteer pool is made of people who were already translating from their language to English on the main site and now translate the other way around for Lingua. (That stock provided a lot of our Lingua lead editors.) Then there are people who run into our website, and they see other languages and they say "why isn't my language here?" and we enable them to get involved. We also have other volunteer communities who approach us to plug into our system.
- Once a language site is launched (we now have over 10), it is one of the lead edtor's responsibilities to recruit volunteers, obviously, and they often do that by reaching out to other bloggers in their language communities. They are almost always bloggers themselves so that is not hard.
- We've gotten contacted by university translation programmes, and they want to use us as a student project and have students work on our stuff for their schoolwork. We are going to be experimenting with that.
- We will be experimenting with Google Adwords. This is early stages yet, not everywhere and not formally strategised.
And we already have 10 mirror sites from all these avenues.
Ed: dotSUB already has been doing the student pool thing, NYU has a great dept of translators, and we've optimised our web-app so that it works well as something a student can do.
Ed: And if you're a student and you want to be published, this is a great way to be 'published'. Also, how do you get volunteers to do it on time?
Tomas: Because our book was printed, people felt it was higher quality, it had an ISBN and so on.
Randy: Most projects tap into existing communities, but Ed is trying to knit together a new community. Are there volunteer swapping networks you use?
Ed: Yes, and we work with non-profits, and some have teams of translators, and we hope to be able to train them and eventually pay them part time to do all kinds of translation work. that's just starting to happen, but its in our vision.
Alice: I get asked by other communities to synergize more and more, there are many similar communities, and we're just about starting to work in synergy with others. right now, our volunteer pool is wholly GV-specific, people who get a charge from being part of our community but we are going to start looking at more synergy.
Motivation, Rewards, Incentives
Danilo: in GNOME we have no problem with that, GNOME releases every 6 months and people _need_ their desktop in their language so its no problem. We had professionally done GNOME translations from SUN but they got stale fast. Documentation is much harder than UI strings though; its less visible to users, whereas the UI is in your face so its more motivated. Another hurdle is that we use PO files, SVN trees, and so you need some technical knowledge to participate and that isn't a problem in GNOME.
Danilo: No one is paid in GNOME
Alice: The motivations that people have for being involved vary, and for us our "lead editors" (we call them Lingua Editors) aren't paid a lot, nothing you could live off in America although a good income addition probably in other parts of the world. When a slot opens, we promote volunteers to lead editors. The main motivator is that people are eager to make sure that blogs coverage of their area is positive and not like the negative imagery that appears in the mainstream media of their areas.
Adam: People are motivated similarly in free software; people are annoyed by something and want to see it changed. But documentation isn't such an urgent scenario; once someone has read something they understand it and doing the content is different.
Tomas: Yes, our book is done by people who want to be technology teachers but they don't have the technical skills, and so there is a strong motivation to translate our documentation.
Alice: stats are key for motivation, we have a team thing and some teams do more than others and we try to encourage fair-play competition, its like a soccer tournament results.
Danilo: gnome does something similarly, we recognise communities who have more then 80% translated.
Jerzy: Crediting is very important for motivation.
Ed: We definitely give credit. Users of dotSUB have
Alice: "translated by" at the top by the title, the original author has credit at the bottom with a link to their original text, and yes its incredibly important. our list culture is warm and fuzzy, and the 1on1 vs mailing list thing, is important, its not possible to reach every individual with 1on1 on a big community. Facilitating the payment process for lead editors: sometimes sending money to India and south America can be hard. the person at the Bergman center who sends funds is remote from us and its important to take care with that.
Danilo: public communication is very encouraged in GNOME; many more people are interested than are directly involved. i sometimes get private emails, and i try to reply, even though it could be better on-list. it depends on the delicacy o f the situations, but sometimes I'll cc in a list.
Adam: is getting personal attention a motivator?
Danilo: For sure, when people get recognised at conferences for their work on-line that's very motivating too
Tomas: Public debate is a motivator to ask more questions, when you see others asking "stupid" "easy" questions it creates a norm that's permissive
Dimitris: How can a new small project reach out to translators? I'm going to speed-geek on a tool that will help projects and translators connect.
Jerzy: How important is it to have people meet face to face?
All: very important
Alice; We have a annual global summit. or are you talking about local group meetings? Global Voices has IRC meetings with just our editors, it works okay with a good moderator and an agenda.
Ed: Do translators communicate with each other?
Alice: Sure, a lot on the lists. We really make sure GV is a community and we keep tracl of birthdays and special occasions. Global Voices as an internal newsletter with people's special happenings and accomplishments outside the community.
Dimitris: each language community has its own thing, they meet each other often and a local small community helps a lot.
Alice: has anyone experimented with non-cash rewards?
Danilo: GNOME foundation does web hosting and so on, and the members in GNOME foundation are elected by merit; if you became a good translator, you'll get an @gnome.org email and so on, and there are only a few hundred people like that, and so that's a status aspect in our community. you have to prove you've been involved for a year, not a trivial contribution, and you have to apply yourself to do this. maybe people are shy, and people feel they are "not worthy" enough, and probably 100 out of 500 GNOME Board members are from translation work.
Dimitri: In fedora we have no incentives. if you want to motivate people to do involved work - our installation docs are 1.5Mb of text and its a 3 week job - how do you do that?
Tomas: We encourage people to start a business, we don't have a NC license, so you can make and sell copies of the book.
Tomas: our book was done by flying in people and putting them in a room together.
Randy: economists study how motivation works in the free software community and they don't understand it at all, there are apprenticeship models sure, and credit in source code is a way of building your reputation.
Tomas: Ubuntu Summits are a big thing; its a huge thing to work in Ubuntu and then get a free-beer flight to a summit, its a status thing in the community but its just a nice junket all over. and these summits are very energising.
Adam: Eric Raymond talks about the "itch to scratch" issue and is that is how a lot of projects initial motivation comes from.
Danilo: in launchpad, there is a karma system, and any contribution you make in the launchpad system, you get points. so you can get into "karma fights".
Danilo: when you get a certain amount of karma, you can order more zero price distro CDs. that's a small non-cash incentive.
Alice: we have about $200/month in each language group, but we use Amazon.com gift certificates, and our editors pick how the incentives are distributed.
Other points
Hinde: finding initial funding so that people can see that the material is really good and ought to be in many languages is useful
Alice; deadlines doesn't come up for us; people can do whatever they feel like, and its endless and live; people choose the posts they translate. Generally, we discourage people dong things more than 3 months old. If we have a post that we feel its important to get out there, a grant application call with a deadline say, and we SUGGEST and PROPOSE that people concentrate on it and get as many groups to do this in the next week, and people are highly motivated to do that. We make those suggestions only for posts having to do with Global Voices-related announcements from our Managing Editors or Rising Voices or GV advocacy.
Adam: How much does formatting deter people? Do people want to just do text?
Danilo: removing as many hurdles as you can is important is good
Dimitri: We encourage access to anyone on any module, and for people to try and to do anything and make mistakes, because everything can be reverted and iteratively improved.
Tomas: Our book has a lot of technical illustrations and we never thought about this and translating them was a real problem.
Adam: We are going to try to create language communities. We got dutch funding to translate some things, and we realised translating just strings wasn't enough, we needed the material to be living cintent too, and we are looking at a "franchising" model where we give people total autonomy to manage their language. We try to keep the translation and developer communities involved,
Alice: translating a blog post is different from translating software documentation. a blog post takes a couple of hours to translate.
Tomas: no one uses danish software in Denmark because we all speak English so well.
10:00
Best practices (according to the experience of those present)
Alice: So recruitment is a big issue, training, and keeping people involved. That includes reward systems, which we are grappling with at Global Voices. I'd like see "Best Practices for Volunteer Translation Communities" come out of this.
Ed: Quality Control is also a big issue, but that's a separate sessions.
So, what are the best practices that were discussed in the above?
Ed: There should be a "lead" linguist.
Alice: We have a Lingua Editor orientation sheet and are finilizing a volunteer orientation webpage. Eventually we would like them to be audio-visual and fun. For now they are just text. We made instructions on how to localise our site that we put in the Lingua Editor orientation sheet, and the lead editors who are paid part-time had that as a responsibility.
Danilo: People have an overview for the status of a single language, live and real time, and you can see what has been translated and what need to be done.
Alice: Yes, stats are key for motivation. We have a stats page too available to Lingua Editors. I announce weekly and monthly (posting) stats on-list. we have a team thing and some teams do more than others and we try to encourage fair-play competition, its like a soccer tournament results but not overly jocky because that is not a style that pleases everyone.
