Jim Grisanzio

The OpenSolaris Community will participate at 2010 Japan Developer Summit in Tokyo February 18-19. Subscribe to ug-jposug and ug-tsug for more information.

It’s cool to see the localization of the OpenSolaris distribution moving right along with contributions going directly into the development builds. [i18n-discuss] The 2nd translation cycle of OpenSolaris 2010.03.

Since the transition to the Auth and XWiki applications in August and October, the website team has been updating (editing, deleting, moving, merging, rewriting) the majority of common content on the site — all the stuff around the edges, the stuff not in Communities, Projects, User Groups, or Subsites. We’re making good progress on these updates now as well as maintaining various project management documents for the website transition. Here is the initial list of two dozen files we updated recently. More coming. Send questions/suggestions to website-discuss. File bugs at defect.opensolaris.org.

Here are the most important content updates in this round:

• Website Roles & Collectives (Updated):
  Start here to understand the context around all of the roles in all of the collectives on the site (including the elusive Electorate) and who has Website Privileges, Administrative Privileges, Source Code Repository Privileges, and Governance Privileges. It’s all on one page.
• Website User Guide (New):
  An outline of the essential tasks most users perform on the site based on the roles they hold and the collectives in which they participate.
• Localizing Website Content (New):
  An emerging contribution model to translate all the content on the website.
• Website Infrastructure Life Cycles (Updated):
  How community members can acquire new website infrastructure, and how that infrastructure is managed throughout various life cycles. All the spaces on the site have slightly different acquisition processes, but everything is documented on one page.
• How to Participate (Updated):
  There are many ways to participate in the OpenSolaris Community. Advocate for the community, contribute code, report bugs, translate content, help new users get involved, port and maintain packages, write documentation, start user groups. How would you like to participate? Tell us.

After the winter break, we’ll address more content issues (including the front page of the site), we’ll  deploy significant updates to the Auth and XWiki applications (both are being tested now), and we’ll  start working on some graphical and navigation issues across the site. Looking forward to it. We’re making solid progress now, and we have a pretty good plan to continually evolve the site to support OpenSolaris engineering operations and community development programs around the world.

For updates, check the current roadmap (which we are building now). The 2009 roadmap has been updated and is final. Also, I will keep the announcements page up to date as we move into the new year.

I stopped by the OpenSolaris Hot Topics Seminar in Jingumae tonight …

Here are the presentations and videos from the event from Shoji Haraguchi. Japanese language only. See Shoji’s YouTube space for more OpenSolaris videos.

We had 3 little earthquakes around here yesterday and today. I felt 2 of them. This is not unusual for Japan, of course, since the darn place moves so much it’s like living on a boat out in Tokyo Bay. But the two quakes I felt (about mag 3-4-ish, I guess) woke me up. That’s when things can get confusing. You are sleeping, after all. Then the room starts moving. And keeps moving. 10 seconds. 15. 20. The walls creak a bit. The light above starts to swing. Etc. It’s all very gentle at that level but it’s movement, not vibration. That’s the distinction to understand if you have never felt an earthquake. Anyway. Are you dreaming? Did you drink too much the night before? Should you get up and at least make an attempt to ascertain your situation so you can react if necessary (such as duck)? That’s what was going through my mind around 5 this morning. Wouldn’t it be ironic, I thought, if I weren’t dreaming and this little shaker led to a big serious quake and I just passed it all off as a dream? Those few seconds may matter. Get up.

The OpenSolaris community in Japan participated at a charity event last night — Tokyo’s Biggest Tech Party Ever. I don’t know if it was the biggest ever, but there were 400 people there throughout the evening from over a dozen tech communities in the city. Michael Sullivan, who leads the Tokyo OSUG and who got us involved in the event, auctioned off a bag stuffed full of OpenSolaris and Glassfish items (shirts, CDs, books, mice, pens, pads, hats, and whatever else we could find). Good time. Some images.

Members of the OpenSolaris Community in Japan will be participating in three community events this week Tokyo’s Biggest Tech Party Ever (A Charity Event), OpenSolaris Hot Topics Seminar, and the Tokyo Linux User Group’s Technical Meeting & Bonenkai. Should be a pretty busy week to end the year around here. I’ll take some images. If you are in the area, stop by. After that I am taking a couple of weeks off — no email, no cell phone, no Internet, no nothing. Just fresh air.

I stopped by the Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group meeting in Yoga today. The guys were running two consecutive sessions on ZFS, Solaris Internals, and Driver Development. Good turn out for a Saturday afternoon, too. About 35 people came to the sessions with another 30 or so contributing on IRC at #opensolaris-jp on Freenode. Here are some images:

 The Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group grew out of the Japan OpenSolaris User Group. Here are some links to more information about the OpenSolaris community in Japan. And here is a stash of several years of images from OpenSolaris in Japan.

Sriram Narayanan posted some nice updates to advocacy-discuss the other day (here, here, here, here) from FOSS.IN in Bangalore. It’s excellent when people post mail like this to the community list when they are out at conferences because it leads to discussion around the world and helps generate ideas for the future. Connecting communities globally is just as important as building them locally.

Here are some FOSS.IN images from Kumar Abhishek. See the Bangalore OpenSolaris Community here. And, of course, the BeleniX distribution goes here. I couldn’t make it to FOSS.IN again this year. Bummed. Maybe next year.

Now that we’ve moved to XWiki, we should go about the business of localizing more of the OpenSolaris website. This is going to take a while and it will require work from the community and from the website engineering team. It may also require some people from Sun and the OpenSolaris community getting directly involved in the XWiki community, which could prove interesting as the communities benefit from each other’s contributions. It’s a big opportunity all around, and hopefully we’ll be able to build more OpenSolaris development communities around the world by simply speaking more languages on our website. There will be multiple steps involved to localize everything, but at least we have some tools in place and a much better platform from which to build some interesting localization projects. So, here are the big three buckets:

1. Auth

Auth is already localized into 17 languages thanks to the contributions of the OpenSolaris community using the Sun Open CTI tool. In a few weeks, we will update auth, and then after that the community will be able to update the localizations for auth as well. The process of localizing auth is well known now, and we’ll just move ahead as we have in the past. Auth is most important in this process because the more languages we can localize auth.opensolaris.org into the more languages we can offer on our implementation of XWiki at hub.opensolaris.org. Remember, hub is integrated with auth and part of that integration means that language preferences are set in auth.

2. XWiki

XWiki currently supports 21 languages in the base application. Now, if you go to the OpenSolaris website and edit a page, you will see the following text in the right navigation bar:

Document translations
You are editing the original document.
Translate this document in: cs de en es fr pl ru zh

Here’s what it looks like in a screen shot. Those eight languages represent the intersection between localizations supported on auth.opensolaris.org and those supported by the XWiki application itself. It’s important that we build out that intersection so we can enable more languages on hub.opensolaris.org for the community to localize more general OpenSolaris content. So, when you click on a language code in that nav, certain elements on the screen will immediately change to that language, and the URL will change to language=[whatever language you chose]. After you translate and save the page, the right nav bar in edit mode will display the language code, and also at the top right side of the page the new language code (among whatever other translations are there) will display with a little flag icon. That tells users the page is localized into any number of languages. Pretty basic but we didn’t have this capability on the old site.

Now, here’s the challenging and/or confusing part from a social point of view. hub.opensolaris.org is not a wiki where anyone can edit and translate anything. The site is actually comprised of many applications and many spaces, but all of the content basically fits into three big sections:

1. Common Content: This content includes the front page, project overview, FAQ center, roadmaps, site map, downloads, Collectives overview and navigation, navs, header/footer spaces and documents, style sheets, etc. Sun’s Website Team manages the common content on hub.opensolaris.org, and requests to update and translate this information can be made on website-discuss. Contact information here.
2. Collective Content: This is all the content inside all the hundreds of Collectives on the site — Community Groups, Projects, User Groups. Leaders of those Collectives are responsible for managing their own content and for providing edit privileges to their community members. Contact information here.
3. Subsites Content:This is all the content on the dozen or so applications, sometimes called subsites, that provide services to users and developers, such as cr.os.org (code review), jucr.os.org (source juicer), pkg.os.org (package), test.os.org (test), etc. And each subsite has an owner. The site map has more details. Contact information here.

So, you can only translate content where you have privileges to edit in the first place, and the site gets all that user access data from auth, which is set up to implement the structure of the community as specified in the OpenSolaris Constitution. It’s actually not as complicated as it sounds (although it needs to get easier over time, we all know that). Here are the Roles and Collectives
we built into the new site, and that should be enough to explain the basic structure without having to read the entire Constitution. Basically, if you have edit privileges to your own areas on the site and you want to translate some content, then go translate content. Just do it. But if you want to translate content in an area of the site where you don’t already have edit privileges, then you should contact the Leaders in those areas and ask them if they would be interested in having their stuff localized and if they would give you the appropriate editorial privileges to do that work. Can you imagine people saying no to that request? I can’t. And the manual process of going out and talking to people will only increase the number of interactions community members will have with each other. That can only be good.

3. Subsites

The subsites should to get localized at some point, too. This can be accomplished in three steps:

1. First, the website engineering team will build a backend web application to serve all the common graphical elements of the OpenSolaris website to all the subsites, so that includes the headers, footers, wordmarks, logos, icons, etc. This way, the entire website can have a common look and feel (as much as possible given that there are many applications involved). Also, the benefit of this concept becomes clear when we have to update common elements of the site or add new translations or templates. Then all of the subsites will be updated as well and those owners don’t have to worry about keeping in sync with the rest of the site. Over time, all of the sites that make up opensolaris.org will look and feel more like one site (with single sign on via auth, of course). That’s the goal anyway.
2. Second, the OpenSolaris community will be able to localize all the content for that web application, and when we are ready we’ll make it available via the Open CTI tool. So, even embedded text in icons will be translated.
3. Third, OpenSolaris community members can contact the subsite owners and offer to translate that content, which can then be uploaded to each subsite by the Leaders.

Contribute Right Now

So, to sum up a bit, if you have language translations skills, here’s how you can contribute to this crazy website localization effort:

• Local
  ize content in the areas that you already have privileges to edit.
• Ask other Leaders in other Collectives if they would like you to localize their content. 
• If you are a Leader of a Collective and you are not involved in localization and want your content translated, post to i18n-discuss and ask the Internationalization & Localization Community.
• Ask the Website Team if they`d like the common content on the site localized. The answer is yes, by the way. We have updated a great deal of the site’s common content (FAQs and such), and we continue to do so. So check with us first so we can remain in sync as much as possible.
• Add more languages to auth via Open CTI by translating the auth resources file. Ask questions on i18n-discuss (subscribe here, archives here, forum here, blog here). A new auth resources file is coming soon.
• Add more languages directly to the XWiki application at l10n.xwiki.org by translating the XWiki ApplicationResources file. NOTE: WE NEED A JAPANESE TRANSLATION OF THIS FILE! It’s a big deal and would represent a gigantic contribution to the XWiki community as well as the OpenSolaris community. I am talking with the XWiki community about this as well (see thread beginning here and running about 15 messages). Currently, XWiki does not support Japanese (ja) among its list of 21 supported languages (it supports Japanese language text displayed on pages, of course, but not at the application resources level with menu and icons and the URL). Subscribe to the xwiki users list here.
• Content translations are major contributions to this community. We take them seriously. Please read and sign the Sun Contributor Agreement (FAQ here), so everyone’s rights are understood and protected. Here’s more on contributing to OpenSolaris.

What do you think? I certainly don’t have this all figured out yet, but that’s enough to start. On the old site, we started this project with the Portals, but that was a very temporary effort to fix a site that didn’t support localization. Auth and XWiki do support localization (see XWiki’s application evaluation here), so now we can move much faster on these early steps. Even longer term, we’d like to develop a system to automate some of this so we can do bulk translations and publish those documents automatically. One thing at a time

Posted to i18n-discuss at opensolaris dot org (here, here). Join the conversation there.

Check out these portraits of world leaders from Platon shooting at the United Nations recently. He had all these guys in one place for a few days, but getting them to sit still for a minute or two and smile nice for the camera proved quite a challenge. That`s what makes these images most interesting. Platon had to work fast and shoot from his gut. I like it. Click on each image and listen to the audio as Platon describes each session. You feel his passion. You can also practically picture him bouncing around the hallways at the UN grabbing world leaders at random as they dart by rushing to deliver their speeches to the General Assembly. Good stuff. The best story — by far — is Qaddafi, no question about it. Wild. Also good are Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu, and Medvedev. Humm. Interesting set of characters right there, eh? Gordon Brown was pretty good too since he broke protocol, which is always nice since it drives the handlers mad. Must have been fun with some of these guys. Oh, the star of the show chickened out so Platon had to insert a previous image to make the spread complete. Personally, I wouldn`t have done that (yah, like I`ll ever have that choice!). It only takes away from those who decided to participate. What makes the images hang together is that they were all shot under the same circumstances. No matter. Nice images, cool stories. Works for me.

A couple of weeks ago we had a conversation on website-discuss (here, here) about some features of the new website that were not directly moved and/or replaced from the old site. Much of the discussion involved blogs. Put simply, blog aggregation on the site changed because the website application changed. We migrated to an entirely new application, one that offers substantially more benefits over the old one. But as a result, some of what was on the old site was not replaced (or may be replaced in new/better ways in the future). One item on that list was the old (badly broken) blog aggregation system we had at the top level of the old site. Some people have been concerned that we no longer have the ability to collect blogs on the new site. Not true. Here’s a better way to look at it:

Before the migration to XWiki:

opensolaris.org used to have three levels of blog aggregation: (1) blogs collected at the top level of the site, (2) blogs collected inside Community and Project spaces, and (3) blogs collected at planet.opensolaris.org. That was nice, I suppose, but probably a bit over the top. Also, the processes for deciding what blogs to aggregate was distributed among the owners of each of the spaces on the site, all the mechanisms to collect the feeds were manual, and community members had no way to offer their feeds into a centralized database. But we poked along with what we had.

After the migration to XWiki:

The new opensolaris.org does not have a top level blog aggregation feature. But Collective Leaders, Affiliates, and Developers can still add blog feeds to their Communities, Projects, and User Groups and planet.opensolaris.org remains the same as it always has been. Also, we are exploring ways of providing a centralized blog feed directory via the site’s new Auth database, so that blogs can be easily aggregated in Collective spaces or on planet.opensolaris.org or externally with whoever wants them. I like this idea a lot (via Alan Burlison) because it keeps the decision making process of what feeds to collect directly with the people closest to the action: Collective Leaders.

I do not support a top level blog aggregation system for all blogs in the OpenSolaris world because before you know it you have thousands of blogs, most of which have owners who are not necessarily directly involved in the community on the site. Then it all becomes too big and the value drops rapidly. It’s too much centralization. That’s what happened with the old system. And although some people have complained that they miss the old feature, I got a heck of a lot more complaints about it when it was live. Complaint #1 was that I was taking any blog off the street that mentioned OpenSolaris in any way whatsoever and that was diluting the overall content too much because too many of the bloggers weren’t really involved in the community. Point taken. Also, I don’t support the notion of screening blogs at the top level of the site because that makes the website team judge and jury as to who gets collected — and that is most certainly not our role. We should be pushing content and projects and decisions into the Collectives where people are actively working their stuff and where they have edit privileges to their own spaces on the site.

Anyway, in the mean time, Collective Leaders, Affiliates, and Developers can add blog feeds via the XWiki RSS macro. Just edit a page, click on the macro tab at the top left of the edit box, scroll to select the RSS macro, and enter the data in the fields provided.

It’s amazing how fast content goes stale. Man. Just give it a little time and it’s toast. Fortunately, now that we are running XWiki it makes updating stuff jet fast (and it will be even better when we move to XW2). I like XWiki markup, too. It’s just simple.

I updated about 20 pages with little nits here and there last week, and the more I look the more I find in need of updating. Over the next couple of weeks we have to update the FAQs, Roadmap, and Website Project substantially to give people a better idea about the current website plans now that the Auth and XWiki transitions are complete. More on those later.

I rewrote the Contacts and Help pages, too. I think these pages should be merged, though. I don’t see any need to have both, but since they are currently separate I tried to write around that for now.

And, of course, the OSUG leaders table remains in constant motion. I added several new OSUGs this last week or so. User Groups come and go in waves, but the OSUG community remains one of the most active groups on the entire site.

I also updated the Collective Life Cycle Instructions with a lot more detail and some important footnotes (especially the need to choose unique names for Collectives and the distinction between names and titles). The more I set up Collectives on the new site the more I find to document. Website infrastructure can be activated, deactivated, reactivated, transitioned, and terminated so I flushed out the document with more specifics for community leaders going through each phase. I am trying to make that document comprehensive so at least we have one place to send people for everything related to Collective life cycles. Even after the transition to the new site, which involved deleting and merging many documents, we are still way too fat on opensolaris.org. We have too many overlapping process documents that confuse people, so we are still trimming those down. Making progress.