This post is my 2 cents about Jad’s latest post trying to stir things up and attract more translators to the Ubuntu community! Having led the Brazilian team for a couple of years myself, I wanted to point out a couple of things I’ve learned along the way. Obviously advices are best taken when asked for, but here it goes anyway:

• Beware that 300 volunteers working at the same time without a robust and clear way of knowing who’s doing what will make it impossible for your team to manage;
• Also, with this many people contributing with single, hand picked strings is extremelly detrimental to the overal quality of the entire package, not to mention the entire suite;
• I have always liked the idea of contributions being done upstream first, and then tricklying it down to distros and what not. It is my dream and goal to make sure that Ubuntu reverses this trend and start sending contributions upstream (translations). Check out my blueprint: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/translation-workflow-and-notification-system

Well, back to work I go. :)