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’s been a while since I last wrote anything, mostly due to a few new changes that happened these last 3 weeks or so. Here’s a small list of some of the things that I can remember right now: My pet project BillReminder is now hosted in the GNOME SVN repository! It took me a while to get the right resources and free time to migrate everything, but I believe that it is now completed.

Today I received a mysterious package in the mail. Turns out it was some swag from Pandora: a hat and some stickers. You know what the best part was? Not the cool hat or stickers, but the letter that accompanied the items in the envelope. It was actually manually signed (i.e. not a print out) by Lucia Willow, Community Manager, and Tim Westergren, Founder. It is the kind of attention to details that makes a huge difference!

A while back I was asked by a member of a Ubuntu translation team (who shall remain anonymous) about how the Brazilian team’s workflow worked and how we managed to maintain our position among the top translated teams in Rosetta. What follows was my reply to this person. I hope it will prove to be useful to any other team out there who may be struggling with the same issues. I’m also interested to learn how other teams managed to keep their members involved and/or how others can benefit from their experience.

Snagged from the original “Cautionary" strip. [caption id=”" align=“alignnone” width=“665” caption=“Talk to your kids about Linux”][/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_519” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Yv Scarlett Maciel: the first year”][/caption] As I uploaded 10000 pictures into F-Spot tonight, I got lost in the memories of people, places and events that they brought back… everything starting with the birth of my first daughter Yv. I cherry picked a few pictures of her first year and created a set. It is amazing how time does fly… she’s going to be 7 at the end of the year!

A screenshot of my work laptop. The current setup has Openbox for tons of keyboard keybindings, PyPanel, Twitux, Glipper, Gajim and GNOME Xchat. Add Terminator with lots of panels, Epiphany and Rhythmbox (not in screenshot) and you got the applications I use every day. UPDATE: Link to a larger screenshot.