[osflash] Update on User Groups -- welcome Netherlands, Italy and South Africa

[Christophe Herreman]

Hi Aral,

>>I'm not sure about this either. The big problem with such a system is 
>>keeping it in sync. I believe that Folkert's suggestion of having 
>>translations of key areas as articles on the individual user group 
>>sections makes sense as:
>>
>>a. It doesn't pretend to be a complete translation (which is impossible 
>>to sync without daily dedicated effort) and thus doesn't raise that 
>>expectation
>>b. Provides an entry-point/road-map in a local language to make OSFlash 
>>more accessible to a broader audience
>>c. Keeps the agility of the wiki
>>    
>>

Agreed that is takes a lot of work, but how nice is it to have a "This 
page in Dutch" link on the page, like wikipedia has. In case of full 
translations, I feel they should be done in the main wiki and not in the 
user groups space. What about using wiki namespaces for the different 
language version? For example en:arp:examples, du:arp:examples.

>I agree that it's better than having completely separate domains (eg. 
>osflash.be, etc.) as those will be confusing for people ("Is it the 
>OSFlash site in French or is that osflash.fr -- oh, it's a user group?")
>
>However, setting up a sub-domain will be slower and will require manual 
>intervention, whereas setting up a namespace on the wiki (eg. 
>osflash.org/user_groups/dutch) takes seconds. I prefer this approach as 
>it allows better delegation and allows user group managers to set up the 
>sites themselves. Agile, good! :)
>
Agile good, Napster bad ! Hehe, just reminded me of that Metallica 
cartoon. Anyway, the wiki approach is probably better in terms of 
maintenance.

And what about naming the user groups? Should it be 
user_groups/netherlands and user_groups/belgium, since user_groups/dutch 
is language based and might give the wrong impressions. It's not that I 
don't want to work together with the Dutch guys ;-) but as Mark said, 
there should be a distinction between language and location. The info 
about meetings, members and other arrangements will be different for 
Belgium than for the Netherlands.

regards,
Christophe