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Abstracts of Conference Papers - Community Stream

Community RE (report from the Bleeding Edge)

Pavel Janík - independent consultant
Developers' life is much easier now than it was in 1.x times. Much easier. We have EIS, child workspaces, we can do QA etc. The development process is open in several aspects. There are dark places though.
In his presentation, Pavel will talk about his experiences with developer milestones, his build system and about his findings about processes of Hamburg RE. He will bring several interesting (and potentially conflicting) questions. Could public tinderbox help Sun engineers identify potential conflicts between Sun build environment and community environment? Can community member change the community build environment without changes in Sun build environment? How can the member of community fix P1 build issues effectively? More milestones a week: can we follow them at all? Master fixes and moving tags after the milestone is ready: should it be announced?
Sun only child workspaces and their effect on the development process (bugs in Sun internal bug tracking system, description of child workspace vs. every change in CVS).

Target: developers from both Sun RE and the community interesting in experiences from the hell^H^H^H^Hbleeding edge, problems and proposed solutions
Biography: Pavel Janík is long time user and developer of GNU/Linux and free software applications, member of GNU project. He is a member of OpenOffice.org Community Council, OpenOffice.org Engineering Steering Committee, co-lead of l10n project and lead of Czech Native-Language project. He provides regular builds of development milestones for more than 20 languages and GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and MacOS X operating systems.
In his other life, he is an independent consultant working for various public and government companies, agencies and institutions in Czech republic and EU.
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Entering the OOo Community

Andre Schnabel
The aim of this session is to give a general overview of the projects and its organization, but also tips to enter into a project.
This session will have 3 axes in a first time :
  • the overall project structure (Accepted, Incubator, NLC, CC) and its communication flow
  • the organization inside a project and how the NLC could be a bridge between the development project and the NL project, keeping people in touch and introducing people to those projects.
  • the documents  (like specs template and features described in IZ) and tools used for collaboration (Licenses, JCA, CVS, EIS)
NL projects are not independent  entities, they are the first step to belong to a community and learn how to behave in it. For those who wants to go further, the need of picturing the OOo community is a requirement. Aside the structure, there are general principles that are available in any FOSS community like: aiming dialog and consensus, sharing knowledge and power, personal responsibility, confidence.
This means for example that competencies are promoted and recognized not as personal contributions but for what they bring to the project. In the same way some are projects leads, but only contributors in other projects.
In conclusion, contributing to a project is based on an ethic of discussion and respect for others.

Target audience: All people from NLC (or not :-) willing to contribute to a project in OOo community for the first time.
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The State of the Project Year 5

Louis Suarez-Potts - Community Manager, OpenOffice.org/CollabNet
This talk recapitulates the events of the last year and then looks forward to what the next year and beyond might hold for OpenOffice.org.  Topics include:
  • What the past year has produced and how the project has evolved;
  • What we can do to enhance developer contributions:
  • Changing license is but one measure
  • Improving the build process
  • Re-architecting OOo to make it more modular
  • License change
And then there is 3.0 and beyond.  How can OOo capture more attention? There is the well-known proposal for OpenOffice.org Lite, which would require a re-architecting of the code.  But it may be done if mobile phone companies and others get involved, for it is a very popular notion, one that merits more investigation.

Target audience: General
Biography: Louis Suarez-Potts has been the community manager of OpenOffice.org since close to its beginning.  He is also the chair of the Community Council and the lead of several projects on OpenOffice.org. He lives in Toronto.
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Localizing OpenOffice.org

Monica Badia - Italian Language Lead, Sun Microsystems
In June 2004, Sun Microsystems Inc. and OO.o started a Localization Pilot Process with the aim of improving the collaboration effort both in translation and localization testing (see: http://l10n.openoffice.org/localization/L10n_pilotprocess.html). Now that the short term goals have been reached, we would like to
  1. share our experience during this pilot in the specific areas Translation and Testing
  2. consolidate and set up the long term localization process.
The Globalization team of SMI would like to present in a BOF session the following topics:
  • the general Localization Pilot Process
  • the Italian Success Story which will provide the audience with detailled information on the Translation process
  • the linguistic review process
  • the translation tools
  • the Localization Testing and TCM tool
  • OO.o 2.0 Dutch localization:an example of how Sun  / Sun appointed vendors / and NL OO.o Communities can work together.
  • the translation process automation – how Sun is setting up a process to automate the file exchange with the OO.o and how the OO.o Community will benefit from the future automation.
Target audience: All members of the communities interested in the L10N of OO.o and in a collaboration with SMI
Biographies:

Dott. Monica Badia: Italian Language Lead at Sun Microsystems. She is responsible for the quality control of Sun localized products in Italian. She is also lead of the linguistic QA Matrix and linguistic review process for the European languages.  She counts a 6 year experience at Sun Microsystems in the field of localization. From 1999to 2003 she was assigned to the translation  and L10N testing of StarOffice in Italian.
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The Lingucomponent Project – linguistic tools in OpenOffice.org

Daniel Naber - Software developer, IntraFind Software AG, Munich, Germany
The Lingucomponent project is responsible for spell checking, thesauri, and grammar checking inside OpenOffice.org. I will show where OOo's spell checking and thesaurus features stand today, how they differ from those in StarOffice and how the community can enhance them. One important thing is of course extending these features to new languages. This is a fair amount of work, but it doesn't require programming skills and I'll demonstrate the approaches that make these tasks feasible.

New thesauri can be built using OpenThesaurus, a PHP-driven website that allows the community to work on a new thesaurus or to maintain an existing one.  Writing dictionaries is a task that's not well supported by tools, but I'll show the basic ideas behind MySpell – OOo's integrated spell checker – and how to get started writing your own spelling dictionary. For grammar checking, I will show what is still missing to integrate a grammar checking into OOo.

Also, the concept of a programming interface for spell checking and thesauri will be explained which allows everybody to plug in his own spell checkers and thesauri.

Targeted audience: developers, but not necessarily programmers
Biography: Daniel Naber studied computer science and linguistics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He now works at a software company in Munich that specializes in enhancing fulltext search with linguistic methods. He's author of OpenThesaurus, a web application that's used to maintain the German (www.openthesaurus.de), Polish, and Spanish thesaurus for OpenOffice.org. He also wrote LanguageTool, an English grammar checker that can be adapted for other languages.
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The Localization Process

Alessandro Cattelan
The Italian OpenOffice project is reorganizing the localization process in order to improve the quality of the translation and to keep it as up-to-date as possible.
We would like to propose the organization of a BOF where translators could discuss how to best carry out the translation process. We would like to focus on the following issues:
  • the importance of Translation Memories (TM) and glossaries;
  • CAT tools (which CAT tool is best for the OOo localization);
  • how to work with a CAT tool;
  • workflow (how to organize the work of the translators – structure of a translation team, mailing lists, TM and glossaries repositories, stylistic guides, etc.);
  • coordination of the various national groups.
Target audience:  Translators and people interested in the localization process.
Biography: Currently specializing in translation at the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT), Trieste, Italy.
Working as a freelance translator and language teacher.
I am currently  co-operating with the Italian OpenOffice project team for the localization into Italian of the suite.
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Localization – the tools and the people

Adam Rambousek - Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
This session will present the localization framework used by many native language projects with brief overview of tools available for translators and project leaders. In addition to technical aspects, also people are important for successful localization. I will present the experiences in attracting, choosing and retaining project contributors, organizing them to cooperate on translation and evaluating their work. And also, I will talk about collaboration with users on finding bugs in localized texts.
Target audience: Anyone interested in localization process
Biography: I'm the member of Czech native language project for a few years and from the beginning of this year I'm the translation co-lead. Also, I'm a student at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno and I'm developing dictionary writing system in the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at FI MU.
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Bug hunting Party

André Schnabel
To give the daily work of our QA team a boost, the best way is to come together and do the job.
There have been some virtual bug hunting days within the recent years, organized via IRC. We want to do the same but invite people to meet each other, talk to each other, spread their knowledge and go for a bug hunt.
After a short introduction of the daily work of a qu member, we would simply start doing it. That means searching issuezilla for unconfirmed issues, try to confirm them, look for duplicates or even already resolved issues.
People should bring a notebook with them, if possible.
For the session we will need wired / wireless internet access.

Target audience: Community members, current and future members of the QA team
Biography: I'm member of the OpenOffice.org project since May 2002, mainly doing documentation, user support and QA.
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