The MORFEO community regards language exclusively as a means of communication that should be effective. The community aims to experiment with an innovative language-related model aimed at achieving the following goals:
- Try to be as efficient as possible in language use, taking into account that most of the community members are at present located in Latin America, and the use of English could be an obstacle at the operational level.
- Not to exclude anyone from the possibility of participating in the community because they do not speak any of the Latin American languages. In short, anybody in the world should be able to join the community, provided they have a good enough mastery of the English language.
We are now considering deploying a model that conforms to the following rules:
- Translation of the web site contents into the English, Portuguese and Spanish languages.
- Source code associated with the MORFEO components, including comments, written in English.
- Freedom for work group members to dialogue through mailing lists in the language in which they feel most at home, provided they comply with and respect the following rules:
- The subject field text of the messages sent should be in English.
- The messages should include a 2- to 3-line paragraph at the end of the body, summarizing the subject of the e-mail in English. This summary does not have to be attached to replies to e-mails (discussions about a particular subject).
- Discussions about any particular subject in any of the Latin American languages should revert to English at the request of any community member. In this case, the community member who started up the discussion should generate a new message within the same thread of the discussion, summarising, in English, the progress of the discussion.
Send your comments on this proposal to Morfeo-feedback@lists.software-libre.org. As regards mailing lists, this system will take effect as of 1 December. We are looking for volunteers to translate the web site into the different languages.
