Catching Up Is Hard To Do.

Over the past week, I've come to this site many times in the hope of writing down what I have been thinking of at the time. It's been a very busy week, with a lot of deep thinking and late night abstraction happening. So I'm going to talk about what has been keeping me busiest.

LinuxGazette

LinuxGazette has been taking up a fair amount of time - not the administration, not the writing and not the editing. Just thought. The LinuxGazette community is an interesting community, and it's becoming a virtual community of note. In fact, it is a virtual community of note. The languages that the community speaks are as diverse as I have ever found. That's a reason why I have been playing with concepts of language translation and Drupal.

One of the problems with a virtual community is that no one person can form the community. People often make the mistake of thinking, 'if we build it, they will come' - and that's not necessarily true. Certainly, people may visit - lots of people visit the sites I deal with (LinuxGazette is the most popular so far) - but will they come back? That's up to the community, really, and the individual. If they get what they came for, they might be back - but when? They will be back when they need something similar. Or want to help with something similar.

What's interesting here is that on email lists related to ICT, there are a few people who think that a virtual community doesn't exist unless an organization exists. That's folly; I think that people believe this because they are unfamiliar with the abstract concept of community - separated from geography and legal issues.

Consider the number of people worldwide who didn't want Bush to get a second term. They are a community (and it's likely that if you strung up a muppet without a hand against Bush in a worldwide poll, the muppet would win). That they only coalesce in certain areas says little about the community itself. It's much the same with the Linux, Free Software and Open Source communities. Certain opinions on topics create communities. Certain levels of experience on topics create communities. So within LinuxGazette, when we talk about 'community' we have to talk about the greater communities. And that's a difficult thing; group dynamics in an online group doesn't respect 'laws' of groups in settings of organizations and such.

But that's all really hard for some people to understand. It used to be hard for me to understand, but it's something that one can pick up on. I look at communities such as LinuxGazette's community as the 'tip of the iceberg'. It's not the tip of the iceberg that's important - it's the whole iceberg.

The switch from the static LinuxGazette to the present, online Linux Gazette has apparently been interesting. I've reviewed a lot of the emails that went flying back and forth, and caused some to go running off and using a name that they shouldn't be using - but the whole problem centered - or at least appeared to be centered - on the fact that LinuxGazette was going to become an online entity. The change was something that was resisted, and it was resisted so much that a fracture appeared - and that fracture became an unhealthy break. That's sad.

Linux Gazette is a publication of SSC, a technical publication - where people ask questions, and so on - and I look at it as it was, and as it is now. Why on Earth would I write an email and wait up to a month back for a solution I needed yesterday? That's silly. But speculation on my part leads me to believe that some people didn't really want to give the community control - they wanted to keep control, and that's OK. But that's not really OK for the community, since it really goes against the meritocracy. Sure, I'm the editor of the LinuxGazette right now, but my job is clearly to facilitate the community.

So I don't believe that responsible community people would resist changing a publication to include a content management system. Maybe there was another reason - and those are probably fighting words with a few people, but they are not meant as such. I honestly don't understand why people would want to slow down the flow of information. Further, I don't know why they would want to smear the names of those who want to assure that the tools are made available to the community to do increase the flow of information. So I don't know. It seems like something is missing in the story.

So part of the upgrades done with LinuxGazette were to provide more tools for the members of the community. And there are more tools that I think should be implemented as well. A lot of my time this week has been involved in trying to figure out what would be useful, what tools are available, and how they could be used. It's fun, difficult work.

You can read the History of Linux Gazette here .

Spanish

I'm heading to the Dominican Republic for a meeting on December 4th. The duration of the meeting is until the 11th, but I'll stay in Dominican Republic until the 18th of December. The meeting is related to the Mistica project, which involves a really cool email list with automatic translation.

But I have a problem. You see, I don't speak Spanish very well. So, acknowledging this, I picked up a CD/book Latin America Spanish course which I have yet to crack open. I'm serious. It's not because I don't want to, it's because I don't have the time. And part of the reason I don't have the time is because... despite having an email list with automatic translation, the list related to the meeting is predominantly Spanish with no translation. So I'm guessing a lot of what is being said, and diligently copying and pasting... but then, the major documents are in Spanish.

To someone unfamiliar with me, they might think that this would help me with my Spanish. Well, maybe it has but I see no significant improvement - because the rate at which I have to read all these things in Spanish makes me rely too heavily on automatic translation, and since it isn't done automatically on the mailing list or in the documents, I have to spend way too much time copying and pasting. To top it all off, there are different acronyms for everything.

Long story short - I'm frustrated with the situation, but there is nothing for me to do but try. Yet people want to discuss all sorts of things, and they bring in personal anecdotes as well, and really throw me for a loop.

What's weird is that as an English speaker, I tend to try to go out of my way to help speakers of other languages as much as I can. This isn't being done for me. Will it change the way I do things with non-native English speakers when speaking English? No. But to others, it would. So while it's interesting to hear Spanish speakers talk about the English hegemony, it's apparent that the Spanish speakers may inadvertently be trying to create a Spanish hegemony.

Aside from the language issue, I do expect the conference to be interesting. It's not their fault that I do not speak Spanish, and I have had opportunities to learn in secondary school (when they were also forcing me to learn French as well, and really screwing me up.). But it's not my fault that I'm a native English speaker, so they'll just have to accomodate me more then since they haven't been as accomodating in the past. It's the only way I can get things to work within the timeframe necessary. *sigh*

Oh well. I can only do so much.