Portuguese Forums

[nmarques78]

I would like to suggest the following:

* Creation of Portuguese Language Forums featuring two sub-forums:
#1 - Portugal
#2 - Brazil

The reasons why I present the two sub-forums are the following:

* Portuguese has a wide speaking community, but there are differences in many ways and there two separate versions of Portuguese:
- Portuguese European - Normalized and Produced by the Science Academy of Lisbon. This is spoken in Portugal and all Portuguese speaking countries except Brazil.
- Brazilian Portuguese - Normalized and Produced in Brazil with different rules from the European Portuguese. Brazil started it's own Portuguese Language production in 1937 and has only signed treaties based on Orthography which don't cover semantics, grammar and other aspects of the European Portuguese Branch.

* From a L10N interpretation, Portuguese comes in two flavours: pt_PT and pt_BR. This is one of the most important things why we can run 2 separate forums as we can segment the audiences.


Those cover the importance on Language, eventually for site structures I would advice not to use a L10N approach and pt_PT and pt_BR are just not easilly recognized by the major population and would probably advice the community to establish the following, use recognized international codes for the countries, which are established by IANA on RFC 1561 (i think, not sure though) in which:

PT > Portugal
BR > Braziil.

I'm not placing this suggestions regarding 'Portuguese' because I want segregation, but instead to provide an easy way of providing accurate contents and promoting correctly the communities.

Please note that everyday millions of Portuguese speaking people use PT and BR as they associate it with the countries. This natural and in some way instinctive form of identification by people can be exploited to better deploy contents.

Just a thought trying to help to support Portuguese Speaking communities.

nelson

[hcvv]

It is a nice suggestion, but it needs volunteers to run the Portuese forums. Are you the first volunteer?

[Spyhawk]

Please have a look at Establishing Language Specific Forums - openSUSE Forums

Thx

[nmarques78]

It is a nice suggestion, but it needs volunteers to run the Portuese forums. Are you the first volunteer?

I can be a volunteer, but I would recon that due to the strategical importance of such Forums, we should be looking into some kind of 'Ambassadors' to run them as they are usually more sensible for users.

Regarding the 2nd reply, I've seen that information actually, but my perspective is this:

openSUSE does have notoriety at least in Portugal and a solid user base (few but good), but also shy! How many do you see around? I know personally a few.

I am not sure when openSUSE is in Portugal, I'm just a normal enthusiast and I believe that someone has to give the first step and push the communities if they don't exist.

This is mainly a though...

[hendersj]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:06:02 +0000, nmarques78 wrote:

> hcvv;2181528 Wrote:
>> It is a nice suggestion, but it needs volunteers to run the Portuese
>> forums. Are you the first volunteer?
>
> I can be a volunteer, but I would recon that due to the strategical
> importance of such Forums, we should be looking into some kind of
> 'Ambassadors' to run them as they are usually more sensible for users.
>
> Regarding the 2nd reply, I've seen that information actually, but my
> perspective is this:
>
> openSUSE does have notoriety at least in Portugal and a solid user base
> (few but good), but also shy! How many do you see around? I know
> personally a few.
>
> I am not sure when openSUSE is in Portugal, I'm just a normal enthusiast
> and I believe that someone has to give the first step and push the
> communities if they don't exist.
>
> This is mainly a though...

In order to create such forums, we would need some volunteers who speak
natively. Spyhawk has been through the process and I'm sure would be
happy to walk anyone through it who needed/wanted to. :-)

Jim



--
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator

[Spyhawk]

Spyhawk has been through the process and I'm sure would be
happy to walk anyone through it who needed/wanted to. :-)

Sure!

Just ask me if you have any specific question (preferably in PM, so I'll receive an alert).

[nmarques78]

Thanks for all the detail. Lets place this 'on hold' for a couple of days while I try to locate active Portuguese speaking members in the community. I know there are some Brazilians and Portuguese hanging around the Marketing list, let me contact them and maybe we can cut some slack for everyone and work it out the best way to target and satizfy the needs of our audiences and then submit a plan of action to bring them live.

I will follow the guidelines provided on the this thread. I think it's important, even if it doesn't generate much traffic, because at some point opensuse.org provides a 'catch-all' for all users. Having their native language is always a very good initial approach to potential users and enthusiasts.

I think though there are some differences between Portugal and Brazil, we can probably work this issue in the best way that can serve our communities.

Meanwhile I'm also going to dig some information locally (Portugal) and see where the community hangs around so we can promote it later or eventually recruit people who want to lead such forums and that have a higher knowledge inside of openSUSE community in Portugal and Brazil.

nelson.

[hcvv]

Wishing you success Nelson.

[keyb_user]

Hi Nelson,

Great to see your initiative for the Portuguese Fora.

I think though there are some differences between Portugal and Brazil, we can probably work this issue in the best way that can serve our communities.

Meanwhile I'm also going to dig some information locally (Portugal) and see where the community hangs around so we can promote it later or eventually recruit people who want to lead such forums and that have a higher knowledge inside of openSUSE community in Portugal and Brazil.

nelson.

I would like to suggest that some communities are already in place in Portugal and Brazil. But they are rather informal.
You can even search for OpenSuSE events and all

Eventos/ENOS/2008 - openSUSE


I have been around OpenSuSE for many years and I think the current way the forum management is "endorsing" language specific fora is indeed very important.
I would not mind to help of course , but my time is very limited.
Anyway my main concern is that dividing between Portuguese and Brazilian sub-forum is really not a good idea.
The more contributions one can see in a centralized location the better.
dividing the _exact_ _same_ information between two sub-forums may not be the best approach.
If you google the web you will find many accents of Portuguese, even, as you know, in Portugal. But they are just that .. accents ... just like US and English , France Canada ... whatever ...
But when it comes to technical stuff things are the same.
So dividing the already small community is not, IMHO, very constructive.
Trying to reach both so we can all have a central place for help and support ... that is the most important !

Regards,
Pedro

[nmarques78]

Dear Pedro,

I understand your concerns, and it is important that the decision should belong to the community. Maybe some representatives from the Portuguese and Brazilian community can sit together and sort this kind of things out.

From my experience, I always seek information in English, or eventually in European Portuguese, never in Brazilian. This is not prejudice driven, but there are too much differences between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Be mindful that European Portuguese scientific regulation is done by Academia das Ci�ncias de Lisboa, and the process started in 1911. From all the Portuguese speaking universe, Brazil was the only country which decided to 'fork' their language, and they have their own scientific production and regulation since 1937.

In another scope, you can say that Portugal and Brazilian signed a couple of 'Orthographic' Agreements/Treaties, and if you are Portuguese, then you should also know that the public opinion smashed the government due to this last Treaty, which actually provides a violent assault on our culture.

Then, from another scope, the Marketing scope, when you target an audience, you should target it taking into consideration the cultural values of that very same audience, a quick example:

1) Citroen Picasso > Citroen loss millions in Brazil because Picasso was in some parts of Brazil associated with Homosexuality, that didn't happened in the rest of the world, including Portugal.

2) Chevy NOVA > A couple more of millions lost by Chevrolet, because no one in the Spanish universe wants a car that does't go (no va).

3) Mazda MR2 > Pronounce MR2 in french and get an idea on how french people would associate that Mazda car.

The list goes on and on... The question you should ask yourself is: "what does my targeted community needs from me and what are they expecting?".

This doesn't mean that both communities can't work together, in fact they should support mutually and learn from each other... But by the time you get Portuguese people being moderated by Brazilians, you can expect a fight, specially if you enter in the realm of 'end users' and first timers.

I rest my case on this, it's something for the community to decide, and I've started looking for Portuguese who want to engage on such project, for example, I've talked already with Carlos Gon�alves (which you probably know from ENOS).

Like you, I don't have much time to take seriously such Project and my 'affiliation' is with Fedora. From my point of view, all communities around FOSS in Portugal are so scarce and distant, that I only see them growing up together! And this is where I might help soon in the future with 'linux.pt' Project with something that I will present later.

I trully encourage Portuguese speakers from Brazil and Portugal to start a thread and ask members from the community to advance with this project. It's good for openSUSE, it's good for local communities and specially for enthusiasts that want to learn something or get enrolled with international communities. A local community can be the startup ramp for them to approach international communities and eventually become contributors. I believe that it should be local communities established in countries to promote users and enthusiasts to enroll with distributions providing: artworks, translations, code, security response task forces, fixes, quality assurance, etc etc etc...

I look forward to see Brazilians and Portuguese together promoting openSUSE and FOSS side by side, but I would recon it will be more effective if they target their audiences based on local cultural aspects, from which 'language' is most likely the most important.

Remember, language is far more wider than just 'orthography', it includes semantics, grammar and far more! I would even dare to say that Spanish is more close to European Portuguese than Brazilian Portuguese from the grammar and semantics point of view! But thats just me.

All the best for openSUSE in Portugal and Brazil and a call to arms for both countries!

MOBILIZE!

nelson.