The creation and/or fostering of non-English openSUSE discussion forums will generally further the concept and objectives of the openSUSE project. These guidelines will help guide the processes associated with this and will help streamline the process. If you are considering proposing a language specific forum, please read and become familiar with these requirements:
Unless otherwise agreed to by the majority of forum staff, each of the following steps must be complete before non-English forums and/or forum links are created on http://forums.opensuse.org:
1 - THE REQUEST/PROPOSAL
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The proposal for a new forum or a link to an existing forum should be submitted to one of the forum administrators (but not “forumsadmin”)
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Any initial request received from an outside party by any member of the staff will be posted, in it’s entirety if written, or summarized as thoroughly as possible, if verbal, to the rest of the forum staff staff.
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Incoming proposals will be reviewed by the staff and needs to have approval of the majority of the staff that wish to express an opinion on the proposal before any action is taken. The period for comment shall be 7 days.
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With the request, the requestee shall provide an overview as to their related technical background so as to provide confidence that this is a genuine effort to establish a foreign language forum, and that reasonable qualifications are in place for them to initiate/manage the new foreign language forum during its initial start up days
2 - NEW, MERGE, or PARTNER DECISIONS -
All requests for new language forums will be considered first as creating new sub-forums at http://forums.opensuse.org
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In all cases where the non-English forum already exists, the first effort will be to merge the existing forum user base into the openSUSE forums by creating new forums here. If that is not possible or if deemed beneficial to the openSUSE project, we will discuss a possible partnership arrangement.
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In all cases, new, merge, or partner, all parties involved must agree to the following terms:
[INDENT]1 - For new, merged, or partner forums, at least one English speaking person will be identified as a contact and liason for the indicated language forums. If the forums are hosted at OSF, this person will become a member of our staff in an appropriate role. The person identified for each language facet of the OSF forums is responsible to provide the the OSF staff, in English, every January, a short status report of their perception of the health of their non-English forum(s)in order to determine the ongoing health and viability of said forums and ensure. English is selected as a common communcation language, and the report requirement is for all openSUSE forum language groups. The report is intended to facilitate the maintenance of a regular coordination between the diverse openSUSE forum support language groups, providing an annual mutual checkpoint and a venue where non-urgent areas of discussion and commonality can be raised and progress tracked.
2 - Each OSF language forum will have at least two moderators (this may include the same or different from the above contact) who will be official openSUSE forum moderator and actively moderate the indicated forums. The moderators and the assigned contact must agree to support and enforce the openSUSE terms and conditions in the indicated forums.[/INDENT]
4 - All language forum links, whether new, merged, or partner will be created under our “Language Specific Forums” header, with priority given to forums hosted on our servers. All “partner” forums will be indicated by the tag “External Link”
5 - If a merge is agreed to, the staff roles of pre-existing communities will keep their role in the new language specific sub forums as they line up with openSUSE forum roles, except as otherwise provided on an individual basis.
6 - If a partnership is agreed to by all parties, we’ll point members with the corresponding native language to the pre-existing community as our “official partner” by creating a link to the pre-existing community and vice versa (link at the pre-existing community to the openSUSE forums). If all requirements are agreed to during the negotiations with pre-existing communities, we’ll announce the pre-existing community as our “official partner”.
7 - If the behavior of staff or partner is found not to be compatible with the Guiding Principles of the openSUSE community and/or our terms and conditions in the long term, the OS Forum staff will decide on a course of action.
8- The final decision on forum specific language support will be made by the current openSUSE forums staff.
9 - If the above conditions are met, the forum technical administrator will work with the necessary people and implement.
Yes, this sounds like a bunch of stuffed shirt corporate mumbo-jumbo we need to do our due diligence ensure the ongoing viability of any forum we add here.