TeamCoordinatorResponsibilities
Every Ubuntu translation team has a coordinator who has the owner role of the respective Launchpad team and do common coordination work with other administrators in the team. The coordinator is one of the key parts in translating Ubuntu, such a big project, so several requirements should be set up here for those people:
Having a stable and contactable email address
Our basic contact method is email, so having a stable and contactable email address is the "basic thing". We don't recommend a coordinator use some temporary email service because with a good configuration, there won't be junk mails flooding you. And we don't suggest to use your work mail unless you want to work there for a long time. Anytime when the contact email address changes, make sure you have informed it to all your team members, and please also send an email to ubuntu-translators mailing list to let people around know about it.
Being Responsive to Contributors
A very important part of being a coordinator is being responsive to other contributors in the team, and also being responsive to new contributors wanting to join the team. If new contributors are feeling welcome, they are likely to stay contributing for a long time. On the other hand, if they feel that they get little or no response from the coordinator, they are likely to move on to do other things. If this happens, it is a tremendous waste of contribution resources.
Being responsive means that the coordinator should respond timely to email. If the coordinator goes on vacation without possibility to read email for more than a week, then he or she should temporarily hand over the coordination duty to another member of the team and announce that to the team.
Being Responsive to Ubuntu Translations Coordinators and other teams
The team's coordinator is the point-of-contact of your team, and all other contributors about any issues with the affected language or its translations. Because of this, it is extremely important that the coordinator is responsive when contacted by email about such issues.
Subscribing to ubuntu-translators mailing list
Everyone involving Ubuntu's translation work is encouraged to subscribe to ubuntu-translators mailing list, but for team coordinators, we make it a requirement. We can't imagine they key contact of a translation team don't know the latest topics of Ubuntu translation. Please at least receive the list digest to make sure you know what is happening, of course further paticipation is welcomed.
When you are creating a new team, doing some important decisions, having some good ideas or facing any problems, please don't hesitate to send mails to the list. We encourage the communication among translators, developers, teams and other people related. Sending yours and recieving from others, the communication has just been taking place.
Having common knowledge on i18n/l10n process
Launchpad Translation, as known as Rosetta, has made translating free software much more easier than ever before, but it isn't, and can never be perfect. Translators need to know some basic guidelines when dealing with some technical related situations they may meet during the work. As a coordinator, you need to be clear about most of the common situations and solutions. What's more, having knowledge about working with .po files will be a great thing. If your team have any problem on these issue, please ask at ubuntu-translators mailing list, and people will tell you their experience, even just to te point you need to know.
Maintaining the team in a well organized state
Coordination and organization is critical when team work takes place. Launchpad has set "team" to be the basic unit when contributing, so a well organized state is very important to ensure the work can be done in a best way with best result. A coordinator may need to grant access to new members when they need it and have the ability to make good use, and of course you need to recycle the access when facing with abuse.
Some languages may have a very big translation community,and such situation can introduce problems (quality assurance, member relations) sometimes. We encourge coordinators do a clean up when the team is too big to keep a well management, also you need to find some ways of making these people participate in a better way (making suggestions, contributing to upstream projects), so we won't waste such contribution resources.
Resign When It Is Time
For every contributor, there comes a time when he or she wants, or has to, move on to do other things in life. This is also the case for language team coordinatorship. When the coordinator, or others, feel that the coordinator cannot meet the responsibilities and do the job properly anymore, the coordinator should resign.
In order not to leave the team in an undefined "black hole" kind of situation, it is very important that the resigning coordinator also informs the project mailing list of the resignation. If the resigning coordinator has suggestions for a new coordinator, please also let the mailing list know at the same time.
Other resources
- If the coordinator has been non-responsive for some time, it is a good choice to let him step down perhaps is the best choice to run the team better. For such situation, please follow the role reassignment policy.