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pullnosemans pullnosemans 2016-februaro-10, modifita 2016-februaro-10 2016-februaro-10 06:04:26 UTC, modifita 2016-februaro-10 06:05:33 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

**creating a team of coordinated core members on Tatoeba**

I think that now that Tatoeba has grown into a community of decent size, with some fairly constantly committed members, it is time to think of creating a team of core contributors.

Many ideas are presented on this wall, but they are often so uncoordinated that they are lost in the chaos of everyone just saying what they think should be done without any possibility of them actually doing it because in the end, they have no say in what is done with the site. There are no clearly assigned roles as to who is able to decide what.

To make better use of the people's ideas, I think we need to have some kind of interface where a discussion can be started with the fixed goal that at the end of the discussion, all suggestions are taken into account and a decision is made.

To be able to do this, I suggest we form a "family" of experienced and trustworthy Tatoebans who are familiar with each other's competences, willing to pick issues to work on in an organised manner, and then working together to make it happen.

For a more in-detail explanation of why I think we need this, see https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/sh...#message_25456

I am thinking of taking the time to create a poll where people can say they would be willing to be members of this core community.

Do you think this would be a good idea?
If yes, what else do you think should be included in the poll?

Please let me know. Thank you.

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gillux gillux 2016-februaro-10 2016-februaro-10 15:29:04 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

I think your analysis is right and I have to say it is the same on the development side. Even though there are very few active developers (only me and Trang at the moment), we’re unable to coordinate and decide upon what to do. I remember I had trouble with this in the past [1], but I eventually stopped caring and I kept focusing on what matters to me (furigana for Japanese, advanced search…), while I sometimes fix bugs or add features on people requests when I’m in the mood.

> To make better use of the people's ideas, I think we need to have some kind of interface where a discussion can be started with the fixed goal that at the end of the discussion, all suggestions are taken into account and a decision is made.

I agree. This reminds me of the forum idea: https://tatoeba.org/wall/show_m...#message_19996

However, I think the tool is not the problem. If we’re unable to decide upon what do to after discussing a topic on the Wall, what would make using a different tool different? And like Trang said [1], how do we prioritize tasks? How do we gather people’s opinions in an efficient and relevant way? Since everyone have their own personal interests, I think it’s rather a political issue.

[1] https://tatoeba.org/wall/show_message/22454

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sacredceltic sacredceltic 2016-februaro-10 2016-februaro-10 21:14:01 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

> I think it’s rather a political issue.

Tout est politique.

TRANG TRANG 2016-februaro-14 2016-februaro-14 23:31:02 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

> creating a team of coordinated core members on Tatoeba

This is an important topic for me, but I'm afraid that we're still not in a stage where we can build the dream team that we've always wanted.

We had attempts in the past to build a more coordinated team, but the response was always rather underwhelming.

The thing is that there are people who would have the skills to make Tatoeba more awesome, but do not have enough time or energy for it, so they don't want to commit to anything. Then there are people on the other side would have time, but not enough skills and knowledge, so they don't want to get involved into task that are beyond their comfort zone.

It is extremely rare to find people who have skills and time, or people who have time and are willing (and are able) to learn whatever is needed to get things done. So whenever try to recruit more people for our core team, we sadly end up with almost no response.


> Many ideas are presented on this wall, but they are often so uncoordinated
> that they are lost in the chaos of everyone just saying what they think
> should be done without any possibility of them actually doing it because
> in the end, they have no say in what is done with the site.

For me, this is because we lack people with very good understanding of the project and with strong technical knowledge. That is, people who are able to take all the ideas presented on a specific topic/problem, process them, and come up with a clear solution that satisfying enough for everyone and can realistically be implemented.

gillux or myself can do this. We can coordinate discussions for problems that we decided to work on because they bother us the most, and produce a concrete result. But we don't always have the time, or the motivation, to do this for every idea that are discussed on the Wall.


> To make better use of the people's ideas, I think we need to have some kind
> of interface where a discussion can be started with the fixed goal that at
> the end of the discussion, all suggestions are taken into account and a
> decision is made.

I agree with gillux that the tool is not the problem. But maybe you have something specific in mind. For you, what do we lack in the Wall, that prevents us from having a discussion with a fixed goal and a decision that is made in the end?


> I am thinking of taking the time to create a poll where people can say they
> would be willing to be members of this core community.
>
> Do you think this would be a good idea?
> If yes, what else do you think should be included in the poll?

As far as I'm concerned, I think it is worth trying, for the fact that it's a way to make people aware we need a stronger core team. But I can also say by experience that we can't expect a lot of answers.

I personally don't know what should be included in the poll, but maybe before having a poll, we will need to define specific roles and tasks. I wrote an article a while ago on that topic: http://blog.tatoeba.org/2011/04...s-to-help.html
Maybe it can inspire you in some ways for the roles.

We would need to go beyond that though. Having people say they want to be part of the core members is great. But then what?

For instance when it comes to new developers, we need to figure out how to guide them to work with us. We need to make it easier for them to set up their development environment (i.e. to install Tatoeba on their computers). We need to figure out easy tasks that they can start with, so that they can learn smoothly how the code works and don't get discouraged.

The same goes for all other roles: we need to define very specific tasks for new team members, and we need to guide them at the beginning so that they don't feel lost. Otherwise they might be motivated to help, but they would have no idea what they can or should work on. And all of this, is a lot of work in itself.


On a related topic, I want to come back on something you mentioned:

> There are no clearly assigned roles as to who is able to decide what.

In fact, we do have some rather clearly assigned roles. They are just not completely obvious to you because we don't have an official page yet where all of this information is summarized. But I can tell you roughly:

- gillux and myself in charge of what goes into Tatoeba's code, and of updating Tatoeba.
- Pfirsichbauemchen is in charge of deciding who becomes advanced contributor and who becomes corpus maintainer.
- CK is in charge of the audio in Tatoeba.
- Both CK and Pfirsichbaeumchen are in charge of suspending bad users/spammers and hiding spam/offensive messages. AlanF_US and myself are also in charge of this, but we make less interventions.
- Ricardo14 is in charge of adding new languages in Tatoeba, and helps me for various other tasks.
- AlanF_US was in charge of writing update notes, to communicate to the community what's new on Tatoeba. These days he is too busy though. He was also helping with development, tests and documentation.
- tommy_san is in charge of accepting or rejecting requests from people who want to translate Tatoeba's interface on Transifex.
- The people who are on Transifex are in charge of translating the interface into their respective languages.
- Corpus maintainers are in charge of correcting sentences from users who are no longer active, and of deleting sentences that considered too bad quality to be kept in the corpus.

And for everything else, I'm basically the one responsible, until someone feels they can take the responsibility for me and I can trust them for it.

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gillux gillux 2016-februaro-15, modifita 2016-februaro-15 2016-februaro-15 06:33:14 UTC, modifita 2016-februaro-15 06:35:18 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

I agree with you, but I feel like you kinda missed an important point. Pullnoseman was talking about taking decisions. I think it’s really important. Often, discussions end up with no clear result because we have no clear way of deciding what to do. For example, we never vote after discussing. At the moment, in practice only you and I have the actual right to decide, by starting implementing things (or not doing it), and I have to admit I’m not very comfortable with this. When everyone agrees on a solution, it’s easy to start implementing it. But when there are several propositions, or people not agreeing, or when the decision has important implications for the future of the project, or I just don’t feel confident with a particular topic, then I won’t do anything. You certainly can, as the author of Tatoeba, but I can’t. To sum up, at the moment you’re the only one who actually decide on important changes. Maybe you’re fine with this, but it makes Tatoeba growing really slowly regarding key issues like corpora quality etc. Just like pullnosman said in the previous thread:

> it appears to me like it's simply TRANG's site, and everyone else is just getting involved where they please, some more and some less, but generally unable to really get together to get something moving on a larger scale, and often times even against one another instead of together. A lot of energy simply evaporates, people shout their thoughts into the prairie and then mostly go on doing their own thing again.

If we had an official way to decide on what to do, it would free me from the responsibility of taking decisions. I think it would also force people to focus on finding clear solutions rather than “shouting their thoughts into the prairie”.

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pullnosemans pullnosemans 2016-februaro-15 2016-februaro-15 12:48:08 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

TRANG, I hope I'll find the time to answer you tomorrow. For now, I'll only quickly answer gillux:

I have the impression that we are on the same page here. I'm glad about that, especially seeing that only two people gave constructive feedback to my post.

I absolutely think having a forum used only for discussing important issues would be an important step towards getting things more organized.
one possibility would be to have only a handful of people who can start threads on the forum, and only one thread can be open at a time, but when one is open, it's serious. after one or two weeks of discussion in the thread, the people with the required technical knowledge will make a decision and implement it.

of course the tool is not the problem (or rather not the only problem), but starting with having a new tool could help changing everything else, I think.
as far as prioritising tasks goes, for example, we could have it that people can still make proposals on this wall, and when a proposal really kicks off a discussion and/or comes up several times (as e.g. the orphan sentences problem), it gets a thread on the "serious" forum, and after one or two weeks, it's started to be worked on.
this way, problems can still fall by the wayside, e.g. when they are addressed while another big issue is being discussed on the forum, but it would be a start.

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TRANG TRANG 2016-februaro-16, modifita 2016-februaro-16 2016-februaro-16 10:24:08 UTC, modifita 2016-februaro-16 10:52:06 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

​​​​> I absolutely think having a forum used only for discussing important issues
> would be an important step towards getting things more organized.

I believe that our GitHub issues does what you are asking for:
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues

Each issue on GitHub is basically like a forum thread. We create issues even for small problems though, not just "serious" ones. But we can label issues with "priority:high" for important topics. We have a few issues that were labeled this way, but it was somewhat arbitrary: https://goo.gl/BbGCxv
Only a handful of people can label issues and you can see who exactly set the label.

A minor problem is that it's not directly integrated into Tatoeba. Members who want to participate directly in any of these issues need to create an account on GitHub. But I don't think it is too much of a barrier.
GitHub issues often have links to a related Wall thread anyway, so people could still discuss things on the Wall instead of on GitHub, and we can keep track of it somehow.


> as far as prioritising tasks goes, for example, we could have it that people
> can still make proposals on this wall, and when a proposal really kicks off a
> discussion and/or comes up several times (as e.g. the orphan sentences problem),
> it gets a thread on the "serious" forum,

This is something that's already happening. People usually make proposals or report bugs on the Wall, and at some point, we create an issue for it on GitHub.
It happens that issues are created directly on GitHub, but we will bring up the topic on the Wall if we ever start considering implement it, unless it's a very straightforward issue.

We've been working this way for a couple of years now but we still have the problem of prioritization. As you will see if you browse our issues, very few of them have a priority label. What would justify that we focus on one issue over another? What would make an issue deserve a high priority? The number of people who voice their opinion about a certain issue definitely has weight, but doesn't always justify the priority.


> and after one or two weeks, it's started to be worked on.

If what you mean is that after one or two weeks, we start coding something, I can say that it's not always realistic. There's no guarantee we can come up with a decent solution within only one or two weeks.

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gillux gillux 2016-februaro-16 2016-februaro-16 11:17:48 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

To me, the Github issues tracker is just a tool for developers to not forget about issues and enhancement requests, and discuss implementation details.

However, since developers are currently taking final decisions, yes, the Github issues tracker somewhat matches what pullnoseman said. But as I said, I don’t like that as a developer because I can’t and won’t assume big decisions. I would like things to be decided on tatoeba.org (you said the fact it’s not integrated into Tatoeba is a technically a minor problem, and I agree, but to me it’s a major symbolic problem) while Github would just be the place where developers execute what have been decided by the community. I’d like powers to be separated on Tatoeba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...on_of_powers).

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TRANG TRANG 2016-februaro-17, modifita 2016-februaro-19 2016-februaro-17 12:49:28 UTC, modifita 2016-februaro-19 17:37:32 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

Alright, last comments I'll post in this thread because I'll need to focus on other things. It's an interesting discussion nonetheless.


> To me, the Github issues tracker is just a tool for developers to not forget
> about issues and enhancement requests, and discuss implementation details.

To me it also serves as documentation about why a feature exists and was implemented a certain way. The decisions can happen in various places, like on the Wall, on the Google group, on IRC, by email, by private message, in a meeting, in a poll... But they need to end up in the GitHub issues in a way or another, for developers to know what they're supposed to do.


> to me it’s a major symbolic problem

If the problem is only symbolic then we need to work on changing this image that GitHub is this isolated island only for developers. The "git" part of GitHub is for developers. But the "issues" and "wiki" part, don't have to be.

In my opinion GitHub offers a good infrastructure for developers and non-developers to collaborate on the development of a software. We can of course implement our own tool, so that we can customize it for our very special needs. But I don't feel it's worth the effort, it feels like re-inventing the wheel.


> However, since developers are currently taking final decisions

Actually, it's not entirely true. When you are making a decision while implementing something, you are not really making this decision as a developer, but rather as a core member of Tatoeba. The same goes for me.

In contrast, our GSoC candidates who contributed code to Tatoeba are also developers, but they did not make any final decisions.


> I’d like powers to be separated on Tatoeba

The fact that you and I hold both the power to decide and to execute our decisions was never a choice, but a necessity. And yes, it's a burden. But I don't want to drag the discussion for too long.

All I can say is that if there are topics on which you'd really like to work on, but you feel stuck because you cannot or should not be making the decision of what to do, then you have to let me know. I'll do my best to unstuck the situation.


-----
Edit: corrected 'take decision' --> 'make decision'

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sacredceltic sacredceltic 2016-februaro-18 2016-februaro-18 21:23:21 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

>In my opinion GitHub offers a good infrastructure for developers and non-developers to collaborate on the development of a software. We can of course implement our own tool, so that we can customize it for our very special needs. But I don't feel it's worth the effort, it feels like re-inventing the wheel.

Github is for geeks...For laymen, it's just not making sense...It's all acronyms and technical considerations. certainly nothing to do with analysts requirements.

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CK CK 2016-februaro-19, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 2016-februaro-19 01:33:07 UTC, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 10:48:05 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

[not needed anymore- removed by CK]

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odexed odexed 2016-februaro-19, modifita 2016-februaro-19 2016-februaro-19 04:40:56 UTC, modifita 2016-februaro-19 04:43:14 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

I personally see several obstacles when it comes to using Github by an average Tatoeba user.
1) The interface of Github is not really intuitive nor user-friendly. It has no translations as Tatoeba. There are many items like pull-requests, filters, labels etc., that most people don't even understand.
2) Usernames on Github are often different from Tatoeba. I believe the most people would prefer to know who they are talking to (for example, how long does this person use Tatoeba, what languages are interesting to him etc)
3) It's not quite clear who should create issues and how to do it in the right way.
4) The issues aren't really well-structured. They have labels but I can't see a comprehensive and colorful view of the tasks we are facing with. I don't know what problem developers are currently working on. Some issues are about fixing bugs, others are about adding new languages or improvements of the interface so it looks like putting all the eggs in one basket.

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TRANG TRANG 2016-februaro-19 2016-februaro-19 15:58:24 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

Before I reply in detail, I want to make sure that you understand that implementing our own tool would require a lot of time.

I'm no saying GitHub is perfect, but compared to all the solutions I'm aware of, it offers a good enough infrastructure. And rather than coding something on our own, it would be more efficient to teach users how GitHub works.

Similarly, you could say that Transifex is not user-friendly, and that we could use Tatoeba itself to handle the translations of the interface. But we just can't afford it. We're not enough developers to implement within Tatoeba something that does what Transifex does.

But we have this guide for Transifex: http://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/arti...ce-translation
While we have no similar guide for GitHub.


> The interface of Github is not really intuitive nor user-friendly.
> [...]
> There are many items like pull-requests, filters, labels etc.,
> that most people don't even understand.

So I've more or less answered this already: GitHub is not the most user-friendly tool for everyone, but we can teach users how it works.

We will have issues with user-friendliness even if we implement our own tool because making good user interface is a very difficult job. If you look at Tatoeba itself, there are many things that are not user friendly, and we have a hard time fixing them because we're not UX experts.


> It has no translations as Tatoeba.

The thing is that we have no choice but using English as our default language to communicate about the development of Tatoeba. Maybe French would work too, because gillux and myself are French speakers.

But let's imagine that GitHub is translated into Russian. If there are discussions in Russian, we would need to have all these discussions translated into English or French, and we would need somebody to translate for us everything we have to say, from English/French to Russian.

So it would not be enough to only have the interface translated into other language. For each language we would support, if we really want to support it, we would need dedicated translators to help passing a message from a language to another.


> Usernames on Github are often different from Tatoeba. I believe the most
> people would prefer to know who they are talking to

Yes, this is something which can be confusing. But it's a matter of filling up your profile accordingly, and a matter of checking someone's profile when you want to know who they are exactly.

That's the case for gillux for instance, who has the username "jiru" on GitHub. If you're only reading comments on issues, you'll see "jiru". But if you go to his profile (​https://github.com/jiru), you'll see that he set his name as "gillux".

You can also add a URL in your profile. For instance I just added the URL to my Tatoeba profile, and you can see it under my name in my GitHub profile: https://github.com/trang
​Someone who would need to know more about who I am on Tatoeba can go to this link.


> It's not quite clear who should create issues and how to do it in the right way.

I admit I've always wished that GitHub had a feature to restrict who can create issues because right now everyone can create issues. That's something we could implement if we had our own tool. But that's not a big problem. The main problem is that we don't really have guidelines regarding creating issues.

That's something I've actually started working on since the last Tatoeba Day. But I didn't have time yet to complete them and publish them.


> The issues aren't really well-structured. They have labels but I can't see
> a comprehensive and colorful view of the tasks we are facing with.
> [...]
> Some issues are about fixing bugs, others are about adding new languages
> or improvements of the interface so it looks like putting all the eggs in one basket

GitHub is not the problem for our lack of structure. We are the problem, because we don't take the time to structure the issues. Labels can do the work. But we need to define the right labels, and we need to decide in which case to apply which label.

Also, GitHub provides an API (https://developer.github.com/). So if we really needed to, we could code our on UI on top of GitHub's data, to have a nice visualization of our issues.


> I don't know what problem developers are currently working on.

Here again, GitHub is not the problem. For you to know what developers are working on, developers need to communicate it, it some way or another.

This article explains how you can figure out what we're working on:
http://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/arti...s-get-involved

​In theory, you can know what we're working by checking what's in the milestone. But that implies that we make sure to always keep the milestones up to date, and that we have an issue for everything we're working on. Which is not always the case.

But again, that's not a matter of GitHub no allowing us to provide the information. It's a problem of us not taking the time to communicate it.

Actually, there is a feature in GitHub that we probably don't mention enough, and I realized we should have mentioned it more often: you have the possiblity to "watch" a project on GitHb:
http://piwik.org/wp-content/upl...ik-tickets.png
When you watch a project, you are notified by email whenever someone creates an issue or posts a comment in an issue. This can be an easy way to follow what's happening in the dev world.


All of that being said, if you know another tool that does a better job than the GitHub issues, please let me know. I have nothing against using new tools when they can do a better job. We did it when we moved from Launchpad to Transifex, to handle our UI translations.

But my position remains that we shouldn't develop our own tool, because that's not our core activity. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to develop issues/requirement tools, and it would be a waste of time for us to try to develop something like that, when we could spend this time to improve or implement features that are really core features of Tatoeba.

sacredceltic sacredceltic 2016-februaro-19 2016-februaro-19 07:44:40 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

I don't mean it's difficult. It's just not adapted. See post by odexed below. I entirely share his views.
Github is a code repository, it's not designed to discuss functional issues and plan evolutions. It's way downstream in the process.
I'm already an unwilling Github user, because I also develop (in ruby), and each time I use it, I feel frustrated by the way it is structured. It lacks synthesis. I very rarely manage to find there the information I'm looking for.

Issues should be represented in a web structure, with indicators of priority and colour indicators telling if the issue is being worked on and for what delivery.
Requirements should be clearly laid down in a structured manner, with a matching system relating requirements to developments.

Personally, I use other collaborating web tools to manage my projects, from ideation to delivery. In my view, coding is the last thing to do, not the starting point.

sacredceltic sacredceltic 2016-februaro-18 2016-februaro-18 21:24:49 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

"taking a decision" is a gallicism. In English, humans "make" decisions.

TRANG TRANG 2016-februaro-15 2016-februaro-15 20:01:42 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

> I agree with you, but I feel like you kinda missed an important point.
> Pullnoseman was talking about taking decisions. I think it’s really
> important. Often, discussions end up with no clear result because we
> have no clear way of deciding what to do.

When discussions end up with no clear result, I don't think it's because we have no way to decide, but rather that we don't have enough information and knowledge to decide. For me it is quite normal that some discussions cannot end with a clear result because they bring up difficult issues that would require a deeper study, or insights from people with a deeper knowledge on the problem.


> If we had an official way to decide on what to do, it would free me from the
> responsibility of taking decisions.

I too, would love that more people step up, so that I can be free of taking so many decisions. But I would still like us to make good decisions, not just decisions for the sake of deciding something, especially if it is an important decision.

Sure we can define a better, more organized process for decision making. But if we don't have qualified people to take part to the decisions, then it doesn't matter what process we have.