[zanata-users] List-forking. A clarification about Zanata admin rights

[David Mason]

Hi Sankarshan,

See responses inline.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay" <sankarshan.mukhopadhyay at gmail.com>
> To: zanata-users at redhat.com
> Sent: Friday, 6 September, 2013 3:20:59 PM
> Subject: [zanata-users] List-forking. A clarification about Zanata admin	rights
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Isaac pointed out, rightfully so, that hijacking a self-introduction
> thread was poor form.
> 
> <https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2013-September/011034.html>
> mentions:
> 
> "For the coordinator of each language team who has not yet gained the
> admin privilege of your language team in ZANATA, please contact Issac,
> me or Red Hat employees of your language team. We will be happy to grant
> the admin privilege to you. (You must to be current coordinator on the
> team list.)"
> 
> So, if I break it down, if I were seeking admin access to
> Bengali(India), I'd have to write in to either:
> 
> - Isaac
> - Noriko
> - Or, whoever in my language team is also a Red Hat employee

The correct procedure at the moment to become a language team coordinator is to go to the page in Zanata for the language and make a request from that page using "Request to Join Team" or "Contact Team Coordinators" - in either of those there is an input field for a message where you can ask to be made a coordinator, and in this specific instance it would be prudent to give a link to the thread linked above and any information that will help to identify who you are.

Using this procedure, one of two things will happen.

1. If there are already one or more language coordinators, the message will be sent to them and they can decide how to respond. Any language team that has a coordinator is essentially self-managing and Zanata administrators do not generally interfere with that.
2. If there is not yet a language coordinator, the message will be sent to Zanata administrators, who will usually try to assign a qualified coordinator as soon as possible so that we can let the translation community manage themselves without further interference from us.

Obviously this is not ideal. See below.


> The clarification I seek is about this third actor. How is it that a
> Red Hat employee, who may be a contributor to my language, is by
> default able to grant me (a non Red Hat employee) admin access?

Not all Red Hat employees have these kind of privileges. For many language teams, the coordinators happen to be Red Hat employees simply because so many of the translators on Zanata work for Red Hat. As for system-wide admins, most of them are members of the development team who program Zanata, who are all employed by Red Hat - as mentioned we ideally want all language team management to be done by the community, but at the moment our way of bootstrapping the community management requires some manual work from us, which is not ideal (partly because it uses some time we could be using for adding features, but mainly because it should not be arbitrarily up to us to decide who can lead a language team).

> As I mentioned at
> <https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2013-September/011054.html>,
> 
> "Usually, for other systems that I am familiar with, when a member of
> the language community
> desires admin access as a coordinator of the language, they write to
> the admin of the infrastructure/ticketing system. In this case, it
> appears to be otherwise. So, I wanted to know if there is a plan to
> change the system that you have in place with something else."

I have some personal goals for the system to completely remove the requirement to contact anyone (even a ticketing system), to remove the requirement to manually assign coordinators, and in fact remove any requirement for having to manually assign any user to any role - instead translators should be able to start translating and gain more privileges as they prove that they are good at it. This will take a while to implement, but the basic idea is that anyone should be able to suggest translations for any language, and from there they can build up a reputation score any language that they are able to translate to a high standard. The system will still require some bootstrapping* but will be a lot better than the current situation, where a translator has to wait for someone before they can enter any translations, and where coordinators feel they have insufficient information to decide whether someone should be allowed to join a language team.

* to deal with the issue of who reviews the suggestions by the first translator for a language, before anyone has enough reputation to be a reviewer.

I have a few RFEs for the start of these changes (just a start of course):

 - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919253
 - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919258
 - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919262


> Additionally, could you also clarify if Zanata uses "admin" and,
> language coordinator as synonyms? Translation Content Management
> systems prefer the latter than the former. Admin is usually reserved
> for those who have access to the infrastructure.

In Zanata "admin" and "language coordinator" are completely different concepts:

 - language coordinator: user who is in charge of a specific language team (a single locale) who can add and remove users from that language team, assign review privileges to team members, and assign other coordinators for their team (there can be any number of coordinators for each team).

 - admin: a small number of users (mainly the development team) who have access to all the server management features. Admins also handle requests for language teams that have no coordinator (and usually try to assign a coordinator as soon as possible).


I hope that adequately answers your questions. I'm happy to clarify or answer any more questions you might have - I think that community governance of the translation process is the most important issue to deal with and get right as we develop Zanata.


Cheers,

David Mason
Software Engineer
L10n Engineering

Red Hat, Asia-Pacific Pty Ltd
Level 1, 193 North Quay
Brisbane 4000