Closed Bug 95808 Opened 23 years ago Closed 23 years ago

Split European Evangelism into East, Central and West European

Categories

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Administration, task)

Product:
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Component:
Administration
Platform:
Other
Other
Type:
task
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: timeless, Assigned: asa)

Details

Russia and a few other countries span Europe + Asia [heck, some of them span 
the Middle East too ;-)], but their languages don't match either. BC agreed we 
could use a new Component in Tech Evang.  Anyone interested in taking it?  I 
cc'd people who are working on the Russian and Polish Evang letters since they 
are already involved in the Evang process.

Description, Scope, QA and Assignee are up for grabs.  I think Cyrillic might 
work, but something's nagging me saying that one of the former soviet 
socialist republics doesn't use cyrillic even though the language is related.
I believe some of the work Bob Clary is doing on the Polish enangelism tool will
work for the Russan as well. We (Poles) us the latin alphabet but with some
local variations. Therefore the proper coding (ISO-8859-2) is different from the
default ISO-8859-1 used by English. As the tool works with ISO-8859-2, it should
work with   Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5 or other - the Russians use several, I'm not
sure which is preferable).

<QA_ignore>
Timeless: I have no idea what country you mean. No ex-Soviet republic of related
(Slavic) language uses the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic-using Slavic countries
are Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (ex-Soviet countries) as well as Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria, Macedonia (never parts of the former Soviet Union). Some other Slavic
countres which were never part of the Soviet Union have used the Latin alphabet
for over a 1000 years: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia.
Bosnia-Hercegovina is obviously divided. Other (non Slavic) countries that use
Cyrillis are (I believe) Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia and Mongolia (all
except Mongolia ex-Soviet) while ex-Soviet Azerbaijan, Tadjikistan and
Turkmenistan converted to Latin. The so-called Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania) used Latin even when they were Soviet republics.
</QA_ignore>
There are at least 33 languages in the former
USSR and most of them are not related to Russian
though a lot of them use Cyrillic as a writing
script.
Here are the languages that do not use the
Cyrillic script:

Latvian
Lithuanian
Estonian
Georgian
Armenian

Some languages which were using Cyrillic at the time
of the breakup have decided to move to Latin or
even to Arabic script depending on pre-Soviet
cultural affliations. The 3 major ones I know of
which use Cyrillic are Russian, Ukrainian, and 
Belarusian. 
Having Cyrillic as a category is not 
very useful. While I don't oppose creating
another component, I would give it a thought
as to what the most effective way of doing
evangelism work would be.
If you have signed up someone who can do Russian,
or Ukrainian, you can have the default European owner
assign bugs to that person. We may want to have a web 
page where we can maintain the list of volunteers.

> Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5 or other - the Russians use 
> several, I'm not sure which is preferable).

Use KOI8-R for mail messages - that is what Mozilla uses
as the mail standard and most Russian users agree with that.
KOI8-U for Ukrainian though you see Windows-1251 used
sometimes.


One compromise plan would be to split
Europe into 2 regions:

West European
East European

West:

Countries/languages to the west of Germany (or about 
15 degrees longitude). This also includes countries whose
land falls more on the west side of 15 deg L. Austria
is here because most of its land falls on the West side.

East:

Any countries to the East of Germany (15 deg L).
This would include:

all of former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece,
Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. 

For default assignment, Tristan Nitot for West European.
And for East European, how about Jacek? 

The idea is for us to recruit more people into 
the evangelism activities and the default owners
to re-assign to language-specific experts in case 
evangelism interaction via mail is needed.
I don't think we need to subcategorize Evangelism
product into as many languages of the Evangelism 
letter-tool.

This way a Russian volunteer can participate as an
assignee of the bug.
Sounds good to me. And thanks to all for the lessons.
Summary: Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category → Split European Evangelism into East + West European
As I understand German, Russian and (of course Polish) I should like this "East
European" realm, even as it is arbitrary. But do you know that Vienna (capital
city of Austria) is east of Prague (capital city of the Czech Republic)?
Generally Austria lies more to the east than Germany (and its name means Eastern
Country :->) so it should be included in the Eastern part of your plan. Anyway
it would be ridiculous to put Germany and Austria (same langage) in different
categories.

More importantly, we step into a political minefield, here. I suspect most
Germans will not like putting Germany in the Eastern Europe as described above.
Similarly all (or almost all) Central Europeans which were formerly in the
Eastern block (including me) will protest if you re-create the iron curtain
(that is if you divide Europe as decribed above with or without moveing Germany
to the Western part, as the iron curtain used to run across Germany).

Therefore I believe we need three categories:
- West Europe: exactly like you descibe it
- Cental Europe: all the Latin using countries of the Cental Europe, namely
Germany, Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Albania (I'm not sure about Bosnia &
Herzegoviana as it uses both alphabets)
- East Europe: the rest of former Soviet Union plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Macedonia (maybe Bosnia & Hercegovina)

I believe it would be more politically correct to divide Europe like that. I
could accept the Central European responsibilities. That means we need someone
fr the Cyrillic writing part.
Summary: Split European Evangelism into East + West European → Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category
Mozilla changed the summary back to the original. I will use the opportunity and
change it to something more to my liking.
Summary: Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category → Split European Evangelism into East, Central and West European
One more thing. If we left Germany in the Western part, the three categories
would be defined by the character coding: ISO-8859-1 for Western, ISO-8859-2 for
Central and Cyrillic for Eastern Europe. 
>  I suspect most Germans will not like putting 
> Germany in the Eastern Europe as described above.

I was not clear probably but 15 degree L defines
the Eastern border of Germany and so accoding
to my proposal, Germany and Austria will fall in
the West. 
I like your idea of West, Central and East because
as you say it will hlp avoid the old cold war
analogy -- but we should put Germany & Austria into
the West. 

> One more thing. If we left Germany in the Western 
> part, the three categories would be defined by 
> the character coding: ISO-8859-1 for Western, 
> ISO-8859-2 for Central and Cyrillic for 
> Eastern Europe. 

Baltic languages (Estonian, Latvian & Lithuaninan)
don't use ISO-8859-2. They use ISO-8859-4 or Windows-1257.

So as a revision of your proposal:

- West Europe: exactly like you descibe it including Germany
               and Austria.

- Cental Europe: all the Latin using countries of the Cental Europe, namely
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Albania (Bosnia is here.)

- East Europe: the rest of former Soviet Union plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Macedonia (maybe Hercegovina -- probably not needed -Kat)

I think we should move Bosnia to Central Europe.
For recent historical reasons, Bosnian does not
use Cyrillic any more. So we should put Cyrillic
using Yugoslav blocks into East -- this would include
Serbian in East.

What about Herzegovina? Is there such a country still?
I think that the former Bosnia-Herzegovina can be
covered by languages, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian,
which we already have in the above classifications.


Until you find someone you can list me as the 
default contact for the East Europe, Nitot for
West and Jacek for Central.
Does that sound like a plan to begin with?
If people reading this bug report knows a suitable
person for the East, have that person look at this
bug. That person should preferably read/write one
of the main languages of the East Europe. (I can read
Russian some but writing anything would be extremely hard.)
So we agreed to the new partition of Europe ;-) Good. It seems this continent is
more difficult to deal with than North America...

I do agree about the practicality of putting Germany and Austria in the West
(even as historically those countries actually invented the name Central Europe
to describe themselves  - but that was over 100 years ago). Bosnia-Hercegovina
is actually comprised of two units Croat-Muslin (Latin) and Serb (Cyrillic) so
we can probably divide the Evangelic workload from that country on this basis, too.
Sounds good.
Stop, guys!

First, so this is no unneeded flame: default Internet encoding is KOI8-R for
Russian. There are several others which are commonly used (CP-1251 for example),
but they aren't standards, as far as I am concerned. Also is KOI8-R the main
encoding for Unices (except for Unicode ones :))).

Then a second question: what exactly is the aim of splitting Evangelism? Is it
all about covering the earth with Evangelism Letters? Then why don't you split
it into languages? Why regions? Or is it about something else, something I don't
realize? 

And third, I am a Russian, so I guess Mozilla Community can count on me :) Even
more, I'm a Russian living in Germany, so my German is somewhat close to mother
language (but not really close, I couldn't really translate, but assisting!).
> First, so this is no unneeded flame: default Internet 
> encoding is KOI8-R for Russian. 

There is no disagreement about this, please don't worry.
If you want to translate the Evangelism letter into Russian,
you can make sure that the warning about mail encoding
woudl say "KOI8-R" for Russian. See my comments above for
Russian and Ukrainian mail encodings.

> Then a second question: what exactly is the aim of 
> splitting Evangelism? Is it all about covering the 
> earth with Evangelism Letters? Then why don't you split
> it into languages? Why regions? Or is it about 
> something else, something I don't realize?

It is primarily not about splitting them into many
languages. We would like multiple default owners 
for Evangelism bugs. Currently, me, Bob, Jacek, and
Tristan have agreed to be default owners. My belief
is that splitting the Evangelism product into a 
reasonable number of subcategories will help lessen
the load each default owner carries. At the same time,
we can enlist from other Mozilla volunteers to help out
with contacting webmasters or site owners having problems.
Each default owner can manage such sub-assignments 
in consulatation with appropriate volunteers.

For this reason, having a reasonably small number
of region/lang components is preferable. If some default
owners have too many bugs assigned, then we can think
of adding another category and seeking additional default 
owners.

I would like to suggest that we give it a try to the
proposed split of Europe and see how it works. If this
is not sufficient in practice, then let's revisit the
issue at that time.
I ran through all the European bugs and marked CentralEurope or EastEurope in
the status board to help make the split easier.

BTW: do we count Turkey as Europe? It spans the Bosphorus so technically is both
part of Europe and Asia/Middle East.
I had some difficulty with Turkish when I proposed
the Character Coding sub menus. Turkish used to be 
written in Arabic script unitl the early 20th century but
since about 1930 has been using a modified Roman script.

After mulling over this, we decided to place Turkish in
SW Asia since the language is of the Altaic family and
almost all instances of this family of languages are in 
Asia. 

I recommend the same for the Evangelism product.
Don't forget about Scandinavian countries. :-)
Antti, Denmark, Norway by our criteria (15 deg L) are in
the West but Sweden and Finland would be in Central probably.
I hate to split Scandinavia, however. How about putting them
all in the West? (The only reservation I have is Finland since
its language is not related to Germanic languages like 
other languages of Scandinavia.) Any opinion? 
I think "West Europe" would seem like the best option for most Finns, anyway.
Nikolai Prokoschenko, would you agree to be the 
default assignee for the East Europe? Please also 
find the default QA contact for your component. 
Until you can find someone, I am willing to act as
the defautl QA.
Asa, here's our proposal for the split with the descriptions
and default contacts info:

===================================
West Europe:

Countries/languages to the west of Germany's eastern border.  
This includes Germany, France, Austria, all Scandinavian 
countries, UK, Iceland, etc.-- i.e. what is commonly known 
as Western Europe.

Default assignee: Tristan Nitot <nitot@netscape.com>
QA contact: Christopher Aillon <christopher@aillon.com>

Central Europe:

All the Latin/Greek using countries of the Cental Europe, namely
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, etc.

Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl>
QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com>  -- temporary fill-in


East Europe: Former USSR countries like Russia, Ukraina, etc. 
plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Serbia/Slavic Hercegovina.

Default assignee: Nikolai Prokoschenko <prokosch@gmx.net>
QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com>  -- temporary fill-in
===================================

I am assuming that Nikolai is OK with the East Europe and 
Chris Aillon is OK with the West Europe QA contact.
I am seeking my replacement for Central and East Europe's but
until someone comes forward, I will act as a temporary default
QA. 

Let's get linguistic diversity between the assignee and
the QA contact!
The default QA for West Europe is:

Christopher Caillon <caillon@returnvalue.com>

Asa, please use this corrected address rather than the
one listed above.
Hey Axel, I thought you might be interested in this bug ...
Hi!

I'd like to volunteer for QA position for Central Europe. I speek these
languages: Slovak, Czech, English. Can understand German and Russian, with some
dificulties also Polish :-)

-mondo
Thanks,mondo (Pavol?) for volunteering to relieve me!

You will be a good complement to Jacek who knows 
Polish and a few other languages. Jacek, you've got
a partner now.

Central Europe:

Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl>
QA contact: Pavol Vaskovic <pali@pali.sk>



I agree with Jacek Piskozub that this is a political minefield. I also agree
with Nikolai Prokoschenko that splitting to West-Central-East doesn't make sense
it the real issue is language/writing system.

I think it would be less confusing and more politically correct if the
individual bugs were just assigned to a person who writes the language that is
relevant to the bug.

The latest division seems to be based on character coding. If you really are
going to split Europe, wouldn't it make sense to at least use names that better
describe the slitting criteria (instead of using vague geopolitical terms)?

That is:
Latin-1 (in Europe)
Latin-other
Cyrillic
Henri, I don't think we have that many volunteers to be
the default QA's -- to have an assignee for each of the
languages. We want to lessen the task of default QAs
but it is unrealistic to expect that many volunteers. 

What we have is not perfect but the current proposal
will work as well as yours. Since we have more or less
regional splits in the rest of the world, I would rather 
keep consistency in categorization in Europe.

As a practical matter, I sense that there is more or
less an agreement among the volunteers that they can
work with this classification. I would rather not 
revisit the issue that had been (in my mind) settled
already. 
So, there goes my comment....

One question: do we have a newsgroup for Evangelism? I would really like to have
one. 

Second: I guess, it's ok with me as an assignee. I'm not too sure, whether I
understand right, what I have to do, but I'll try my best.

Third: Yes, of course we do not have so many people. But splitting Europe is
also silly enough - a potential bug reporter won't be really sure which part of
europe he should take. And also, if we take languages, it is a lot more easier
for us and for everyone else - how many sites do we cover, if we have a
(default) English department? Spanish and French and we have 80% of countries
out there. Russian, German, French and we have covered almost everything. Where
is the problem?
> But splitting Europe is also silly enough - a 
> potential bug reporter won't be really sure 
> which part of europe he should take.

You can look in the Component descriptions -- what countries
are in what subcomponents will be explained there. This is
like finding which Mozilla component to assign bugs to.
Bug filers can look in the component descriptions and
then make the best choice. In case there is an error made
in choice, the default assignee can easily correct it.

We have had other regional divisions for the past several
weeks and there have been very few problems like you
mentioned.

>Russian, German, French and we have covered almost 
> everything. Where is the problem?

The problem is we also need to cover other countries/languages
and we need to have a way to classify them. In the 
current proposed classification, the default assignees
will most likely end up covering their favorite languages 
anyway. But in addition, we are asking them to help with 
other languages within the region the assignee is 
responsible for.





> You can look in the Component descriptions -- what countries are in what
subcomponents will be explained there.

Wrong. There is NO link in Evangelism Tool to ANY kind of descriptions.
Everything one can expect is a complete bug report, which is IMHO too
complicated for a "normal" bug reporter.

> We have had other regional divisions for the past several weeks and there have
been very few problems like you mentioned.

Do you know why? Because there are thousands of people out there using Mozilla,
who don't even know there is such thing as Bugzilla. And of course they don't
know about any kind of components, nor do they know about Evangelism and
Evangelism Tool. Most people who are filing bugs are Mozilla project
contributors - developers, testers, people who took the time to learn about this
whole thing. As I understand the situation, Evangelism Tool has been made for
"normal" people, who simply discovered an unworking site, that's all. All they
want  is to inform the developers about this and forget it! Therefore, there
must be an easier way to file an Evangelism Bug, like some kind of automated
system with only a few questions - where have you found a rendering bug, what is
your name, how can we contact you and short description of the problem. The
Project Contributors can then make a better bug report, write Evangelism
Letters, or whatever. Do you see the problem I am worrying about?
I don't know how the Evangelism Letter tool got into this bug, but let me
clarify some of the comments regarding it.

The letter tool is intended for regular members of the evangelism communitity
not for general consumption. The Letter tool is designed primarily for sending
standard letters to webmasters to help give them information to help them
upgrade their content. It does have the ability to bring up a new evangelism bug
using the normal bugzilla new bug form which does have links to component
descriptions.

We don't necessarily want mom and pop kettle to file evangelism bugs. We deal
with enough bad evangelism bug reports as it is. The idea of setting up a
newsgroup with an email interface where 'normal' people can report problems with
sites has been discussed. That would allow us to collect data from users without
having to pollute bugzilla with poorly written evangelism bug reports. I think
this is a good idea but we have not progressed on implementing it. Either way,
that is not relevant to this bug.
We want knowledgeable mozilla.org community members to help locate sites, file
evangelism bugs, diagnose site problems, and to contact web masters. We do not
need thousands of evangelism bug reports filed by people who are not
knowledgeable about Mozilla or Bugzilla.
Nikolai, what you're commenting on is about
Evangelism Tool mostly. This bug is about Buzilla
components. We are not speaking about the same thing.
If you have questions about Evangelism Tools, please
address them in another bug and not do that
in this bug. The Evangelism tool is a helping 
tool to use in conjunction with Evangelism bugs
reported in Bugzilla.

The component descriptions I am talking about are
from Bugzilla. For example, go to any Evangelism bug,
e.g.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98341

and then click on the link "Component" below Bug # and
Product fields. You will find the component 
descriptions.

As for fling a bug more easily, you can use the Bugzilla
Helper form if you are not familiar with Bugzilla:

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html

You can help improve this for average users if you want.

Thank you for the answers, now I see that I've been thinking in a wrong
direction. I apologize  for the inconvenience.
Nikolai, thank you for your last comments.
As you know, we want to ask you to be the default
assignee for East Europe. In this position, you will:

1. monitor Bugzilla bugs filed on web sites in East Europe
   component. (There is no deep meaning to this categorization
   except to divide up the work among several volunteers
   as explained above.)

2. You can then analyze the problem reported -- by yourself, 
   or QA person (like me), or any other person you might
   want to seek help from. You're the manager of this
   East Europe component and so you can ask other people's
   help on the net, newsgroups, etc.

3. For web sites in languages you don't read, you 
   might want to request help from others. I will try to
   help also. (If you're adventurous,you can do it
   yourself.) 

4. Once you know the cause of the problem, a bug could
   on the Mozilla side. Or it could be a problem on the
   web site. In the latter,  you can use the Evangelism 
   letter for Russian if you like. If it is not possible 
   to write in Ukrainian, Belarusian, etdc., then you might 
   ask for help or write in English as the last resort. 

We hope you can help us in this effort by being the
East Europe's default assignee.

Thanks.
QA Contact: lchiang → timeless
Let's get the categories estalished now. 
If we need more categories later, please file
additional bugs. You should line up a default
assignee at least if you want to do that, however. 

Asa, here's the revised summary of component
descriptions and assignees:

(Note: I am still looking for someone to replace me as the
default QA contact for East Europe.)

===================================
West Europe:

Countries/languages to the west of Germany's eastern border.  
This includes Germany, France, Austria, all Scandinavian 
countries, UK, Iceland, etc.-- i.e. what is commonly known 
as Western Europe.

Default assignee: Tristan Nitot <nitot@netscape.com>
QA contact: Christopher Aillon <caillon@returnvalue.com>

Central Europe:

All the Latin/Greek using countries of the Cental Europe, namely
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, etc.

Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl>
QA contact: Pavol Vaskovic <pali@pali.sk>

East Europe: Former USSR countries like Russia, Ukraina, Armenia, 
Georgia, etc. plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Serbia/Slavic 
Hercegovina.

Default assignee: Nikolai Prokoschenko <prokosch@gmx.net>
QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com> -- temporary fill-in
===================================
New Components created. When the bugs have all been moved out of the old
EUropean component I'll remove it. 


Nikolai and Jacek, can you migrate some of the 
European bugs to appropriate categories? Once this is
done, Asa will eliminate "Euroepan" as the category.

Tristan, can you also help moving some bugs out of your
assignment to Central or East Europe as well as
classifying yours as West Europe.
OK. I've already marked CentralEurope or EastEurope in the status whiteboard of
the appropriate bugs to make it easier.
I don't seem to have any permissions to change the Component :(( Can someone
please set the appropriate permission bit on my account? Thank you.
Asa: Could you give Nikolai the permissions he needs as the new East European
Evangelism component owner?

Thanks in advance.

PS. I've already took all the bugs that IMHO belong to Central Europe.
Asa, I've just finished moving the last of the bugs over to appropriate regions.
 As of right now there are no bugs in the European component.  All set to remove
the European component.
Chris and Jacek, a great job! 
Now that the migration to new components is over,
let me mark this bug resolved/fixed.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 23 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Just one more thought. The deciding factor in many cases should be the language
of the site. For example a Russian speaking webmaster in Estonia (see bug
59290for an example) should be contacted by the Russian speaking evangelist
(Nikolai) making East Europe the obvious choice even as the default language of
Estonia falls in the Central European comonent, according to what we decided here.
vrfy fixed
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Component: Bugzilla: Keywords & Components → Administration
Product: mozilla.org → bugzilla.mozilla.org
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