http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=365822&postcount=2

Changes have already begun

I'm not sure how I feel about sub-fora (I can speak latin too ) but I do think more support for non-English is a good idea. Over here: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...8&postcount=37 I suggested that it's possible to have both the original language and a quick translation if possible, but then I saw http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...3&postcount=38 and remembered that we have excellent ways of getting to the gist anyway. If you have time, translate, if not, we can manage.

I think sub-fora could artificially splinter the site in a way that isn't healthy - sadly human beings tend to congregate like with like, and sub-fora could (I don't say would) become 'the place where an xxx speaker goes' - if that person doesn't come to the site in general, we stand to lose the mosaic that maemo users have created here. That would be sad, and we'd lose an awful lot of expertise.

So:
1. in favour of support and encouragement for non-English and English speakers
2. probably not in favour of sub-fora for language specifics only

I am, btw, an English speaker. Bear with me if I try {language x}!

I vote benny1967 as German language subforum moderator

Two elements two think about, based on evolution:

- The subforum might be ther first step to attract more contributors in a language, followed by locale wiki pages, planet...

- Most people do improve their English skills over time, and the same person that can only read but won't dare to post in the lingua franca (and I don't mean French) perhaps will try after some months of sporadic and the regular Maemo English reading.

We started experimenting with supporting different languages in the new maemo Greeters pilot today: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33968

I was amazed at not only how quickly the greeter idea caught fire, but also how fast and easy it was for languages other than English to show up in the signatures.

Now we have greeters of various nationalities pointing newcomers who speak their language to valuable resources, by means of every post they make, anywhere in the forum.

I call that a half-win. With a multilingual wiki, that picture becomes complete.

More elements to consider:

- maemo.org has already the basic pieces in place: forum board, wiki, social news, downloads... Localizing these is surely extra work but overall is probably less work than creating the infrastructure from scratch, every time again for a new language by someone else. Unefficient approach? It might be easier to get yourself started with whatever complete CMS without having to negotiate with anybody, but you will have a harder time in the mid term.

- maemo.org is free of advertisement. No contributor is paying or earning money in relation to page views, Google juice, etc. Many (most? all?) of these new sites need to fund their infrastructure themselves and many (most? all?) have some kind of advertisement. To cover expenses... or to try to make some extra bucks? Who knows and how can someone here be sure.

btw, I'm a native Catalan & Spanish speaker myself.

I agree with Benny. One of the most intriguing, provocative, useful things of the Internet is that it's like the primordial broth - for ideas and people on whose legs ideas walk instead that bacteria and protozoa.
So, in order to have a healthy biodiversity, let localized forums sprout as they want, let them evolve and flourish, reproduce and eventually die. They eventually will show an osmotic interchange with the maemo.org site and enrich the overall experience of all of us.
See the Symbian culture, as reported by Chris, as an example. There's a whole lot of discussion and using and reporting and programming in Italian, as far as I know, and apparently also in German, in Chinese and whatever.

Also, think of tech blogs, power user blogs, and also cultural or costume blogs which will help spread in other languages the innovations and power of the maemo platform, like they actually do with other free and open source efforts like linux distros and multi-platform end-user apps.

Of course I don't think Nokia should endorse all, fund all, control all. But, in many ways, what is thought and done on maemo.org is not a Nokia-only thing and has many other faces, vendor-independent.

Disclaimer: I'm Italian and my English is far from perfect
And, putting it simple, I don't thing that localized subfora on maemo.org are particularly useful, even if they aren't going to be a harm indeed. Laissez faire, laissez passer!

I second that...

Moderation is the key. As we keep getting wider we will need more moderators... (Not to enforce rules dang it so please back away from the keyboards, LoL)
Moderators are needed to simple monitor and to have the tools available to clean-up messes that can be caused by just one or two malcontents...

A night of SPAM or a few nasty arguments that spill out into other fora can bring the whole place to a stand still.

...but then again, everything could continue to be sunshine and lollipops.

***
@ qole, I lived and worked in Europe in my twenties. Being from Philadelphia at first I was in awe of the language skills that my European peers possessed. Then I realized that in order to cover the same amount of area in Europe that I considered my stomping grounds in the US, I would have had to speak 5 separate languages...
If you needed to speak different languages in Alberta, Washington State, Victoria, and the rest of BC, I'm sure you would be proficient in them all by now too.

...And by the time I left Europe, my German, English, French, Swede, Flemish, and Italian friends and co-workers all had incorporated the words "Yo" and "dude" in their vocabularies anyway.

I don't know exactly what the situation is in other countries/languages but, at least in Portugal (where I'm from), people that don't speak english are usually not the type of people that search for online forums or uses the internet that intensively. With this I mean that i think it would be pointless to have sub-fora (yes, portuguese is a latin language ) for different languages, as people that can't understand english would also be the people less likely to search the web for answer to some particular question or find this forum anyway.
Besides, having the forum in several languages seems really weird and I don't think it would work out so well.
I agree that translating the wiki to these languages would be much more productive and produce much less clutter than having sub-fora.

my 2 cents (not worth much more than that, really)

I don't see anything wrong with providing multilingual subfora here at all. They'll 'happen' elsewhere anyway if you don't provide the media here.

If you worry about misinformations in languages other than your own (xenophobe much?), then this should be one of the better ways to correct that rather than turning away from them.