EV50 campaign

[Florian Mueller]

> There's bound to be some more reporting during these weeks that will be
used to further step up the ev50 campaign. <

I'm not sure I understand exactly what this means.  What kind of
"reporting"?  Press coverage?  The poll closes in 20 days, so there is some
more time, but not much, during which new things can happen.

> Except for you so far noone of us has any experience with managing
multilinguality of the noswpat site. <

I'll be glad to answer questions, but there isn't much magic to it nor are
there any secrets.  It's simply a lot of manual labor.  The only thing
that's fully automated is that the English-language values of PHP constants,
or entire English-language HTML files, are used for a default if something
is unavailable in the language version requested.  Other than that, one
simply needs to create and maintain the whole set of files in all language
versions.

Some languages are a bit tough because of their special characters (Polish,
Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and most of all, Greek) and one
should ask translators to provide OOo or Word documents, then create HTML
versions and copy over the HTML-encoded text segments (for instance, "Jak
g&#322;osowa&#263;" is the Polish text for "How to vote").  The existing
HTML codes show how it's done, but again, it's always OK to ask me
questions.

> We can't make the basic operation of nsp dependent on the availability of
sponsoring.  Sponsors don't want to pay for such basic services but for
cost-intensive extras, such as a regular "NSP award" or the like. <

You know better than an external like me what your financial abilities are,
but especially the "basic operations" are a costly challenge because they
require the continual availability of the individual(s) required to do the
job.  I think it would be a legitimate position to talk to sponsor companies
on the basis that NoSwPat has been a very successful and award-winning
campaign, but some resources are required to continue it.

The question really is how much you'd want to do in the interim.  Updating
the content now in 17 languages is a major project.  Even if I with all of
my experience in doing this were to do it, it would take a couple of months
(first some time to define and write new content that better fits the
current situation; writing instructions for translators as to which
sentences have changed etc.; getting translators started and having some
changes to the PHP code made; finally processing the various translations).

The current set of texts contains a large number of general statements on
software patents, but there are references to that now-defunct proposal for
an EU swpat directive all over the place, and some pages in the text require
a fundamental rewrite because of that while others require a varying number
of smaller changes.

If it's just about news in the right-hand column, then that's easy of
course.  There are three news.html files (in /lang/en/, /lang/de/ and
/lang/fr), and they can be edited.  If new items are added, some older ones
should be removed periodically in order to avoid an excessive height of that
column.  That's all there is to adding news items.
  
> Adding mod_dav to the server and informing us about the ports to use
shouldn't be so difficult. <

We can ask Gunnar, but MySQL AB's approval is key, and after they allowed
Gunnar to spend quite some time on EV50-related things, I don't know how
much more they can justify to do right now.  I'm not saying that Gunnar is
unavailable, but his availability is certainly not a given.

> Is there anyone apart from Gunnar who can help with this kind of admin
task ? <

Some PHP knowledge is required, and Gunnar is very competent WRT dynamic web
pages, but you should be able to find someone.  However, the question is how
you secure that person's ongoing availability.

Florian