PR STRATEGY
- Need a 360 degree strategy.
- Must be easy to translate
TRAINING
- Need video guides in English
- Quick overviews
- Detailed walkthroughs
- Translated video guides
- Wiki docs to be transferred to Community site, translated to Lingua sites
- Remember to use long wiki docs (posting guide, translation guide, style guide) as reference for people unwilling to RTFM (Read The Fun Manual)
- Initially tell people to read “Welcome” documents
- Make sure welcome documents cover simple version of tech processes.
- For specific questions link directly to section of reference and paste content into email.
- Remind them of documents for reference
- Use screen sharing to show contributors how you do it instead of trying to describe it in text.
- Izumi to share guidelines in English
Profiles
- Unified profiles across sites is on TODO list but not promised for specific time
- Link to profiles on other sites from your bio on each site.
- Use sidebar to show RSS of you posts from other sites on your profiles (Gohary and Paula can explain how).
- Encourage contributors to write their bio/profile as if it was a CV so it is useful for jobs. No limit on length.
- Claire will start community conversation about professionalizing profiles (if people want!)
SEO/Promotion
- Make sure the Global Voices Wikipedia page is translated into your language and it links to your Lingua site.
- Make sure your personal sites and any other sites that make sense link to your Lingua site, all links improve your Google ranking.
- Don’t put them as spam in other places, Google can smell spam and hates it.
Translating tweets
- Know your tools!
- Blockquote button in visual editor to convert a paragraph back and forth.
- .translation option in “Styles” pulldown menu to make a paragraph into translation blockquote and back again.
- Other options in Styles pulldown work the same way
- Click an element and look at Styles pulldown to see which styles are active. Also look at blockquote button to see if element is a blockquote.
- To “escape” blockquote and get a fresh clean line:
- Add a new line at the end of quote (cursor after last line and hit enter)
- Click blockquote button (“) to make the new line into a clean paragraph.
- Now you can make the new line into a translation if necessary.
- Works for normal blockquotes and tweets equally (since they are ultimately just blockquotes).
Counting Quick Reads in terms of Active status
- Veroniki wants QR to be counted for active status.
- This is fair, we should count them significantly now that they are longer.
Management style + Community
- GV Português has four editors who help share the workload
- They experimented with assigning each other work days, but ended up working more fluidly
- GV Français, which has been active for seven years now, fluctuates in activity
- The editors and community leaders don’t maintain a rigid system; they do what they can when they can.
- Claire recommends finding at least two or three community members who have consistent schedules and relatively settled lifestyles.
- GV Español operates with a “core team” of translators who follow a specific editorial direction and publishing schedule. The rest post what they want and when they can.
- GV Japanese focuses specially on welcoming new volunteers and maximizing collaboration on post translations.
- GV Malagasy divides their community into two teams, each of which is managed by one of the two co-editors. These teams engage in friendly competition to see who can post more each month. This strategy has proven to be motivating.
- GV Arabic sends already-drafted welcome kits to volunteers that suggest a personal Skype meeting with the editors to get to know one another.
- They reward active volunteers with publishing privileges.
- GV Aymara has only one editor, five consistent volunteers, and a sixth volunteer whose activity fluctuates.
- The editor decides the editorial direction by choosing articles from GV Español and sending them to each volunteer. Translators have the goal of translating at least one article per month.
- One of the reasons that the editor sends articles to each volunteer is because most of them don’t have internet access in home, and therefore don’t have time to scan GV Español themselves — so they go to Internet cafés, download their articles, and take them home to translate.
- They’ve found that their audience engages most with posts that are seven paragraphs or less.