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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> If you want the aim for the program
to be language and culture agnostic and the idea of following up on the
project in substance both to be serious having project supervisors who
are able to communicate with the grant recipients in their native
language would probably be essential. These do not necessarily have to
be part of a formal committee of course. But having people who - from
the outside and not being part of the projects themselves - accompany
the progress of the projects for their duration would be quite
significant.</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Christoph, that is
asking a lot of volunteers...communicating in native languages
of grant beneficiaries when the native languages are Swahili,
Zapotec, Uzbek, Bahasa Javanese, Kannada, Zulu, or Haitian
Creole would be very difficult to implement. As an American
diplomat who served in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, I can
attest that language barriers are indeed a problem (within India
my native local employees had to hire interpreters at times
because there are so many languages), but I doubt we can expect
the OSM volunteer community to include speakers of nearly every
language on the globe who are also willing to take on
responsibility for grants management. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">That said, perhaps we
could consider a "United Nations" approach and have a subset of
languages in which applications would be acceptable, and for
which volunteers might exist to serve as grant managers. The
choices (this is just top-of-the-head thinking out loud, don't
hammer me for not including your favorite language) might be,
for example, English, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish,
Farsi/Dari/Tajik, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi/Urdu, Russian,
Swahili, French, Hausa, and Malay. These are widely spoken
languages within particular geographic areas, and in my
experience it is less difficult, for example, for a Telugu
speaker to find someone to translate from Telugu to Hindi than
from Telugu to English. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">And I know that
"Google" is a four-letter word in the OSM community, but I feel
compelled to point out that Google Translate does include the
following languages:<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Afrikaans<br>
Albanian<br>
Amharic<br>
Arabic<br>
Armenian<br>
Azerbaijani<br>
Basque<br>
Belarusian<br>
Bengali<br>
Bosnian<br>
Bulgarian<br>
Catalan<br>
Cebuano<br>
Chichewa<br>
Chinese<br>
Corsican<br>
Croatian<br>
Czech<br>
Danish<br>
Dutch<br>
English<br>
Esperanto<br>
Estonian<br>
Filipino<br>
Finnish<br>
French<br>
Frisian<br>
Galician<br>
Georgian<br>
German<br>
Greek<br>
Gujarati<br>
Haitian Creole<br>
Hausa<br>
Hawaiian<br>
Hebrew<br>
Hindi<br>
Hmong<br>
Hungarian<br>
Icelandic<br>
Igbo<br>
Indonesian<br>
Irish<br>
Italian<br>
Japanese<br>
Javanese<br>
Kannada<br>
Kazakh<br>
Khmer<br>
Korean<br>
Kurdish (Kurmanji)<br>
Kyrgyz<br>
Lao<br>
Latin<br>
Latvian<br>
Lithuanian<br>
Luxembourgish<br>
Macedonian<br>
Malagasy<br>
Malay<br>
Malayalam<br>
Maltese<br>
Maori<br>
Marathi<br>
Mongolian<br>
Myanmar (Burmese)<br>
Nepali<br>
Norwegian<br>
Pashto<br>
Persian<br>
Polish<br>
Portuguese<br>
Punjabi<br>
Romanian<br>
Russian<br>
Samoan<br>
Scots Gaelic<br>
Serbian<br>
Sesotho<br>
Shona<br>
Sindhi<br>
Sinhala<br>
Slovak<br>
Slovenian<br>
Somali<br>
Spanish<br>
Sundanese<br>
Swahili<br>
Swedish<br>
Tajik<br>
Tamil<br>
Telugu<br>
Thai<br>
Turkish<br>
Ukrainian<br>
Urdu<br>
Uzbek<br>
Vietnamese<br>
Welsh<br>
Xhosa<br>
Yiddish<br>
Yoruba<br>
Zulu<br>
</font></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><font face="Helvetica, Arial,
sans-serif">On 1/14/2020 10:28 AM, Christoph Hormann wrote:<br>
</font></div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:202001141628.20899.chris_hormann@gmx.de">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">On Monday 13 January 2020, Joost Schouppe wrote:
</font></pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
Please provide feedback before January 28th, so that we can
potentially look at this at the next Board meeting Jan 30th.
</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
To not keep this thread completely dominated by the meta-discussion on
the form and procedures of document development a few comments on the
actual draft:
* as i said before the overall concept of this draft looks quite
positive to me.
* many of the points of my previous comments:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-October/006294.html">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-October/006294.html</a>
still apply (with the exception of the progress made on the follow-up on
projects - more on that below) I would encourage the new board members
to look over these previous comments.
* the promise to try facilitating translations will not eliminate the
problems of language and culture bias. Selecting a commitee based on
English language capability will inevitably introduce a significant
bias into its composition which would propagate into the selection even
with a highly supportive translation service being provided to
applicants (which is often difficult in the first place).
* i see a problem with the idea of the same people doing the selection
of projects being involved in follow-up on these projects. Someone who
has made the decision to select a certain project will often have the
tendency to justify that decision afterwards. This is in conflict with
the aim to accompany the projects with critical evaluation for doing
what they were selected to do within the principles and rules of the
program. Put more bluntly: Sacking a project for not abiding by the
rules would require the committee to admit they have made an error in
judgement. I see there are also reasons for combining the two tasks but
the described issue can IMO not be ignored. It could also increase the
tendency to select by cultural commonality (preference of people to
select projects they personally would want to work with later).
* connected to the previous point: If you want the aim for the program
to be language and culture agnostic and the idea of following up on the
project in substance both to be serious having project supervisors who
are able to communicate with the grant recipients in their native
language would probably be essential. These do not necessarily have to
be part of a formal committee of course. But having people who - from
the outside and not being part of the projects themselves - accompany
the progress of the projects for their duration would be quite
significant.
--
Christoph Hormann
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.imagico.de/">http://www.imagico.de/</a>
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</pre>
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