Fedora in Japan
June 18th, 2008 — red_alertAccording to the mirrorlist activity map, there’s quite a bunch of Fedora users all over Japan (mainly Tokyo/Kyoto area I think). That’s quite interesting, because we have no ambassadors in Japan at all. Well, we have hardly contributors there at all.
The wiki shows up 4 contributors when I search for “Japan”. All of those four did not yet migrate their userpage to the new wiki. One of them is involved in the Fedora JP Project, which seems to be out of business now (last news was the release of F8). To me, it seems all 4 guys are inactive. If they’re not, they seem to to translation work which is needed – F9 was translated to Japanese to only 84% according to the translation team’s website.
I also joined #fedora-jp (obsolete) and the newer #fedora-ja, to find no more than 3 users.
I also checked the FedoraEvents page in the wiki: no events in Japan. I also googled around a little, but didn’t really find a Linux/FOSS event in Japan (might be due to my problems with the Japanese language) that has more than 100 attendees. Are there no such events in Japan?
Why are there hardly any contributors from Japan while there’s quite some downloads? What are we doing wrong there? What could we do to get them involved?
July 10th, 2008 at 06:34:06
Probably not one smoking gun, but:
* Japan has a good system to bring international researchers into Japan, .. like me. (Especially to Tokyo and Kyoto) We tend to stay for a short period of time then go home. It’s much faster to download Linux than to try and get English Windows. There are enough day-to-day challenges outside of research to eat time away that might otherwise go for software development. There is a big tendency to use it and leave it.
* Japan is a very “inside / outside” -centric place. Japanese people often find it easier (psychologically) to do their own thing without asking for help or sharing.
* Japanese language barrier is pretty big and intimidating–from both sides.
… There is activity in Ubuntu ja. For all I know that could be draining people from Fedora.
Unless someone was native-level in English, Japanese, and Fedora it’d be hard to facilitate increased contribution from Japan.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:52:46
Great comment on that, thank you Lance! That’s very interesting and I might dig a bit deeper into that as I find time for it.