[Anubad] L10n Dashboard

Thu Jan 9 14:41:18 PST 2014

Hey Sankarshan,

First of all, I'm really really sorry for getting back to you on this so
late (over a month to be precise), however, was literally stuck with too
many things, and I somehow wanted to get a better understanding of where
the project stands and how it can shape up in the future before getting
back to you.

Going through all your suggestions the most important thing that came to my
mind was that I was somehow missing out on the perspective of project
maintainers / organizations. I guess it's time I started chalking down a
formal project documentation and come up with an architectural model for
such a system, before going back to churning out code.

>From what I have gathered so far here are some of the most important
high-level requirements that I can think of:-

   1. The system should provide a consolidated view for l10n statistics
   across projects and provide easy access to individual projects.
   2. The system should be capable of data visualization for real time data
   gathered from multiple sources, to provide enhanced reporting capabilities.
   3. The dashboard should be a double ended one: i.e. have separate views
   for organizations/maintainers and individuals.
   4. It has to be modularized, so as to separate the view from the
   back-end stores.
   5. It needs to easily deploy-able to enable individual teams to directly
   plug it to their own repositories and use it.
   6. The system has to be easily extendable to allow for easy
   modifications, as well as be light, efficient and user friendly.

I would like to know about your thoughts on these as well as ask if you
think should be any more added requirements for such a system?

In terms of development speed for the project, I agree that a project of
this scale needs more aggressive goals with quick iterations, however, at
the moment there aren't enough contributors to the development efforts for
the project and most of what is done is primarily by myself during my spare
time.

As such, I would like to draw more attention towards this project, and get
more contributors aboard, however, I'm still not quite sure about how to do
that. Do you have any ideas in mind by which this project can get more
contributors to work on the development efforts?
Regards,
Sayak

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:18 PM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <
sankarshan.mukhopadhyay at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Sayak Sarkar <sayak.bugsmith at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Since the past few weeks I have been thinking about a problem that has
> been
> > a consistent pain for me ever since I started contributing to various
> l10n
> > projects here and there. The problem was that there was no single central
> > entity where I could go to, to find a list of all the projects that I
> > contribute to, and at the click of a button get directed to whichever
> > project's whichever locale I wanted to work on.
>
> I would like to consider a different aspect. Localization,
> irrespective of whether it is completely done by the community or done
> in-house for a product, has the need for project management.
>
> In other words, while a language team might be interested in checking
> where they stand per project, a project team would like to view the
> coverage and status of language/locales. A quick example, while bn-IN
> might be interested in how it stands across the products within the
> Mozilla family, Mozilla might be interested in checking how a specific
> release of Firefox is covered by languages. These are various ways of
> looking at the collated data - views. The underlying data-model that
> powers the store ensures that such flexibility of reporting can be
> in-built.
>
> > Too many URLs to remember, too many translation systems to remember, and
> > most importantly keeping track of all what's happening where, and what is
> > the statistics of the various projects. Having all these in a single
> place
> > would allow a contributor to make a better decision about which projects
> to
> > prioritize while working.
>
> So, the unification that a dashboard provides is not only the view. It
> provides a ready-to-go framework. Consider the functionality you
> expect from feed-readers - you need to add an URL (or, a feed) and,
> you want to keep polling the target system for content refresh.
>
> > I looked up a bit and couldn't find any such dashboard, so as a
> prototype I
> > have started working on creating such an l10n-dashboard, which I think
> > might also be a helpful tool for other contributors well.
>
> An approach to take would be to separate the back-end store services
> from the view model. Right now you are handing over the view to the
> actual system (your dashboard -> Transifex). The ideal way would be to
> figure out how you can systematically poll the content and, keep it
> refreshed.
>
> > The project repository can be found at:
> > https://github.com/sayak-sarkar/l10n-dashboard with a detailed summary
> > about where I'm currently working on this project as well as the
> > prospective future roadmap of the project.
>
> Additionally, while you can consider some means of running a globally
> available service that provides the dashboard, any other project (say
> a company doing non-open-source translations) should also be able to
> install it on-premises and plug-in their content repositories and, get
> the dashboards set up
>
> > I'm quite interested to get some feedback on this project from the
> members
> > of this group to better understand how this tool can be better
> implemented.
> > Also, as it's already on GitHub, anyone can simply fork it and help me
> with
> > a pull request based upon the project roadmap.
>
> In short, what your prototype now does is a view. But what would give
> you maximum impact is if you add reporting capabilities into the view
> - quick example, tie in project freezes/timelines and, thereafter
> visually depict which languages are falling behind.
>
> > A demo of the current prototype can also be found at:
> > http://sayak.in/l10n-dashboard. Not much at the moment, but it's
> atleast to
> > something to start with. :-)
>
> This is a good start. And, you have identified a large gap that is a
> pain point for a lot of projects. I am hoping that you can encourage
> more contributors and, set very aggressive goals on quick iterations
> to get results.
>
>
> --
> sankarshan mukhopadhyay
> <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>
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>

-- 
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