[Community-Discuss] Improving participation of Francophone and Arab countries

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jan 1, 2016, at 11:57 , Hytham El-Nakhal <hytham at tra.gov.eg> wrote:
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> Hi Borg and All,
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> Happy New Year for All :)
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> @Borg, Let's continue our brain-storm on how to increase participation from Francophone and Arab countries on the Community mailing-list.
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> Sure staff can provide this statistics but may be it'll give us a false indication, for example if 10 community members visit one specific page for 100 times (then we have 1000 hits) while 500 members visit other specific page for 2 times each (then we have 1000 hits), which page is important ? I prefer that community put their priority list important
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> pages and then seek for an accredited translator to volunteer and translate it to Arabic.
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> Let me brief the discussion done on rpd list and open it for the whole community, we discussed how to improve the participation of community members from Francophone and Arab countries in AFRINIC activities? Some colleagues from community claimed that the reason is translation in meetings is English and French only.. and website pages are in English and trainings done in English and French ... The discussion almost conclude that the official language of AFRINIC is English and for Arabic translation there is a suggestion to get feed back from community to elaborate the important web pages to be translated..

Simple, really… Three column report:

Page		Total Views		Views from Unique Source Address


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> So, What else do you think are the reasons for low participation of community members from Francophone and Arab countries in AFRINIC activities?

I think that whoever said “apathy” has largely hit the nail on the head.

However, I really have no dog in this fight as the only language I speak is English, which is why I’ve mostly stayed out of it.

I offered a few suggestions to try and steer away from the “we can’t do it all, so let’s do nothing” fallacy.

Beyond that, I’ll leave it to those more effected to choose the best solution(s).

Owen