Non-English .NET community experience

[duracellko]

Election has started, but it's never late to ask questions. Also this question is about getting background of certain group of candidates.

Question

What is your experience with non-English speaking .NET or developers community?

Background / More Information

There were some statements or comments about this, but it would be nice to know your background better.

About Me

I come from Slovakia and 10 years ago I blogged about .NET. And before I started blogging I asked myself what would be better:

1. Blog in English language. Advantage is to have wider reach, because there is much more English speaking people than Slovak speaking.
2. Blog in Slovak language. Advantage is to have possibly bigger impact.

For example my first blog was about LINQ. If I would write it in English, there were lot of other blogs on the same topic, so added value would be pretty small. However, I wrote it in Slovak so probably there were more people who really appreciated it, because of information in local language.

After some time I moved to different continent, so contribution in Slovak language was not my priority anymore. And especially in my whole life I met just 1 not English speaking developer.

What is your experience? Probably there is also difference between different languages/countries. For example Spanish or Chinese community must be very different compared to Slovak community.

[MarcBruins]

I hosted meetups only in the Netherlands. This means taking care of a veneu, food, speakers, and doing a bit of marketing. Our meetups where sometimes in dutch and sometimes in English, it's pretty easy for most of the dutch people to use either of the languages. My blogs are always in English because there is a much broader audience, I also find that people in tech know English.

I'm curious if you could explain how this would be relevant for this experience is relevant for the .NET foundation? I think some experience with meetups or blogs would be good. You have to know a bit how that world works although it's not that hard. If I would be selected as a board member it is not that I'm going to host a meetup for you or write a blog to tell you about LINQ.

The important part for me is to facilitate and take any obstacles out of the way:

• Help out with issues regarding hosting a meetup, could be anything from food, content, swag etc.
• Creating slidedecks or getting slidedecks for the .NET community that can be used by literally anyone
• Helping maintainers around the world, that never seen each other in real life to get together to host a meetup. This is what we did with MvvmCross and it was sponsored by the foundation.
• For bloggers in the foundation, it would be interesting to see if we could get a Grammarly license.

There are definitely more, but this is my view on how we should help out as the board of directors. We should create a sustainable foundation that not is a big brain which you can ask anything. It should be a facilitator that serves the .NET ecosystem.

[duracellko]

I'm curious if you could explain how this would be relevant for this experience is relevant for the .NET foundation?

The answer will not influence my vote, but I am curious if any of the candidates want to represent non-English speaking developers. Or encourage contribution of documentation translation.

[MarcBruins]

Thanks for clarifying, yes I would like to facilitate those groups! I would love to have .NET foundation members or anyone that represents this group to speak up if they want to do something for there local community, then the board could help them achieve it.

[Lakritzator]

@duracellko Thanks for asking this, I find it a very important question!

As a Dutch person, I can only confirm what Marc said, most dutch are fine with English.

Living in Germany made me see that there are countries where this is NOT the case, and I definitively find it important that this is not ignored.

Although a lot of Germans can handle English, some even astonishing well, it's not common to use English everywhere. This means in most cases it would make less sense to get a well know person, for example Scott Hanselman, to present in English for a German audience. It is probably better to have a local person do the presentation.

When having international events, e.g. live streams it does pay off to have closed captioning in many languages. Time can also be a factor is you want to get as many people as possible on board, or online in an event. I would advice to have at least one not native speaking member from outside of the US on the board!

P.S.
I already mentioned something similar in my "final thoughts" here

[mairaw]

I’m originally from Brazil, so started my career there where most people don’t speak English. And 13 years ago I moved to the US, with a short passage through Luxembourg in between.

I’ve worked in content localization before and understand some of the challenges that the non-English communities face.

Now I don’t work in the localization team anymore but I work closely with them to make sure we have the best experience for our .NET developers. For example, I’m hoping we can soon solve the problem of lack of IntelliSense files for non-English speakers in .NET Core. Even though this is not my responsibility, I’m involved on the process.

On my last .NET Conf session, I presented in both English and Portuguese.

I have a lot of empathy for these communities and would love to make the experience even better for them.

[SaraJo]

Seeing the amazing non-US centric communities of coders around the world, supporting non-English speaking developers is central to the success of any language or framework.

I'm sad that this needs to be a question, but I have seen many non-English speaking communities around the world not get the resources and attention they deserve because of ignorance.

I am only an English speaker that also speaks Spanish poorly, however, I've traveled the world and spoken to many people that are part of super diverse communities of coders. I think supporting those groups would be essential to the foundation's success.