Support in Multiple Languages

Community Community Council
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#1

As discussed in https://community.ubuntu.com/t/discussion-support-requests/2017/9, we found crucial to discuss approaches LoCos and the Community overall should consider to provide support in other languages aside English. We do recognise the Ubuntu Forums are a good place to start but they may be insufficient as we are getting support requests in lot of wrong places.

That said, I would like to open a discussion to alternatives we could implement globally to make the Ubuntu Experience more frictionless for new users and for people who cannot or have difficulties speaking English.

My suggestion is to consider Reddit, as it is a balanced solution regarding costs (No costs to create a sub-reddit but requires people to manage and reply to support tickets) and usability (requires accounts but it’s not dedicated to a sub-reddit, unlike forums of some sort and it is not a pain to create a new account).

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#2

As a LoCo lead, or whatever you prefer calling it (I just try contributing to the development of Ubuntu in Portugal and hopefully will be able to gather a couple people to contribute technically), we had a meeting last night to discuss a couple of items. One of those was regarding support in our mother tongue. I share this because other LoCos may face the same problem and here is our experience:

Here’s what we decided to do and why:

  • Forums are an important part. We decided we should look hard to have our own section in Ubuntu Forums. Technically speaking, this is the less expensive option. Setting up a discourse forum for our own implies way more structure than this option. Besides, we do not generate enough traffic to justify this technical investment in services and maintenance. Ubuntu Forums work perfectly for this!

  • The website should explicitly say where people can find support and in which languages. Therefore, we will change our main website to make sure it is explicitly mentioned where people can go to to find support.

  • We have our custom channels we use to communicate with other. We do not use IRC often, but we have a Telegram group. Those should all go into that place and make sure people can see it and understand how it works.

Hope these thoughts can be helpful to any other group facing this problem and I hope to hear others sharing their own experiences and reasonings to help each others.

Regards,
Gustavo.

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