The following is from the 2005 discussion - though the History is probably still relevant. See a more recent suggestion on how to proceed.

This page is meant as a discussion page. Please insert your comments directly in this page.

This page contains the motivation to integrate the until now separated parts of Project Oekonux.

History

In the beginning of the project back in 1999 it has been considered more useful to use the mother tongue of people. At this time only German speakers were involved and this seemed like a good decision then. Because of this the oldest parts of the project have been set up using German. This is namely the German web site and the

German main discussion list <liste AT oekonux DOT de> .

Also the

organizational mailing list <projekt AT oekonux DOT de> was German only for a long time. Of course this meant excluding the reading and writing contributions of people who can not read and/or write German. At some point this was revised and then English was the language most welcome on this mailing list.

Indeed an international branch of Oekonux also has been established (international web site and the

English main discussion list <list-en AT oekonux DOT org> ). This is kept in English so at least for the Western countries many people can at least read the content.

However, besides a few people being active in both discussion lists (usually as well as in the organizational list) there was not much connection between these separated parts of the project. This lead to the fact that the German part largely ignored the international part and vice versa. Discussions on one discussion list usually had no reflection on the other discussion list.

The only time when those two separated parts of the project met were the Oekonux conferences which from the start were laid out as international conferences. Indeed as far as distributions of participants is concerned the integration of the German and international part of the project worked pretty well in the conferences. During the 3rd Oekonux conference in Vienna more than 40% of the presentations were given in English.

Vision

Welcome cultural differences and integrate them to maximize the Selbstentfaltung of the participants as well as the general public.


A very other approach?

There are some major point from the discussion that are not (yet) reflected in the draft above. In the pox-thread with the (tendentious - not my) title "Removing the international part of the project" I stated that there are two ways of thinking about Oekonux - one from the IDEA and another from the PEOPLE. The draft above is much driven from the IDEA to have Oekonux as a single international project and to refactor Oekonux accordingly.

It does not take into account the results from the above thread, that are IMHO the following:

  • Oekonux as existing today has two "legs" - the English and the German one (I coined the terms GermanOekonux and EnglishOekonux)
  • There are (potentially) forming other "legs" (Hungarian, Russian)
  • From the PEOPLE point these are communities with much "binding" and loose "coupling" (to use two terms from software engineering)

Hence, from the PEOPLE point of view it is not possible to identify EnglishOekonux with "the international part of the project" since the former is a question of the "binding" within EnglishOekonux and the latter is a question of "coupling" between a (mainly) German speaking discussion context and a discussion context based on English. Moreover following the IDEA of the draft would destroy the existing German discussion structure.

My proposal was to have two lists (one for each community), to intensify the efforts of interlist communication as taken, e.g., by digesting ox-en on ox-de by s.ma, and to have one wiki with subtrees GermanOekonux, EnglishOekonux and OekonuxCommons. More details about the latter in the OekonuxWiki/GartenPlan.

I expect to see this my position reflected in the forthcoming discussion and hope it will be taken for serious meeting decisions. -- HGG 2005-12-01

Oekonux/Project/Integration/Motivation (last edited 2008-05-25 18:05:23 by StefanMerten)

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