[HanoiLUG] subscribers vs languages

[David Favro]

On 9/22/06, Jean Christophe André <jean-christophe.andre at auf.org> wrote:
> I (almost) agree this too, for IT specialists it's true, and I won't
> detail here and today why French is still spoken in 58 countries and has been choosen as the reference language for important things like Olympic games [...]

Well, I think that French is spoken in 58 countries as a second
language (due to reasons better left unsaid).  By this metric, English
is spoken in every country in the world.  But this is beside the
point.  We are talking about IT here, not what is spoken on the street
or in the home... French is, for the most part, *not* used as the
primary language of any international activities, even sometimes
including French companies operating in foreign countries, except some
very few places such as you have mentioned -- and for reasons that, as
you mentioned, perhaps are better left unsaid.  Alright, I guess I got
a bit off-topic here, but:

> But, I think you miss the point of a LUG here!
>
> IMNSHO, a LUG aims at *users*, not at IT specialists. Off course it
> needs IT specialists to *help* users.

Point not missed at all.  I tried to be very clear in my original post
that I agree that we must welcome the *users* to the LUG and serve as
a bridge for them to the global free-software community.  I am a
newcomer to this LUG, but I have observed that so far, many of the
"members" (if we can say that) are IT students or professionals, and
we *do* need to change that, and maybe segregating the list is one way
to do that.

But what about my point of encouraging and making it easy to learn
technical English for TV speakers and technical TV for English
speakers?  I sincerely hope (partly for my own sake, I need to get
better at this for my own business!) that the LUG can move into this
role, starting with the open-source online dictionary of IT terms.

Perhaps we can talk about it at the next meeting?  Is one coming up?

Happily, I am coming to Ha Noi today!!!