They make Mageia: Oliver Burger

Tell us all about you!

Who am I? That’s quite a question. But let me try… My name is Oliver Burger (aka obgr_seneca) and I live in southwest Germany. At the moment I’m doing something called dual studying here. It means that about half the year I am at a University and the other half I’m at a company, developing mainly web based geographical information systems but other web applications aas well.

How/where do you contribute to Mageia? What else do you contribute to? Why?

I am an active member of the German Mandriva community MandrivaUser.de, I was a Mandriva translator since about 2007 and I was one of the packagers creating the mud third party packages.
Since MandrivaUser.de had its differences with Mandriva S.A. for quite some time, Mageia was the best thing that could have happened. “Our” distribution living on without the influence of a strange company we had to live with…
At Mageia I am team leader of the i18n team. In addition I am in web team and packaging team.
As i18n team leader it’s my job to see the team has everything it needs to do its job. This means keeping in touch with the sysadmins and other teams as well as keeping the team running and cooperating as a team. In addition I am doing my share in the translations as every other i18n team member does.
Being team leader doesn’t mean I could impose decisions upon the team, it’s more
like moderating the team, finding solutions all or most of the team can agree upon and of course I am the team’s representative in the council and thus I have to see to it, the team’s opinions and needs are heard by other parts of the project.
In web team I am still more passive, I did some parts of the web sites for the Mageia 1 release and I have some plans about what I’d like to add to the Mageia web world, but I didn’t find the time to really implement them.
As a packager I am building and maintaining some smaller packages and I’m helping in the mentoring process.

So, what’s special about i18n in Mageia? What are the main points at the moment to be done? What are the difficulties?

I think special is the team building process. In all the years as a Mandriva translator, I never really worked together with translators from other parts of the world. At Mageia I see i18n as being a part of the community, working together with all the other teams. At Mandriva it was more being an unpayed underappreciated employe…

Anything what would you love to see added/happening in Mageia? 

To be honest, what I would really love to see in Mageia is loads of contributors in all the areas, so Mageia can be the best distribution out there!
So if you feel, you have any skills that are helpfull to Mageia, don’t be shy.
And let me add, that we are always welcoming new translators, there are quite some languages, that are translated by single person teams and quite some more we don’t have translators till now.So, come aboard!