David Sifry, founder of Technorati and Offbeat Guides, talks about building international businesses. Two quick points: you need to find great local people you can trust, and you need to make sure they are properly connected and can execute. How do you do this? There are no exceptions: you have to go there. Wherever there is. You have to go spend time with people. Face to face. 

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Ikuko Kagaya from Sun Japan thanked some community contributors today for helping translate the release notes for OpenSolaris 2008.05 into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Brasilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean. That's 10 languages of content with the Sun globalization team working with 10 contributors from the OpenSolaris community around the world. There are more documents that need translating, though. If you are interested in contributing, see Reiko Saito's outline at "How to Translate OpenSolaris Documents" and just jump in.


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Melanie Parsons Gao is collecting a fine list of Sun's g11n blogs. This is good reading for me (well, what I can actually read, anyway). Although Sun is opening its stuff and building engineering communities around the world, our internal software development operations have been global for quite some time. It's interesting to see the distinction between the various regions and cultures and how the people involved in globalization are helping build communities across all those firewalls in all those countries.

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