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Comment by turingbook | Hacker News Reader

Editor in Chief at CSDN here. CSDN is the biggest online community for developers and IT pros in China with more than 30 million registered members. Its news and discussion service part is more like HN or Reddit/programming other than Tech Crunch. And it also has services for blogging, code hosting, programming training and careers, all developers centered.

The code hosting service under discussion is based on Gitlab, developed and operated by CSDN staff. Tencent became a sponsor this year.

And because there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China, we are instead building user community around open source projects at first. It will be a little different with Github way.

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The 'real' Github clone in China is called gitcafe, available at: https://gitcafe.com

I have been involved with the community for many years... and therefore I do not completely agree with your statement: "there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China". We have them, and they generally contribute directly to the projects involved (as it should be as you do not want to create islands/insular projects). Local (and localized) initiatives are great and I hope this is what you meant.

I mean that the number of people who contribute to, the quality and activity of local projects is not very good, compared to the projects on Github. And the contribution from China to international projects is also not very big.

The open sources community in China is still small and lack solid industry support. We should build a bigger community and let more people have the ability and will to contribute.

Any plans on adding "English" and other languages to the site ? There is some very interesting features :)

I am in charge of CSDN development team. We don't have a plan to make an English version yet as for now our focus is still on local open source community setup. Maybe one day when the situation is mature enough...

Why not design internationalisation and localisation into it, and have contributors translate the ui? Shouldn't be too much of a problem.

That might be an excellent way to demonstrate the power of FOSS to a small but growing community in China...

+1. Too often organisations like CSDN, 51CTO, etc believe that the Chinese market is 'totally' different and therefore needs a different approach/method. They still need to realize it is not the message itself, but 'how' you tell the message.

Side note: I have been closely involved in the Chinese Fedora community; assisting and streamlining procedures within the community and getting the community members closer aligned with the project and project goals. As a project we actually haven't treated Asia or China any different from other regions, such as South America, Europe, etc.

China market is not totally different of course, which is self-explanatory that we have similar services with Github, Stackoverflow, Wordpress and Hacker News.

However, it is still different, sometimes very different in details and implementation. And the difference needs time and efforts to eliminate.

I think we can open more development roadmap like localization to the community.

yeah, Thank you !

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