A little look behind the scenes of the localize.drupal.org team creation process

We have seen certain teams eagerly pushing for their groups to be created on localize.drupal.org as soon as possible, no matter what. I've just received a personal contact email which even included this remark about the process, so I decided to repost the reasoning here for the public to read and hopefully understand.

[...] I want to know why this process is so ugly - we need to make some bureaucracy for adding active projects into drupal growing process

I don't think it is ugly, but I agree it might not be clear. We need to ensure that other random people speaking your language are not taking over your existing fine work. (Ie. they do not open a new team without consulting the existing project/team maintainers). So we need to ensure that whatever previous work was done in the given language is cleared in terms of cooperation, so we are not opening some new parallel effort. This is hopefully ensured both by looking for existing teams and asking for their feedback and by letting the issues sit for some time for others to find out about what is going to happen.

Also, similar issues apply to some people having tensions inside language teams and wanting to fork translations. While this happened before with multiple servers per language with overlapping projects or with one server for core and another for contrib translations. We are actively discouraging that and trying to get people under the same roof. We are providing a (hopefully) good infrastructure for people to just concentrate on translation, so that they don't need to suffer from the maintenance overhead.

Those creating a team should understand that this will be the primary source of their translations and they should not do work in CVS without adding to the web service too and they should not operate a localization server elsewhere with the same team for Drupal.org projects. Many of the teams run localization servers before and we need to migrate that data, which takes some time given the accumulated suggestions on those sites, for which we have no tool to import. The issues are used to make sure that those, who open the teams understand these goals and directions and go with them.

Finally, we are beta testing, so the less people experience big issues the better; but we need people to experience those issues for them to come up and get fixed. Those starting early on the localize.drupal.org site naturally experience more issues then those coming later, since the base issues should be resolved by then. For example, we expect to roll out some performance improvements later as performance issues are starting to show and could get painful if we open the gates freely to any number of translation teams.

As with new software, it is not about secrecy or exclusiveness, it is about doing things right, so that you'll suffer less. You should not feel shut out if your team is not created within hours of your initial issue being submitted, there are teams waiting for up to a week already. Please be patient as we go through the process, it is to ensure that your existing contributions are valued and that you can effectively work on the localize.drupal.org interface when you get there.

Some of the reasons above will apply later as well, so I'm not expecting that the moderation based group creation workflow will turn into a first come first served free-for-all process in the long term either.