Hi everyone
This is a fieldnote to briefly tell you about a series of phone calls
I made yesterday to people at Apple about getting support in the form
of a helpline or manuals in Spanish to support our efforts at uptake
and sustainability locally.
The basic idea is that our local LCM site coordinator would probably
benefit from being able to call or look up help in Spanish, and so
far these resources do not exist in any organized way at the level
of the software/support providers. If you get lucky, a help operator
speaks Spanish, and of course efforts to translate on the fly have
occurred when technical difficulties occur. But WHY isn't there any
counterpart to the kinds of documentation and telephone support in
Spanish that exixts for English-speaking Mac users everyday?
I talked to people in Cupertino, CA and in Florixda (the Latin AMerican and
Carribean export/support division) and had a very interesting talk with
someone there who described the market cycle, the differences between
types of products and models that are manufactured for export, the
existence of SPanish Language operating systems, the fact that manuals
get outdated and are not saved after a couple of model years pass, etc.
The upshot was that there is a user group in SPain that you can reach on the
Internet for some discussion of the nitty gritty of extension conflucts
and technical help; and there are two phone numbers for a huge marketing
operation in Mexico City where they usually can walk you through problems,
bu that there ate not manuals older than two years that are kept anywhere,
and none for the models that we are using. There aren't enough Spanish
language dominant users at the lowly consumers-with-a-few-grand-invested
level to justify the time and trouble. Ain't that interesting?
The fact that a U.C. San DIego researcher made the call made it interesting
enough for them to try to be helpful, and the fact that we are talking
about a sizeable population of users if we develop this system properly
and U.C. wide made it even more interesting. But we need to push and
ask and explain more....so this was the first round.
University community relations; operation of a site in its community
context....intersite activity --anyone else want a piece of this?
Thanks
Katherine Brown