Hi, Debbie! Welcome to the circus.

I've been thinking about what I could possibly say by way of welcome that goes beyond the first line of this post ... a greeting that carries with it the happy prospect of additional work burdens and longer hours at the office. :) Something along those lines finally dawned on me today, so here goes.

Some of us have been pushing extensions to Zotero's functionality that will expose the tool to new communities. Specifically, footnote backreferences and parallel cite capabilities in Zotero 2.1/CSL 1.0 will make robust legal style support possible for the first time; and the multilingual branch of Zotero, when it goes live, will make the tool viable for a large population of users working in or with Asian languages.

These are exciting developments, because they promise to bring network effects in their wake. If the platform can support any style, from any field, in any language, on any platform, the barriers to collaboration across distance, disciplines and languages will be greatly reduced. We will make the world larger by bringing people closer together.

At the same time, these new communities will have quite specialized support requirements. Most users in Japan, China and other parts of Asia will be most comfortable with support forums based primarily in their native languages. Lawyers, for better or for worse, are for the most part consumers of code, accustomed to specialized single-point-of-contact support for tools that they use, and they tend (in my own experience, at least) to shy away where that is not available.

It seems as though some devolution of support (and of the collation of user feedback) will be called for -- whether via affiliates, or satellites, or franchisees, or freelancers, or advocates, or whatever. The sticking point, viewed from the periphery, is that providers of "local" support (in terms of language, or in terms of discipline) should be "part of the circle" with links to the core project, but also have independent resources and incentives for maintaining an organization. The resources issue is important -- someone spinning up a Zotero support forum for Japanese users, say, cannot easily look to development funding, because such work is at one remove from the core. I'm not sure what the best response or mode of organization would be -- perhaps library associations could be mobilized to provide collective funding for support centers? -- but it seems an issue worth some reflection.

Welcome!