CSDN is a tech forum/news site, kinda like Techcrunch. It has been around for quite a few years. This github like thingi seems like a joint effort between CSDN and Tencent, whose open source projects (currently six of them) can be found at https://code.csdn.net/Tencent.
Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.
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.
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.
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...
+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 Github team may learn something from the Chinese (and I recall this is true in many Eastern Asian) community. Portal is essential in many popular Chinese websites. People like reading columns and discover things from headlines and visual columns.
Imagine Github offers a way for organizaitons to publish news! So instead of me going to blog.mozilla.org or blog.github.com to find out what's going on, I can just subscribe to an organization, get a newsfeed of their latest releases and announcement, and highlight commits (ex: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59) !
I don't have time to implement this as an idea, but I think Github has that resource to implement it.
I think that the popularity of portal sites in East Asian countries is tied to their high-context cultures, so I doubt they would be very popular in the low-context West.
The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
You reminded me of the sheer abominable genius of the website for Ling's Cars http://www.lingscars.com/ which is one of the finest examples of this in the UK.
> The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be.
I think it has to do with East Asian languages in general having a much higher information density, so their designs also reflect that. To me, that author's examples of "beautiful web design" appear relatively contentless and unfinished (except for the first one), while those he dislikes are obviously content-centric and seem far more pragmatic and useful.
The bias is quite evident in that article: "One culture's clutter is another culture's useful information." Being from the East myself, I've always found the increasingly "information-averse" nature of the West to be a little odd.
Short version, in a 'high context culture', things can be left unsaid and the cultural background will explain effectively to people within that culture (and less effectively to people outside that culture).
A Texan (the American south is high context) can say quite a bit with 'yep...' and letting the culture explain the rest of the meaning.
In a low context culture, less emphasis is placed on single word choices (though they can still be important) and more explanation of the entire context of the communication is done.
It is partly true. That's why CSDN tried to adopt a different strategy other than Github.
Quality and quantity of original open source projects in China are not good enough. As the 1st step, CSDN is trying to foster the culture. To have the IT giants, like Tencent onboard, is definitely helpful to attract more engineers to play some parts in the game.
Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.