Report

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>]

Salam .. I guess that I mentioned most of what happened in my previous 
emails.. but here is a quick status report for the OSS workshop to know where 
we need to follow up..

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Duali: 
* Two entities are interested in Duali, they are:
	- Maktoob.com (Tamer K. Al-Nasser)
	- HancomOffice - through OpenNet (Jamel Eddine Sghaier)
* Both of them expressed initial interest about Arabeyes, they both want them 
for thier services, and find it of benefit to them to support it. They need 
status report about Duali, and need to know what is needed from them to make 
Duali move faster.

Coorperation:
* UBM (United Business Machines), the IBM business Partner in Jordan expressed 
wellingness to help and support Arabeyes. They mentioned Web Hosting as an 
example. Isam will be meeting Mr. Zuri Abu-Awad in monday 23 Dec, to 
ferthurly discuss it. 

* Mr. Ra'ed Bilbasi, CEO of INTAJ, said that INTAJ would love to coorperate 
with any entity (Org, Com, etc..) that help INTAJ in it's mission.

* Rasha Morgan, from IBM Egypt, expressed willingness to coorperate with 
Arabeyes in certain aspects of Arabic language support. She needs Arabeyes to 
propose what exactly Arabeyes need IBM Labs efforts in. It need to be 
something chalanging, it seems that IBM people like big chalanges.

* Marzouk Mahrama, Marzouk Industries (www.marzoukind.com) empressed general 
interest on our efforts. He thinks that there maybe coorperation with Talal 
Abu Ghazalah Group (one of the big Groups in the Arab world) with Arabization 
issues

Li18nux:
* Rasha Morgan is co-board in the Li18nux committee, She agreed on the Li18nux 
groups transperency issue, and the complexity of registration. She asked Isam 
to send her an email with notes and suggestions for the Li18nux. She noted 
that Li18nux main focus for the next 2 years will be in Bidi issues.

Arabeyes Non-profit approch
* A number of attendese expressed great impresstion on Arabeyes. Some of them 
and from the speakers thought that the Arabeyes non-profit approuch does not 
contradict with having full-timers working on Arabeyes projects for money. 
What non-Profit means for them is that the money that Arabeyes make would not 
go to share holders or anyone .. but get invested on Arabeyes projects. They 
mentioned some non-profit organizations that pay to full-timers. Ways that 
Arabeyes can make money from include selling Documentations, support, having 
payed memberships, etc.. 

Arabeyes Quality Assurance
* A topic that was raisen is Quality Assurance. An idea was to have a testers  
or bug tracker team for Arabeyes projects, and other Open Source software 
that have probelms with Arabic.

Press and Publicity
* Robin Miller still going after Isam to do a piece about Arabeyes for 
linux.com
* Zaid Nasser, IT Page editor in the Star Weekly, will write furtherly about 
Arabeyes for next week.