Re: some thoughts

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 23:29, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> ...
> >  1. Agreement on what to do with the company list noted above.
> 
> Contacting them is a good idea. Preferably personally, not via e-mail,
> as this seems to work better.  Also we may make a questionnaire to get
> what does the corporate community want from linux.

Again it seems we all agree, so who is doing what and can we in fact
contact the previously stated companies in-person to get some much
needed feedback from them ?  Any volunteers ?

> I am not sure what will be inside Arabeyes and what will be for the
> super lug. At least I prefer clear cooperation and distinction between
> the two projects.
> 
> >  2. Agreement on what to do with the universities,
> >     a. Student campaigns, alumni networks, roaming tour ?
> >     b. Teachers and research projects - how ?
>
> So, student campaigns is a +1 if we make use of existing student
> networks. IMHO, alumni networks are weak in the Arab world.
> Teachers, difficult. You need that on a one by one case, or train your
> own teachers. Research projects, yes. We need to support that somehow.

Let's keep it simple for now and concentrate on starting this from the
lowest level possible - can we hear from university students and how
they'd be willing to undertake some sort of a campaign to talk to other
follow students to educate them and to raise their awareness ?

> >  3. Agreement on how to motivate lurkers and continue the drive.
> 
> We have many non-active arabeyes members, why. IMHO, because it is not
> easy to be active in arabeyes in the area a person is interested in. I
> hesitated for some time to say this, but I have an example now.
> I have a friend that is now thinking of joining arabeyes. He is
> interested in XML/XSLT and unicode, and he is a programmer. If we tell
> him to go do khotot or KDE translation, we will more or less lose him.
> If we tell him that he ought to do something like 'implement bidi in
> apache fop' with no help, we will lose him, but after some time. Any
> suggestions?

That's why we always ask people to select their own projects/jobs first
and foremost and if they are fully open to ideas and accepting of them
then we suggest and try to butt-in :-)

> >  4. Agreement on what sexy projects we should undertake to get
> >     more world attention and appreciation ("itch" markers).
> 
> I am suggesting that we need to do it the other way round, to discover a
> specific community, what it needs, and address that. My suggestion of
> making Linux the operating system for Internet cafes still apply, but I
> hope we find other projects.

What you note is as good an approach as any.  I would further note that
we need to find someone who is willing to show-us his/her support in
action as well as words.  In other words, I think to pursue a NetCafe
and their needs we need to find some serious NetCafes that are willing
to undertake some change for us to experiment with them on their needs
and deployment.  When it comes to developing something for someone
else I very much am of the opinion of having that someone else right-up
close to me so he/she can try and use my code for feedback and support.
There is no sense in second guessing their demands and requirements.

Do we have any NetCafes we can call upon to run this experiment ?

Salam.

 - Nadim

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