Re: A newer logo

[Bassem Medawar <medawar at panix dot com>]

Sorry to barge in before introducing myself.. :-)

How about a logo *theme*, not just for Arabeyes but all the other Arabic 
computing projects promoted or adopted by Arabeyes, present and future?  It 
would be like the traditional open source animal theme.  It would promote 
Arabic cultural themes.  A logo can be symbolic of what the particular 
project does or purely sentimental reasons.  Of course to render a good 
logo requires some artistic skills which we programmers tend to be 
challenged about.  (Time to hookup with a digital artist brethren :-)

I like the current Arabeyes "logo" on the front page but it would be best 
if it were not gender specific as to not unwittingly alienate anybody.  A 
bouncy, smiling baby in diapers with shining eyes could symbolize the 
nascent character of Arabeyes and Arabization with an eye, pardon the pun, 
towards a bright future. :-)

Short intro:

I have been interested in Arabic computing for nearly a decade.  Originally 
my interested was in being able to exchange messages on Usenet with Arabic 
script.  With a friend sharing my interests, we started a mailing list 
called Reader (as in Usenet/email reader) to exchange ideas how to 
accomplish this.  Reader remained active until the mid 90's and promoted 
the use of Arabic script on the Internet.  In the second half of the 
nineties I got too busy to develop my Arabic computing interests.  Recently 
though I picked up my where I left off and helped create and moderate 
comp.software.arabic.

My contributions to Arabic computing has been mostly organizational and as 
a cheer leader.  Most recently, I've been working to re-launch an 
overhauled/updated Arabic Computing FAQ that was (sadly) abandoned in the 
early nineties.  I'll post more about it later.

In real life, I do application development and application maintenance work 
in a Unix environment.  I live in the New York metro area.

May I ask what's the demographics (or I should say geographics) of the 
Arabyes general list  membership?  Maybe a get-together or local chapters 
can ignite expanded interest in the topic of open source Arabization.

bassem

PS note to the maintainer, can [Arabeyes] be prefixed to the mailman 
message header to make it easy to visually sort out Arabeyes mail from 
other mail?  Thanks.