Re: some thoughts

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

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.
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 ?

As part of my teaching duties in the University of Khartoum, I prepared
the networking laboratory syllabus for the graduation year in electrical
engineering (electronics and telecommunications). This was based on the
linux platform. It served as a kind of compulsary exposure, and what
happens is that students get more awareness about linux, and some are
doing their graduate project on linux. It does not make them linux
converts necessarily, and I think if such a thing was done in the
computer science department, we will have projects that are more
supporting to linux development.
The idea is that there are some places where linux is obviously better
than windows, like networking technologies and parallel processing.
These can be marketed to CS departments. After some exposure, students
are left to judge, and if we can collect their responses 
Another thing is that we can support already existing student
communities. We had an idea in Sudan to support Linux in the IEEE
student branch (now suspended) in the Univerity of Khartoum. Such
communities are part of the student society, and it is in their interest
to contribute to the development of the university and country in the
new technologies, in our case, linux ;)

I have to repeat that it is dangerous to overstate the usability of
linux here. A student will evaluate linux, see it is not up to his/her
expectations, and never return to it.

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. The idea is not
clear in my mind yet, but something along the lines: an arabeyes site as
a library of resources for projects, and, may be, arabeyes members as
co-supervisors (this is difficult) or arabeyes suggesting projects with
financial backing (very difficult), or an arab award...

>  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?
Believe me, it is more important to activate people who are already
available or want to come by themselves than follow those far away. Ask
any marketing expert.

>  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.

>  5. Agreement on if all necessary documents/pamphlets are in place ?
 No ;)

I am afraid this is not a really 'doing' e-mail, but I hope it contains
some meat to eat.

Regards,

Muhammad Alkarouri