Intro and a question

Marhaba jame3an.

I'm an "accidental techie" who's been working on Arab ICT for Development (ICT4D) issues for the past 6 years.

I'm a big believer in and an implementer of the "effective use" of technology approach advocated by Michael Gurstein in First Monday. It seeks a shift in focus from *technology* to *localized content* as the core all ICT4D projects. My small contribution to arabization was writing an Arabic Internet and email training manual in 1999 for women's NGOs, which I used to train 70 representative of women's NGOs in 5 Arab countries.

I joined the list to learn about Arabic software and tools that I can make available to NGOs I work/volunteer with. I basically want to know about and learn very simple, cost effective and powerful to provide to Arab NGOs.

So, I'm now trying to self-teach myself Linux (through Knoptics (do we have it in Arabic?) and Open Source software like e-smith (do we have it in Arabic).

I'm writing to ask whether you know of blogs and wiki software in Arabic that is available on-line for free for use by NGOs?

Thank you in advance for your responses and for creating such an important project as Arabeyes.

Salam,
Ra'ida