OAO help

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

This topic has been tangentially touched on before, but with the recent
"critique" post(s) it really became apparent that Arabeyes needs to take more
of a leadership role in terms of getting everyone organized and in bringing
people together.  To fulfill that vision a domain (courtesy of Isam.Bayazidi),
OpenArabia.org (OAO for short), is available for us to really make it the
premier portal for all things Open Source and Arabic.  The idea is for OAO
to bring the various factions together, from Arabeyes to all the other LUGs,
projects and entities.  OpenArabia.org should not pertain to source-code
openness either, it should venture into any and all Open Source mediums
(books, data, encyclopedias, etc).  The various ideas and details can be
worked out later as the vision(s) are too grand to be noted at this juncture.

The current live OpenArabia.org leaves alot to the imagination in terms of
content as well as look-n-feel.  What is there now is an RSS aggregator of
the various projects which is only a small subset of what the portal is
envisioned to do and house (this aggregator, while we are on the subject,
should really look more like www.linuxhomepage.com).  The recent spat of
conferences has also produced a need to house various "lessons learned"
and a "HOWTO" on how to go about organizing an event to include the various
do's and dont's, etc (we've had to field questions on this topic) along
with the requisite whom to contact for further help, etc.

This is all sounds good to you too, right ?  Well, it should :-)  So now the
punchline.  We need someone to take the lead on this work - by lead we mean
someone that can setup the various pages and do some minimal upkeep.  Drupal
seems to be a popular CMS that lots of people are moving towards and it seems
to handle both English and Arabic well, yet it would be the maintainer's
decision on what he/she decides to do (both Arabic and English will have to
be supported).  We'd be are more than happy to give guidance and set
direction, etc - but as has been noted a _number_ of time we are _way_ over
our heads in terms of work and simply don't have any cycles to spare and
thus the call-for-help.  We have realized though that OAO is an important
facet of our community and we can't continue to deal with it in a hands-off
manner - it is needed urgently.

In short, we are looking for some capable, serious, committed web-admins
and artists to take on OpenArabia.org in order to bring it forth as the
proper premier Arabic Open Source portal.  The work, if need be, can be
closely or loosely supervised (completely upto you) yet there is a very
genuine void in our community in this regard and we need to act quickly
to fill it.

Looking forward to getting some assistance and help.

Salam.

 - Nadim



		
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