Arabeyes -- a critique

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

Arabeyes has been at the forefront of the FOSS [1] Arabization efforts.
It began with general ideas and evolved to concrete goals and agendas
which have taken it from a group of wishful thinkers to a group of
doers.

Throughout the 3 years of its operations, Arabeyes has seen many ups and
downs, internal and external battles and a plethora of challenges. Its
survival can easily be attributed to the determination of a few key
contributors.

The challenge that no one seems to have given much thought to is, what
will become of Arabeyes once the Arabization of FOSS is complete? Or is
this a never ending process? If indeed it is a never-ending process then
one can safely state that Arabeyes has degraded to its initial state of
being a bunch of general ideas and no conrete goals.

It is unthinkable that Arabization is something that we will be doing
for the next 20 years. However, there will be one issue remaining which
will require constant updates and maintenance -- namely, translation.
The question would then be, do we want Arabeyes to end up being a
primarily translation effort?

This is not to belittle the hard work involved in translating GUI's and 
various other documents. However, translation alone has and should not
be the primary business of Arabeyes.

One could say that Arabeyes can be involved in setting standards with
the various standardization bodies once it is a legal entity. Even if
Arabeyes becomes a legal entity and is able to collect enough donations
to pay to join consortiums such as Unicode, W3C, etc., it will not be
enough. 

Going through all of Arabeyes contributors, the reality is, technical
expertise is seriously lacking. How many real contributions have
Arabeyes volunteers made to OpenOffice [2]? What about Wine [3], KDE
[4], GNOME [5]? It is not only a question of time and a flat number of
contributors. What no one seems to be willing to admit is that we simply
do not have the people with the know-how. Is it not shameful that
Arabeyes had nothing to do with the actual development work involved
with allowing Arabic support under Debian Installer [6]? How can we even
claim fame when we have others doing the real work and all we end up
doing is translating a bunch of PO's?

In the beginning of 2003, I have posted a few recommendations [7] to
overcome this technical lacking by introducing a mentoring program.
Despite this being accepted as a 'nice idea' in principle, no effort
whatsoever has been put to make it a reality. This is mainly because
Arabeyes is too engulfed in its day-to-day activities with no more focus
on the big picture. This by no means is to say that the above mentioned
recommendations are the only or best way to proceed -- they are merely
suggestions that have had a very very short thread associated with it.
This simply shows that no real interest has really been given to an
otherwise rather important issue. It is a survival issue.
Unfortunately, we seem to be more interested in issuing press releases
and doing interviews than dealing with the future of Arabeyes as a
project.

>From what I am seeing today and from personal experiences from the very
foundation of Arabeyes, I see no real future for the project. It is the 
equivalent of building an airplane manufacturing plant but not having
the human resources to build anything in it. I will be posting some
recommendations that may help us survive the current situation, but if
my predictions are true, they will be shelved just like all other
long-term vision-based proposals.


REFERENCES:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foss
[2] http://www.openoffice.org/
[3] http://www.winehq.org/
[4] http://www.kde.org/
[5] http://www.gnome.org/
[6] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
[7] http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/core/2003/January/msg00000.html



Regards,
Mohammed Elzubeir