On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:20:03 +0400
Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org> wrote:
>lots of stuff
couldn't agree more, and with all the points kaman, who would have
thought.
I just would like to point out that in our work in EGLUG we face similar
problems, in fact we face the same problems of lake of skills and
contributors with any FOSS related or FOSS like work (including paid
work).
I think this is mainly related to how small the community is, there are
very few Arab FOSS users, and only a fraction of them with the required
technical skills or the motivation to learn them, seeing as people tend
to be busy and not everyone is a dedicated contributor only a fraction
of those will contribute anything.
I don't see how arabeyes can solve its problems without this fundamental
issue being resolved, mentoring may be a nice idea but the fact remains
that the number of contributors is very limited and does not grow.
it is not arabeyes job to promote and advocate FOSS, this is for LUGS
and advocacy groups to do.
based on this assumption I can only see 3 paths for arabeyes to follow
1- make advocacy part of arabeyes work and put effort in solving the
root of the problem
2- think of changes to arabeyes methods and goals with the assumption
that number of contributors will always be small
3- continue as is and hope the community will grow on its own accord and
through the efforts of others
I think the best option is option 2.
it could take many shapes.
for instance turn arabeyes into a funded NGO and employ developers (or
outsource development tasks)
or simply admit arabeyes developers do not implement arabization and
focus on pestering upstream developers to fix stuff and help test it
(this while not glamorous at all could be very successful, high profile
begging did fix the nasty mozilla bug remember).
or whatever
cheers,
Alaa
--
http://www.manalaa.net
ultimate_answer_t deep_thought(void) {
sleep(years2secs(7500000));
return 42;
}
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