Report on the 1st LSM 2005 day (Tuesday, July 5th, 2005)

[Youcef Rabah Rahal <y dot rahal at gmail dot com>]

Salam,

Note: I wrote this last Wednesday July 6th, but I could not send it
from there due to connexion issues... The rest will follow soon.

I presented Arabeyes today in the 'Documentation and i18n' track, and
I talked a little bit more than the initially set 50 min time ;-) 
20 people present, rather interested (a lot of interesting questions).

A girl is perhaps interested to give some graphical help, she said
that she is no professional artist and has no background in Arabic 
art style. I told her that that is not a requirement, and there 
should be enough flexibility for that (I, for one, need to create 
icons and logo for Bayani which are 'cultural-independent'). So, I 
showed her where the mailing lists are.

Also a Tunisian guy who works in some department in La Sorbonne
university is interested by organizing conferences (and at least video
ones), in Maghreb countries on 'FOSS and Education'. So expect to hear 
from him on the lists. Maybe I am to do a video conf with Morocco
before the end of August... I'll keep you updated.

There was a presentation from Charles Schulz (Ossama knows him ;) 
on OOo i18n. He cited Arabeyes at least twice as a _very_ good example 
for i18n communities ;)

There was also 2 other presentations: one about traduc.fr (a French
l10n group) and the other about MozillaFrance. It is interesting to
note that most of our Basic & Painful problems are also shared by
those groups:

- Lack of translators
- Lack of enough technical expertise
- New members' fear of CVS
- ...

However, unlike us, those groups don't hesitate to use other formats
than PO. Nor they hesitate to use online tools like Pootle. I think
we should consider those approaches, once we figure how Quality will be 
Assured with such a tool, although I have a feeling that it won't be more
difficult than what we have now.

Last but not least, it seems that Mandriva announced their future
'Top Secret' project at some recent Linux Expo to be the 'First Arabic 
Distro' (yeah, they call it like that) developed in collaboration
with a company based in Qatar... Anyone has/had info on that ?

-- 
Youcef R. Rahal