LSM 2005: Wed 6th to Fri 8th July 2005

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

Salam,

Thursday, 'Education' track, I did a presentation about Bayani.
The audience was mostly composed of school teachers, which is very
fine. I hope I'll get some feedback. There was a guy from the press 
who said he will talk about the fact that newcomers to FOSS don't need
  to be developers in order to help, and that he'll cite Bayani as an 
example (I made a call for graphical help ;)).

Friday, 'Education' track, I did presentation together with Juan 
Rafael Fernandez from the Ofset.org group about 'i18n in Education' 
where I did the same presentation as on Tuesday, but quicker this
time. He talked about the next generation of i18n format and
software. Namely: XLiff. His speech is at
http://speeches.ofset.org/jrfernandez/rmll2005/

Outside the tracks I met:

* Mohammed Zaanane, the organizer (one of the organizers?) of the
Casablanca Linux Days 2005 (Abdo know him ;)). We discussed a lot
about the issues of arabization. He wants to organize a big event 
in Morocco (or in a Maghreb country) that could also be a meet point 
for all Arabeyes members ;-)

* The developers and conceptors of AbulEdu, a distro and a set of
software and server for schools. We discussed the issues of i18n 
and adaptation of content to multiple communities (GCompris for
example). The projects are now developed in tcl (for simplicity) 
and thus are not well-adapted for i18n. They are thinking about 
the migration to a toolkit that supports i18n: wxPython is the 
candidate. We'll keep in touch in order to translate samples and 
create screenshots that they can rely on while testing. I'll 
keep you updated (probably on the developer list).

* Guillaume Lederer, one of the developers of Claroline.net
He interested by completing its arabization (it is partly translated).
Claroline is a very interesting e-Learning tool and would probably be
useful in the Arab world. He was present yesterday on IRC. Expect a
post from him here and/or the 'doc' list.

* Linuxconf author, Jacques Gélinas, who also works on a very interesting
tool called VServer http://linux-vserver.org/ . May probably be useful 
for our server.

* And many others :)

I attended many interesting confs (there were a LOT of interesting
talks, on different topics, all going at the same time, so it's 
quite impossible to be present in everything... There were also 
many communities boothes):

* One about OOo development and how 'easy' it is to join the dev
team... I am rather interested in that, if there is enough time that is ;)

* One about deployment of Linux in schools of a Brazil state, Parana, and
the issues they face to administer the servers online etc (due
essentially to the great number of users :)

* Many about Edu software, especially by the Ofset.org group.

* etc etc etc

The meeting ended on Saturday (I left on Friday however).

Conclusion: a very important meeting that one has to be present in
every year. It is important for us to keep contact and 
work on the issues for the next year's meeting.

-- 
Youcef R. Rahal