[Indlinux-group] Indic@FOSS.IN report

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@ra...>]

Hi all,
 a log of indic activities at FOSS.IN

Karunakar

===
FOSS.IN/2005, the premier Free & Open Source Software event happened
at Bangalore Palace, Bangalore, India from 29th Nov to 2nd Dec 2005.
As always the event provided a center point for different
localization groups to get together. The highlights of the event were
the whole day localization track on 2nd Dec, IndLinux stall at FOSS
Expo and the Indic computing BoF sessions.

First with IndLinux stall, the event this time saw a wider
participation from FOSS groups at the FOSS Expo, so it was pleasant
not to be alone. Setting up a stall & holding on there is always
tough, esp. with the absence of few regular volunteers who couldnt
make it to the event. Its high time others come forward to take
initiative on own than on some push-pull factor. Overall the response
was good, though no effort was made to track it & some more
preparations like giving out pamphlets, indlinux CDs etc could have
made it better. An interesting aspect noticed was of the support
staff at the venue (security, cleaners) etc getting curious seeing
the Indic interfaces. We had a new banner this time, though old one
was also on display for couple of days by the closing of event it
also went through the ceremonial signing party by speakers,
volunteers & delegates.

As usual the stall saw a regular gathering of FOSS proponents &
Indicers. Highlight points of these discussions were Konkani and
Manipuri localization. Konkani which is written in 3 scripts
(devanagari, kannada, roman) poses an interesting question as to the
triple effort needed for a complete localization. It offcourse
demands development of some transliteration schemes to convert to &
fro between Konkani text written in the different scripts. Those
interested in Konkani efforts join the ilug-goa group where Fred is
trying to sew Konkani efforts.

Manipuri is one of the unsupported languages, though it can be still
used with Bengali script, there are some efforts to revive ancient
Meetei script, which is still a long drawn process, pending which
some basic localization tasks like locale definition, keyboard, fonts
(using bengali script) can be worked on. Interested people join
linux-manipur group where Pebam Ringo is trying to get the people
together.

Indic BoF meet happened on Day 2 afternoon in FOSS village and was
attended by the groups - Ankur, C-DAC, IndLinux, Janabhaaratii,
Malayalam, Oriya, Swecha(Telugu), Tamil, Utkarsh(Gujarati). This BoF
also got clubbed with FOSS in education one, the underscoring point
being that local language computing forms a critical part of it. Main
points in discussion were: Testing, Deployment and enhancing
communication among groups. Extensive testing has to be done for
different stuff, since while the support is already there, there are
still issues cropping up across in different environments. This
demands documentating all bugs, writing test cases, preparing test
data etc. On deployment, it was discussed to identify few test sites,
where Indic stuff could be deployed for use by a specific target user
group and collecting feedback to improve things. But the main
realisation being that its high time the differernt groups be more
vocal about their activities, talking about it in different forums,
mailing lists, blogs, update posts etc. so that the rest of world
comes to know what a team is doing, interesting people feel motivated
and encouraged to join in and duplication of efforts can be avoided.

All Indic & Localization talks happened on the last day as a single
track in Cox hall from morning to evening. This year saw lot more new
speakers in this area, talking about useful work they have been doing
in Indic L10n area.

Following were the talks (in order of schedule)

The long and winding road: FOSS computing in Indian languages
Gora Mohanty, Sarai, CSDS

Delivering Localized Content in Education
Indranil Das Gupta, L2C2 Technologies

Indic Tools for Community Knowledge Bases
Srinivasa Raghavan K, Sarai Consultant

A Javascript Indic Input Method Editor
Surekha Sastry, Sarai Consultant

Localization With Mono
Kartik Mistry, Magnet WebPublishing Pvt. Ltd.

Multilingual Internet
G Karunakar, IndLinux.org

ternationalization challenges facing the WWW
Badi Kumar S, Yahoo! Inc

Workshop on Localised geographical information system
Kanhaiya K Kale

Talk slides could be downloaded from the respective talks from
schedules page
===

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