It's been ages since this blog was updated. Technorati reminds me that this blog was last updated "20 days ago"....

In the meanwhile, a follow-up blog is at FOSS4US and it deals with Free Software and non-profit organisations.

On another front, the AfricaSource mailing list is up and active here. Check it out, as the introductions are just coming in....

Here's a yet-to-be-proven thesis: the visibility of a country's achievements in Free Software is directly related to its English-language skills. Sound unrealistic? Not really. Fact is that to talk about what you're doing, in a largely English-speaking globalised world, you really need English language skills.

It's therefore no surprise that countries like India and the Philippines have a larger-than-life image about what they're doing in the world of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software). In reality, of course, other countries might be doing quite a bit more. China surely is. So is South Korea. But we seldom hear about those.

Kind of got infected by the blogging virus after Asia Source, and that prompted me into experimenting with a number of blogs on Blogger.com. This is a useful site because of the features it offers (multiple blogs, different subjects, one dash-board for control, etc).

What would the others feel?

Some of my blogs deal with Free/Libre and Open Source Software in Asia and IT's relevance to the common(wo)man, in keeping with our BytesForAll.org concept.

These guys, young friends from West Bengal, are trying to get the tribal Santhali language working with Free Software. Incidentally, L2C2 is Low Cost Localised Computing in itself an interesting concept. Being interestingly executed too.

Below is a self-explanatory entry from the Randomink Blogs site It is from "Weekend Aantel". Sayamindu from Kolkata was mentioning the Santhali project recently.

Wikipedia has this to say about Santhali : Santali is a language in the Munda subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. It is spoken by about six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Most of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Tripura, and West Bengal. It has its own alphabet, known as Ol Cemet', but literacy is very low, between 10 and 30%. Santali is spoken by the Santhals.

Over breakfast (or was it lunch?), we exchanged links and subversive ideas. Oh, what a world that would be, if only knowledge was really free!

Jean-Claude Guedon of thbe Université de Montréal is probably better introduced by a paper he wrote. "Just search for me and 'Oldenburg'," he said. It did pop up in a trice, at http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html This is a text about "librarians, research scientists, publishers, and the control of scientific publishing".

Guedon is passionate about open publishing. It echoes in what he writes: "In the last 50 years, publishers have managed to transform scholarly journals —- traditionally, a secondary, unpromising publishing venture at best —- into big business. How they have managed to create extremely high profit rates is a story that has not yet been clearly told. What is the real basis behind this astounding capability? What is the source of their power? How can it be subverted?"

The other day, I shared this note with my user group. It's an HOWTO on encouraging women in GNU/Linux. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/index.html Don't expect a response; I didn't. None came.

Dunno if women need the "encouragement". But what they could do with is a level playing field, and lower entry-barriers. When we were working on an earlier report on FLOSS (see http://www.maailma.kaapeli.fi/asia.html/ ) it became rather clear that FLOSS's geeky, male-only orientation isn't something quite so helpful in making it more relevant to more people.

Take some figures: Putting out a search on Google.com for WOMEN and LINUX threw up 2.6 million links. Both subjects are, for the right or wrong reasons, popular search terms on the Net. But combine the two, and see what happens. "WOMEN and LINUX" (with the term enclosed in careful quotes, to ensure that both topics go together) throws up barely 356 responses. See http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=%22women+and+Linux%22&meta=

From Uganda to Nepal and even in remote Tajakistan, they're experimenting. We're still some way away from having all the answers. But at least we have a more clear defintion of the problem. Maybe we even have some hints of the route to get there. From all these places (and beyond), Free/Libre and Open Source Software seems to be the answer for the poor, neglected classroom.

Ask Wire Lunghabo James of Uganda.Says he: "We tend to think of users as people without teeth.As if they cannot bite meat. They may not have fangs. But they *do* have teeth."

His point is that users can use technology intelligently... if only given the chance. An ICT professional with vast exposure to Internet services, rural and urban connectivity, local and wide-area networking, and management information systems, Wire has his finger on the pulse.

You wouldn't think the Asia Source camp is already over. Not at least, if you went by the mailing list. Check out http://lists.tacticaltech.org/mailman/listinfo/asiasource-l and see how active this list continues to be. Infact, it is more active now than ever.

Now that the momentum has been built up, it seems that the real discussions are taking off. It's not just routine how-do-I-get-there and whatever-happened-to-my-visa queries.Admittedly, a few were of the "I-reached-home-safely" type, and understandably so. But that's quickly changing. Check the archives of this list at http://lists.caltha.pl/pipermail/asiasource-l/

This is nothing but a borrrring listing (or is it?) of URLs linked to people present at the Asia Source. It might seem long and dull, but perhaps it needs to be put down. Just for the record. If you know of any more, or find some that don't work, do let me know:

http://www.mahiti.org * http://www.tacticaltech.org * http://www.aspirationtech.org * http://www.myanmarlug.org *

Some links to a regional initiative to "develop local language computing capacity in Asia", from a hand-over given by a friend from Nepal, Subir Bahadur Pradhanang *

http://www.PANL10n.net (ran into what could be flash here) says it works on documenting problems and researching solutions to enable localisation of ICTs. This three-year (at least) partnership is a marriage between the IDRC (International Development Research Centre) of Canada through its Pan Asia Networking (or, PAN) program and the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences in Pakistan. The latter is networked through its Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP).