Twitter

At the Open Translation Tools 2007 conference, I got the impression that I was the only one who did not twitter. So I started a Twitter account and, untill today I posted only two tweets. To my amazement I have already eight people following me and, this makes me reconsider Twitter.

So, I will experiment a little bit more with tweeting. My aim will be to mostly tweet about things that I would also blog about.. But I can tweet that I have phoned a GLAM or some such...
Thanks,
     GerardM

More thoughts on book sprints

This is my second day that I have been working on a "book sprint". The one thing that I have learned about the process is, that the success is defined by the quality of the people involved. When you combine people like Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn in the mix, there will be something usable at the end.

Having worked for two days with the software used by FLOSS manuals, I am sure that a book sprint can also be done using MediaWiki. The key thing to consider is not so much can you do this, but what is the added value. Writing FLOSS manuals is what FLOSS manuals does and a community has formed around it. Replicating this effort only makes sense when it grows the creation beyond the autonomous growth of FLOSS manuals.

However, when an application is found for writing outside this domain, there might be a point to experiment with MediaWiki.
Thanks,
      GerardM

OTT09 book sprint

When you assemble people for a conference, you bring together all the people clued in on a subject. The Open Translation Tool '09 conference brought together many of the people who are involved in translation, localisation, content and technology.

Floss manuals has this brilliant notion of a "book sprint". In a book sprint a group of people write a book in a short period of time like up to a week. At the end of the week the resulting document is published and available either as a PDF or in a printed form.
Thanks,
      GerardM

dotSUB

With the news that Wikipedia is going to provide support for video, I am sure that a wealth of information will become available in this way. As video is created everywhere, much of it will not be understood because of it being in this language that you do not understand.

At the OTT'09, the open translation tools conference, I met Ed Zad of dotSUB. DotSUB is a project where people add subtitles to video. The functionality of dotSUB is quite important and I wonder how we will do this for the content for Wikimedia projects. The cool thing is that at dotSUB they are considering making their cool functionality open source.

Ed was an inspiration at this conference; he has a long career in translation and he brought the perspective of the translation industry to this conference. For me it gave this conference the depth that makes this a wonderful conference.
Thanks,
     GerardM

African localisation

The last three days I have been to OTT'09, the open translation tools 2009. It has been interesting so far. Given that it is about OPEN translation tools, the public is quite amazing. You have people who are about content, people who professionally translate, people who localise software and people who write tools to support all that.

One of the people I am always happy to meet is Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za. Dwayne was leading a session on translation and localisation in Africa and for me it confirmed many of the things I think I know but it brought also a new opportunity. I learned about ANLOC, the African network for localisation, one of the things I find awesome is that they have defined requirements for a minimal support for African languages.

The requirements can be on many levels and the cool thing is that with these requirements a website can be assessed. I would really welcome Wikipedia or better even MediaWiki to be assessed.
Thanks,
GerardM