Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language, BarCamp Yangon 2011

I gave a talk entitled "Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language" at BarCamp Yangon 2011. The talk covered web-based localization tools Launchpad Translations and Narro that are used to translate Ubuntu Linux and Mozilla applications. The translators can use these tools to contribute translations in a wiki-like collaboration.

This talk was designed as a hands-on session beginning with a short talk that introduced the software localization concepts in a simple non technical language, followed by a practical session where the workshop participants logged on and started translations guided by experienced members of the local translation community.

Make FLOSS Speak Your Language

Ahkeno, a Joomla! localization contributor from Myanmar translated the talk and explained some of the concepts in the Burmese language. She also shared her experience with the Joomla! localization project.

Myanmar based Mozilla Firefox localization community member Steven Zaw Htut talked about the Burmese language package for Firefox 3.6. He explained how to install the package and change the default language of the Firefox Web browser. You can visit the http://www.wordpress-my.tk/ website to download this package.

There was a good turnout for the talk. The audience was mostly young college students who were excited about participating in localization projects. The presence of active contributors from the Myanmar localization community offered them a chance to meet and join these localization efforts. I finished the talk with a few key points about working in teams, asking new contributors not to be afraid of criticism and focusing on quality translations.

Unfortunately we did not have the Burmese (my-MM) locale enabled on Launchpad Translation and Narro. It was therefore not possible to do the practical exercises without the locale and the slow internet connection would have made it difficult for many people to sign up and work on translations. This event nevertheless helped me develop the framework to begin developing material, both printed and online for the future localization workshops. The overall response to the workshop was positive. It showed me that there is definitely a need for these types of exchanges not only in Myanmar but in many different Asian countries.

Stay tuned. More about this event to come!

BarCamp Yangon 2011, Myanmar

Living in Hanoi, Vietnam, and working with the local Hanoi Linux User Group have been a great experience. They have helped me observe how community driven localization effort works and understand its problems. On January 8, 2011, few Hanoi Linux User Group members organized FLOSS Translation Camp to discuss how to promote localization and to address the problems of Vietnamese FLOSS localization efforts. Following this event and as a result of few off-line discussion with various community members, I decided to design a framework to introduce software localization to new contributors and to create an effective peer review process for improving the quality of the existing software translations. Dietrich who had been following those events closely suggested that I go to BarCamp Yangon 2011. Attending this would be a unique opportunity to know and engage the FLOSS community in Myanmar.

BarCamp Yangon is the biggest bar camp in South East Asia. Last year over 2000 people participated and more people are expected this year. Thanks to the efforts of Mike Amy and the BarCamp Yangon team, I was able to get the paper-work needed for the Myanmar visa. The international participants were received by the BarCamp volunteers upon arrival and everything went as planned if one were not to count the fact that I was stranded at the airport after arriving on a much delayed flight. I planned to stay at the Yangon YMCA but after visiting the latter, I made the wise decision to check into a hotel which offered clean sheets and a hot shower - a much welcomed treat.

BarCamp Yangon 2011 was held at the Myanmar Info-Tech campus on February 19th and 20th. The Myanmar Info-tech campus is situated near the Yangon University on the outskirts of the city. It was already crowded when I reached the venue at 8:30 AM. The registration counter did not have any information about my online registration so I skipped registration and headed to the main auditorium for the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony was very brief. The MC spoke in Burmese and then a dozen or so international barcampers were asked to go on stage to introduce themselves.

There were few machines setup for internet access in the main hall as well as free coffee. The media team was tweeting on the other side. The wireless internet was available, but it was painfully slow considering the number of people who were using it and the waiting one had to endure to get to it.

Unlike other conferences, BarCamps is a different beast. It takes a lot of jousting, pushing and shoving to get your talk posted on the white board that announces the day's sessions. Few of us who had sessions planned the titles of our sessions and handed them to a BarCamp organizer who promptly disappeared leaving us session less and in the dark. Luckily, I managed to swap a session with Luke,an attendee at the Barcamp, who had planned his talk for the next day. The sessions spread across various rooms in different buildings on the campus. Each room had a volunteer with a wireless radio that was helpful in getting across up to the minute messages. Closed circuit cameras were used in some of the rooms for the sole purpose of figuring out which rooms were available.

Please visit the page for more pictures from BarCamp Yangon 2011 https://picasaweb.google.com/barcampyangon/BarcampYangon2011

Intellectual property Lawyer and avid BarCamper John Young's talk on IP and Domain names was really interesting. Perhaps this kind of talks and the later off-line discussions sum up the joy of attending a BarCamp.

After the talk I ducked into a few sessions that were not very interesting. After a quick lunch we headed to my 'Make FLOSS Software Speak Your Language' Free Software localization talk. This talk is covered in the my next post.

While in Myanmar, I also attended The Software & Solutions Exhibition 2011 which was organized by MCF and was held at the Strand Hotel in downtown Yangon. The exhibition had stalls from Software vendors, IT training schools, and surveillance equipment vendors.

John Young blogged about his experience at the exhibition in this blog post “Bridging IT and Business” in Myanmar

Walking back from Strand Hotel onto the busy Sule Pagoda Road, I ducked into a pirate CD shop that offered everything from pirated Windows CD, Mac OSx, Android and Linux distributions. In a country with very little internet bandwidth, I was quite happy to see that it is possible to buy a Linux CD for less than one dollar.

Stay tuned. More about this event to come!

GeoHacking and promoting Open Mapping Technologies

For two years I helped evangelize OpenStreetMap(OSM) and open mapping technologies with my friends at GeoHackers in India. The group is subject of the article 'Geohackers show the way in open mapping', it feels that all the efforts bears fruit.

When I first met Geohackers, they were bunch of guys who loved to make maps. Very soon I developed a strategy for GeoHackers, combining promotion of grassroots open mapping technology adoption with events and providing consultancy services for companies, governmental and research organizations who want to take advantage open mapping technologies.

Geohackers organized mapping parties at technical events in educational institutions like OpenStreetMap Mapping Party at NIT Calicut and mapping parties that concentrated on heritage sites in Fort Cochin and Trivandrum.

These events helped me create a blueprint that can be used for organizing such mapping parties everywhere in the world. The document How To Organize A Mapping Party was the initial draft of this process. Fine tuning the process and documenting it helped in the capacity building of open mapping enthusiasts in India. More students and young people joined and contributed to OpenStreeMap project during these mapping parties.

With my intense energy I pushed the GeoHackers group to explore new ways of using open mapping technologies. We had a break when Mapping for Social Change invited us to participate and provide help to Information activists use open mapping technologies. Maps play a pivotal role for social activists along with social media.

The Mapping For Social Change workshop gave me an insight into the problems and short coming of Open Mapping technologies. On the two hour flight back from the workshop I designed a project with Sajjad. We spent the next two nights designing and building HeritageWalks.in. We presented the project to show how effectively open mapping technology used at the Maps For Social Change exhibition .

‘Geohackers’ shows the way in open mapping

About two years ago, in an open map party held in Hyderabad, some geeks sowed the idea of forming an open technology mapping consultancy team. Now, the idea has grown into a full-fledged, non-profit, open technology mapping consultancy team called Geohackers. 

The team, which consists of seven active members and several contributors, gives consultancy services on open mapping for different organisations and projects, free of cost. The team is also contributing to the Open Street Map, a project to make free and open maps.

“With the belief in the ideology that information has to be free, we undertake consultancy works and training for students on cartography,” said Sajjad Anwar, a coordinator of the open map team and a student of the MES College of Engineering, Kozhikode. The contributors include several technology freelancers and techies, working in different parts of the world, he said.

Explaining that the Geohackers might be the first consultancy service on open mapping in the country, he said, “We thought about starting an open mapping consultancy team to impart the ideology of open mapping to the people, as the need of such a consultancy is high in the country.”

The team is involved in several open mapping projects such as Assistance for Maps for Making a Social Change project and Heritage Walks.in project.  “The first project was sponsored by two NGOs- Centre for Internet and Society and Tactical Tech and we have conducted several workshops and training classes for the social workers on how to use open maps. The training and workshops were held in New Delhi and Ahmedabad,” he explained.

“Heritage Walks.in is a unique project to help tourists. People can download maps from the website www.heritagewalks.in for free,” he said.

At present, the mapping of heritage sites in Ahmedabad, Kozhikode, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram has been completed. “The project is aimed to cover the whole India. More heritage sites will be added to the website shortly,” he said.

For mapping purpose, we use GPS devices and free satellite images. The open mapping foundation has contributed two such devices for the purpose, he said.

You will find various blog posts related to events mentioned in the article.

• Fort Cochin Heritage Walk Mapping party
• Trivandrum Mapping Party 12 December 2009
• How To Organize A Mapping Party
• OpenStreetMap Mapping Party at NIT Calicut

Accessibility Reaching Everywhere Workshop Nov-Dec 2011 in Brussels

AEGIS project organizing its final Workshop and 2nd International Conference entitled “Accessibility Reaching Everywhere” on 30 November – 2 December 2011 in Brussels, bringing together both end-users (people with disabilities) as well as platform and application accessibility developers, representative organisations, the Assistive Technology industry, and policy makers. Since 2008, the AEGIS consortium (comprising companies such as Vodafone Foundation, Research in Motion, Oracle, and research groups from Cambridge University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, etc.) has been developing an Open Accessibility Framework – comprising open accessibility interfaces, user interface components, developer tools, end-user applications and prototype accessibility solutions for desktops, rich Internet applications and mobile devices.

The workshop on 30 November will focus on the realisations of the AEGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) project and provide attendees the opportunity to try out all outcomes of the project. The demonstrated products offer barrier-free access to desktop, mobile and web applications, are open source based and will be freely available.

The conference on 1-2 December will gather a wide array of experts and users in the area of Assistive Technology to discuss scientific and policy developments in accessible technology; showcase relevant projects and initiatives in the area of assistive technology.

Access to both events will be free, but places will be limited.

This event comes ahead of the European Day of People with Disabilities that is marked by the European Commission via a policy conference in the first week of December each year, in close cooperation with the European Disability Forum (EDF).

Invitations for registration, scientific papers and exhibitors will be issued soon.

Both events take place at the Diamant Conference and Business Centre, Boulevard A. Reyerslaan 80, 1030 Brussels. More information is available under www.aegis-project.eu, or contact Ms. Julie Buttier at julie.buttier@epr.eu.

About AEGIS Project

AEGIS is an Integrated Project (IP) within the ICT programme of FP7 and aims, through user research and prototype development with current and next-generation ICT, to develop and validate the necessary infrastructure and accessibility frameworks needed for deeply embedding accessibility into the desktop, smart phones and rich Internet applications; with a focus on the needs of users with mild, severe or complex disabilities served via assistive technologies; and to propose these results to the appropriate standards organisations for adoption, as well as to make them available through open source as much as possible.

You can now view the AEGIS project video online here.

Rare Hoan Kiem Turtle Sighted During Tết 2011

The Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) began with a beautiful surprise. Today we saw the elusive Hoan Kiem Turtle surface and swim a dozen feet away from the shore. "This is gonna be one lucky year" I said. "Yes, yes it going to be a good year" replied a lady in the crowd "The turtle surfaces on special occasions". It seems that the turtle was last sighted during 1000 years of Hanoi celebrations last year.

The legend of the Hoan Kiem Turtle fascinated me ever since I arrived in Vietnam, I would walk around the Hoan Kiem lake hoping to catch a glimpse of this beautiful creature. And now finally I saw it during the auspicious time of Tết.

Wishing you all happy new year "chuc mong nam moi 2011"

Click picture for full size image

How to install adobe AIR on ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat"

Adobe AIR is actively supported on Linux. Few weeks ago I decided to try to install Mockups software, it is developed with Adobe AIR. I found Adobe AIR installation easy but very inconvenient.

1. Install Adobe AIR: http://get.adobe.com/ air/
2. Choose Adobe AIR Installer for Linux and select software to download as .deb
3. Download and install the .deb package with Ubuntu Software Center or using dpkg -i command
4. The Adobe AIR is installed to /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/ directory. You can install .air Adobe application on command line or select from Applications > Accessories > Adobe AIR Application Installer.

   
   cd /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/
    sudo ./Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer  
   
   

5. You can also associate .air to open by default with Adobe AIR Application Installer. Select .air application and right click to get properies, then change the open with custom command with path '/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/Adobe AIR Application Installer'.