The enthusiasm and excitement of students was very encouraging. From what they have told us it seems they enjoyed the camp as well. Gautam said he found the informal and interactive nature of the delivery very useful. Some of them wanted to go deep into speech recognition.

Every Localisation Camp targets at least one new translator in addition to spreading awareness about making computers available in a language that is used in every other communications. This time the main target was Labeeb When we met for the first time during gnunify he mentioned he wanted to help out with translations but did not know where to start. So I thought I will call him to Red Hat’s office one weekend and will sit down with him and show him how to translate applications. Moreover he is already a contributor to Malayalam Wikipedia. I already had my audience requirement fulfilled so I announced the event as a continuation of the translation camps smc started already.

I talked to more people and every one was receptive to the idea and offered their help. So at no point in time I had any tension about the success of the event. We had a meeting of Uncode, Lokayat’s Free Software initiative and we decided to have it organised jointly. Abhijit helped mobilise students from College of Engineering, Pune and their FSUG joined in as well. The idea of a small event was shared by so many and the event grew in no time.

We had to restrict the number of participants because we could not handle more than 25 people effectively in our venue. But without much wider publicity – considering how I used to spam every user group list for previous events, we had all the people we needed to get going. Then we went about deciding the structure and agenda of the event. Naveen Kumar, Ankit Patel, Runa, Ani, Shanky and the rest of Red Hat’s l10n team pitched in and we were all set with content of the camp.

Red Hat’s facilities team took care of all the logistics and everything went smoothly. We did not have to worry much about logistics, except for deciding the lunch menu Mintos, Naveen, me and Runa weighed in the choices and came up with the final list. Now you know whom to blame if you did not like any curry We had wifi setup and net connection was least of the worries.

We had very interesting discussion about Free Software philosophy and business models. Most of the time people complains philosophy talks are boring. So we decided to have a question and answer format. People like me and facilities at the office gave a definite notion that Free Software folks are not starving So most difficult part was already taken care of.

Naveen Kumar took most of the load and explained basic components of a localised application, from encoding to rendering. His fascination with numbers and deep knowledge about Unicode encoding provided a great opening and set the audience on a smooth ride ahead.

Ankit came in and introduced tools and processes in localisation. We gave participants time to get familiarised with typing in local languages and using translation tools like lokalize. Since we already decided the schedule is indicative and go deep or skip sessions based on response we were never looking at our watches (or mobiles or time applets). We had tea breaks when we felt like having a break. Karunakar kept every one in suspense when he started with his tricks for remembering inscript layout. He said he will continue the remaining parts the next day only!

Pavitran came all the way from Hyderabad and forgot to talk about kletters

Runa talked about tips and tricks and we had lively discussions, some time going very deep into the root of the issue. She walked us through some of the challenging strings translators encounters every day and asked us if it was easier to teach people English But we were not at all in a mood to give in and thought those challenges are nothing compared to expecting people to learn English. There were some interesting back and forth between me – Sankarshan, Ramakrish – Prashanth and me, Rishikesh – Prashanth. I was wondering why people don’t find computers listening in a port funny when they laugh at khidki. I think it is a deep rooted belief that is instilled in most of the society that everything foreign must be good and we should follow it (well I agree there is a logic other side also to it, every thing foreign is bad – but we should be debating and evaluating things on our own than blindly opposing or accepting anything).

Rajesh Ranjan talked about FUEL project – effort to standardize frequently used words and Ramakrishna discussed cross platform database for sharing this standardisation effort widely.

Rishikesh gave a social perspective and discussed how a language is related with local knowledge and culture and importance of preserving it.

Nadim showed interest in what we showed him and he admitted he is a crime reporter with DNA and came in to cover the event because no one covering technology was available

Abhijith gave different perspective about learning where people are taught to collaborate than compete. He also helped with making the press release. Sankarshan always gave helpful hints, suggestions and directions through out the planning phase.

Shanky and Ani were helping out every one with translations and their systems. We are expecting feedback and summary from the students who came for the camp. Also we have updated the coordinators list with our email addresses in case any one wants to contact us for anything. We have decided to have more sessions of this kind and planned one in CoEP in May.

I should say the availability of Red Hat’s l10n and i18n teams give a definite edge to Pune when compared to any other place in India. We had many people who could handle all the sessions. It was just a matter of sharing who does what. Here also we were least bothered. All in all it was a quite natural sharing of experience by many folks who believes computing should be possible in their own language.

If you came for the camp and reading this post, please go back to the same wiki page and provide your feedback.

See Events in Bangalore for more details. RMS will be in Mysore on 14th and Tumkur on 17th. Stay tuned to FSUG Bangalore mailing list for any updates.

Update 1:

Sujith has blogged about it (Also see his flickr photos)

Update 2:

Sreejith has written about RMS visit to AC3 (Ambedkar Community Computing Center).

Dual licensing and Free Software business models in general are one of my favorite topics. So I sat down and made a diagram explaining the source code flow of a dual licensed software.

In a debate on question of “free vs non-free” or “role of non-free in free
conferences”, this one is drifting towards private and personal references
which can be avoided. Let not Novell get off the hook by stirring trouble
here. There are countless private conferences and symposiums going around
nearby which promote themes of non-free and patents. No free software
activist goes there to register protest.

Differences of opinion are usually accorded highest priority in a democratic
institution, as they may be revealing something very surprising or
innovative – silencing and subjugating are hallmarks of despotic or
autocratic institutions. No one expects the entire rank and file of
organisers to be aware of non-free designs; Novell could have very well
evaded such a public scrutiny before gaining entry here, especially when it
has very little public presence in Kerala.

Free Software conferences serve many purposes and we can accept that one
such method in revealing or knowing about non-free intrusions could be
through some kind of non-violent protest – stickers, posters and T-shirts
are hallmarks of FS protests. Now many of us know what Novell does, and such
an exposure on Novell coincides perfectly with the theme of our public
conference in disseminating concepts on Free Software.

Since public institutions have a say on private lives, it cannot be beyond
criticism. Just like “divine rights” cannot be placed over “human rights”,
it would be equally suicidal if we uncritically submitted to “political
rights” of any party. After all, political parties gain power only after
they appeal before citizens – notably the poor-off ones. Hence sharing dias
or approaching leaders is in no way a transgression, it falls perfectly
under rights of citizens. No established leader or representative would ever
think this way.

Here, a wrong has been committed by (a) humiliating an individual who
protests against a non-free incursion inside a Free Software conference and
disseminates non-free ideology and (b) protecting the non-free intruder to
display their non-free trickery without objections. Novell has succeeded in
driving the wedge, inflicting a kind of perfect damage to a contributors’
community and getting away scot-free.

CK Raju

The most interesting thing about mukt.in was the level of interaction it offered. I had some very interesting discussions with many in the community and students. Pavithran had gathered many familiar names in the Indian Free Software community for the event. Hiran and Shyam decided to come in the last minute. Hiran was taking a session on font designing and Shyam on speech recognition.

Morning itself I met Warren of Drupal and started discussing with him about debian and ubuntu. We discussed issues relating to both the projects and was thinking of having some publicity efforts around lenny release in September. I started a thread in DebianIndia about this. Now that I won’t be in India for sometime, I hope someone would follow it up (Kartik?).

Pavithran and Shreekrishna were running around making things happen. We had some discussion around localization and challenges. Some things we discussed were having consistent translations across all applications and when to transliterate (use the same words in English).

Then Shaktimaan took out his Neo FreeRunner by OpenMoko project and everyone started playing with it. I got the chance to make first call on that mobile.

We had a plus meet at Paradise hotel with Riyaz Usman joining us for dinner. We ran in the rain, took a bus, walked on the railway platform and took and auto to reach Paradise. It was Pavithran’s brilliant idea to take a platform ticket and walk on the platform since all the roads were filled with water and would have to swim otherwise.

Second day we had a very interesting BoF on Education. Thyagarajan from ilugc was telling beautiful stories about his experiences and we all shared our experiences and views on what education should provide.

Then before we concluded the event there was lightning talks of five minutes by each speaker. It was with great happiness and satisfaction I started my journey back home. But there was a twist to that journey, that I will write later

• 
  Mukt.in gallery

Some statistics here shows the progress of Malayalam translations in a week (during the most active week). Click to enlarge.

Many of us were working till 3-4 am in the morning for the entire week leading upto the 4.1 deadline on July 11. #smc-project on Freenode IRC was the main connection for realtime collaboration with ‘mandoos’ (an IRC bot who can learn maanings and teach anyone who asks for it) helping the newly joined members of the team. You can join the IRC channel using your web browser by following this link.

People from all over the globe and round the clock joined this effort. Some places to mention are Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, USA … The enthusiam showed by the members throughout this great effort was amazing. In one single day 5 new contributors submited their first translation and more than 30 people contributed to this effort (Most of the contributors are listed here). It could be one of the few languages which completed kde essentials translations in such a short time.

You can see the list languages sorted by their percentatge of translations here. Malayalam is currently at 63rd position, 4th among Indian languages.

Here are some interesting screenshots of KDE 4.1 in Malayalam.

More screenshots from here.

I would like to thank the entire team for making this possible and do join us in the release party on Aug 9th and 10th at Thiruvananthapuram. Location and event schedule to be announced later (tune in to our mailing list for more details)

Update 1:

List of contributors. Thanks to Ani Peter for making this list.

1. Sasi Kumar
2. AnilKV
3. Ashik
4. Anoop
5. Anoopan
6. Prasad. S R
7. Hari Vishnu
8. Manu
9. Santhosh
10. Praveen
11. Manilal
12. Sushma
13. Sujith
14. Smitha
15. Remya
16. Hiran Venugopalan
17. Hitha Venugopalan
18. Chandrettan
19. Sankaranarayanan
20. Pratheesh
21. Syam Krishnan
22. Shiju Alex
23. Ragsagar V
24. Maxin B John
25. Sarath Lakshman
26. Baiju. M
27. Joju Joshua
28. Afsal
29. Nishan
30. Rajiv and his Mandoos
31. Ani

Update 2:
KDE 4.1 Release Notes – Malayalam English

Will write more after the event.

പുതിയൊരു ശബ്ദാത്മക നിവേശകരീതിയുമായി ഇത്തവണ വന്നത് ജിനേഷാണ്. ഗൂഗിള്‍ കോഡിന്റെ വേനലില്‍ സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് പങ്കെടുക്കുന്ന 5 സംരംഭങ്ങളിലൊന്നാണിത്. ഏതാനും ദിവസങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് മുന്‍പാണ് സന്തോഷ് സ്വനലേഖ* എന്ന് പേരിട്ട തന്റെ സ്കിം നിവേശകരീതിയ്ക്കുള്ള മലയാളം ശബ്ദാത്മക പ്ലഗിനുമായി വന്നത്.

ബോല്‍നാഗരി എന്ന പേരില്‍ ദേവനാഗരി ലിപിയ്ക്ക് വേണ്ടി ഇന്‍ഡ്ലിനക്സ് സംരംഭം തയ്യാറക്കിയ കീബോര്‍ഡ് വിന്യാസത്തെ അടിസ്ഥാനമാക്കിയാണ് ഇത് തയ്യാറാക്കിയിട്ടുള്ളത്. വളരെ എളുപ്പത്തിലുപയോഗിയ്ക്കാവുന്നതും കൂടുതല്‍ സജ്ജീകരണങ്ങളോ മറ്റ് സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകളോ ആവശ്യമില്ലാത്തതുമാണ്. ഈ കാരണം കൊണ്ടുതന്നെ ജിനേഷ് ഇതിനെ “ലളിത” എന്ന് വിളിയ്ക്കുന്നു. ഇതിനെപ്പറ്റി കൂടുതലറിയാന്‍
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Lalitha എന്ന താള്‍ കാണുക.

സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിലേയ്ക്ക് കൂടുതല്‍ ആളുകള്‍ ആകൃഷ്ടരാകുന്നതും, സംരംഭം വളരെ സജീവമാകുന്നതും, വളരെ സന്തോഷമേകുന്ന കാര്യമാണ്. അതു പോലെത്തന്നെ സരായ് ഫെലോഷിപ്പിന് വേണ്ടിയും സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് വഴികാട്ടുന്ന സംരംഭങ്ങള്‍ക്കപേക്ഷിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ട്.

സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങില്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ക്കും പങ്കുചേരാം. ഇതിനായി പ്രത്യേക സാങ്കേതിക മികവോ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറില്‍ പരിജ്ഞാനമോ അത്യാവശ്യമില്ല. “എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിന് എന്റെ ഭാഷ” എന്ന മുദ്രാവാക്യം പ്രാവര്‍ത്തികമാക്കുന്നതിന് സഹകരിയ്ക്കാന്‍ തയ്യാറുള്ളൊരു മനസു മതി. ചര്‍ച്ചകളില്‍ പങ്കെടുക്കാനായി

http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss/
എന്ന താള് കാണുക.

* സ്വനലേഖയെക്കുറിച്ച് കൂടുതലാറിയാനും അതുപയോഗിയ്ക്കാനുള്ള നിര്‍ദ്ദേശങ്ങള്‍ക്കും
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Swanalekha എന്ന താള്‍ കാണുക.

http://code.google.com/soc/smc/about.html

It is really great to see SMC coming back to life after a long period of lull. Now we have great participation from students and 5 projects with Google Summer of Code is a recognition for the work we were doing.

The selected projects are

Unicode Standard Malayalam Font
by Hiran V, mentored by Hussain K.H

Akshara OCR
by Antony Francis Maliakal, mentored by Anivar A Aravind

Basic Voice Recognition System for malayalam
by shyam k, mentored by Santhosh Thottingal

MalluTux
by Mobin M, mentored by Praveen A

Comprehensive Malayalam input system for GNU/Linux
by jinesh kj, mentored by suresh p

It is also exciting to see 8 students from Kerala getting selected for SoC this time. Looking forward to a great summer full of coding and fun.

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing is the only organisation directly participating in google Summer of Code from India (gnowledge project is also participating as a part of GNU project). Thanks a lot for all the SMC members who had come together and made this possible. Lets continue our good work. You can join our mailing list and participate in our activities. Our mailing lis at http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss

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