Christian Perrier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > A first step would be some localization work. Filipino (fil) recently > became listed in ISO-639 and several languages among those spoken in
English was the language of instruction in all the schools I attended, and translation of computer terms using either phonetically adapted words (kompyuter) or deeper Filipino (I don't even remember what the word is) don't really mirror common usage. That said, many cellphones have localized Tagalog menus, and if people are interested in putting together Fil localizations, I don't think it'll be a complete waste of time. The Philippine Linux Users Group and various regional groups answer questions in local dialects, although for the mostly-Manila PLUG, posts are usually in English. That said, the provinces lag behind Manila in terms of computer science education (except for Cebu, which in some respects is actually ahead), and that's what I want to address during/after my PhD (err, haven't started on my MS yet, so that'll take a while). --- As this is debian-women, after all, I guess I should talk about how we're coming along in terms of gender... Many universities have active open source communities, and I'm glad to say we have a number of bright and vocal female Linux users even among the lower years. Microsoft programming environments and single-platform games still dominate the market, but we're seeing a slow but steady increase in the number people with multi-platform skills and enough passion about the subject to want to use great tools. ;) (Which has led to very interesting debates on our list...) We saw a drastic drop in CS enrollment, though, both male and female. Perhaps the growing popularity of call centers contributed to that. Hmmm... Although that means most of the people taking CS now are probably not just in it for the money, it would also have been nice to see if we could sway the undecided ones. We've been both lucky and unlucky that many high school curriculums include programming. Some people discover they like it a lot. Others get turned off by poorly-structured exercises that require little (or too much) thought. --- Promoting Debian in the Philippines needn't start with localization. debian-edu might be a good place to begin. Knoppix has also been very useful for advocacy. One of our government research institutes produces a Linux distribution called Bayanihan (http://www.bayanihan.gov.ph). Basing the distro on Knoppix and thus Debian has been discussed on the PLUG mailing list, and I might be able to help out with that when I get back. I'm also interested in encouraging people to get into development. Open source development really opened up a lot of opportunities for me, and I want to help people get into it. Considering that I'm a relative newbie compared to all of you, I suspect I'm in for some amazing experiences! =) People have kindly given me the opportunity to participate in projects, attend and present at conferences, and teach computer science. I am glad to know so many people helping other people realize they can make a contribution, no matter how small. In terms of promoting Debian and Linux in the Philippines, we're working on the user advocacy level (again, Knoppix has been great), but I'd like to eventually get more people into documentation, development, and other contributions to the world-wide community. -- Sacha Chua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - open source geekette interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun wearable computing, personal information management http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
