Hi, Please see the replies inline:
--- "Charles-H.Schulz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > it's been quite some time that I'm looking to > contact Bhupesh Koli and > Shikha Pallai. My apologies, to you Charles, Louis and all the other Indian Native Lang TLs and members. Our organization has gone through some restructuring, the result of which is that me: Shikha Pillai and Mr. Bhupesh Koli are no longer directly associated with hi.openoffice.org [although we may still communicate on behalf of the project and BharateeyaOOo]. This announcement has been pending since a little while, but as we were caught in the activities of restructuring, we couldn't inform everyone on the list. In our place, Mr. Raman has taken over as co-ordinator of the project, and also as lead of the HI Native Lang project. > The Hindi Native-Lang project seems to be dead > (http://hi.openoffice.org) and nothing indicates > that the Hindi mailing > lists have moved elsewhere, like on the Bharateeyaoo > web site. If nothing changes we will close the Hindi > community web site. Maybe you > could tell me what' going on? Hindi N-L isn't actually dead yet. But I understand your views on the fact that the mailing list is inactive and that we haven't done any updates for some time, on the web pages. With regard to the Mailing lists, well, this has been a problem that we've been facing since the inception of Hindi N-L: We haven't been able to generate much communication on the lists, with the exception of some issues and complaints that came up initially and then were clarified. Although we've publicised the lists to the maximum extent possible, the truth is that the inquiries/complaints have been minimum w.r.t the Hindi project, probably because 1) there weren't many issues with it to begin with, 2) We have many observers registered for the project, but no one has come up with discussions on Hindi N-L issues on the list 3) Most of the times we get personal mails addressed to us enquiring on the language/product usability issues, to which we then reply 4) Our email id [EMAIL PROTECTED] is more popular I guess, since we still receive direct enquiries on that rather than the mailing lists. What we could do is cc the personal emails and the replies to the list each time we get such mails, thought this approach seems a little lame. Can't think of other means of popularizing the list, and putting it to good use: maybe you could suggest something, or other N-L leads could help us here? As for the web pages, yes, here we are guilty. We haven't done much updates at all. In fact w.r.t the content, what's up there still holds, so we didn't need to update it till now. But if it will make any difference to you now, we could put the effort from now on to keep the website active in terms of updated content. A major update that has to come now of course is the change of lead, which we could request you to do as per protocol. Of course, all this is if you want to keep the site alive. I understand your viewpoint about closing down sites that don't have any visible activity, but what I'd like to tell you here is that having OOo in Hindi at http://hi.openoffice.org has generated a lot of interest in the suite as such. Especially because it was the first Indian N-L site for OOo. I can in fact send to the mailing lists a lot of congratulatory mails we've received from Indians who've been happy to see that a suite like OOo supports Hindi and has its website and information available in Hindi at HI N-L, to vouch for this. And the site has definitely served the purposes for which we actually set it up. Apart from that, although the mailing lists are inactive, we have always been available to users/OOo newbies who've requested our help. And as far as promotion goes, most of our activities w.r.t Hindi OOo have gone beyond the web-site stage, because we have actually gone out and demonstrated OOo in many conferences (as Louis might know), and even have initiated activities to bring OOo usage in governmental establishments and other institutions. Apart from that, we have been in touch with leads of other Indian N-L projects, and have been involved in Marathi, Gujarati and Kannada OOo l10n [primarily for build related activities]. For Tamil, although we haven't communicated this to our Thamizha Group (involving Mugunth and his team, who've been good to us, and taken up further translation activities of OOo), we were trying to promote Tamil OOo in India, and have got the IT Minister of our country to launch information on this next month. We have also some developmental activities based on OOo, like a transliterator plugin that we've developed for English to Hindi transliteration; and another activity that we've initiated is looking into the rendering aspects of OOo for different Indian languages. So according to me, we haven't been idle at all. Only that our activities have been a little diversified, and not streamlined only for "Hindi" OOo. We respect your views, and if you think the website needs to be closed down, then we'll have to abide by that. But of course, it will be discouragement for the work we have put in. If otherwise, maybe you could also lend us a helping hand for making Hindi N-L more active and alive. Atleast if you could give us some suggestions about what exactly is expected from the N-L site, maybe it could prove useful to us. > Regards, > > Charles-H. Schulz, > Lead of the Native-Lang Confederation, > OpenOffice.org Regards, Shikha Pillai BharateeyaOOo Team --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
