Hi All, Glad to see you have made Andreas welcome, in some ways you can say he is taking over from me/David. Andreas will also be managing integration of the other localisations for South Africa. For now we're focusing on Afrikaans which is his mother-tongue for now.
On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 10:25 -0400, Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: <snip> > What would be great, though, is if you were to give those of us here > a hint as to what the localization efforts are like in ZA. From news > reports, we have learned that the ZA gov't is falling in love with > FOSS, but I for one really only know of your org's work on actually > localizing OOo--and have no knowledge at all about development in ZA. Localisation: There are emerging groups at various Universities that we have started working with to broaden the number of localisers. We, as in OOo, are still the only office suite in all 11 languages. Microsoft still has another 7 to add (2 in the pipeline from what I can guess). In South Africa we have a funny situation which does hamper our work. Mostly it revolved around decision makers who don't speak English as their mother-tongue not being dogmatic about mother-tongue software. They love what we do, but don't do much to ensure it is adopted. FOSS: We've loved FOSS for a while now. But have seen slow uptake. It hasn't hurt that Mark Shuttleworth is a South African. Ubuntu strangely enough is often referred to as the South African distribution :) In February parliament adopted a very strong pro FOSS policy. Plus we are seeing a move to standardise on an open document format. How this will transfer into action we'll have to see. But the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has already moved to OOo and ODF. Plus the Dept. of Science and Technology is moving. Our slowest mover unfortunately still seems to be the education department. > My interest is to cultivate developers, core developers, of OOo > everywhere. And to engage schools, etc. in the effort. Can you shed > some light on this? ZA is incredibly important in Africa, and is > thus obviously pivotal. We're unfortunately a predominately Microsoft shop. The creators of the people you need for the developer community are still very focused on MS and technologies like .NET - I agree that South Africa is important as we are seen as a large influence in at least Southern Africa. I'd love to see that change. We have a few cards up our sleeve still which we'll share when they actually land. -- Dwayne Bailey Translate.org.za +27-12-460-1095 (w) +27-83-443-7114 (cell) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
