Arabeyes has been at the forefront of the FOSS [1] Arabization efforts. It began with general ideas and evolved to concrete goals and agendas which have taken it from a group of wishful thinkers to a group of doers.
Throughout the 3 years of its operations, Arabeyes has seen many ups and downs, internal and external battles and a plethora of challenges. Its survival can easily be attributed to the determination of a few key contributors. The challenge that no one seems to have given much thought to is, what will become of Arabeyes once the Arabization of FOSS is complete? Or is this a never ending process? If indeed it is a never-ending process then one can safely state that Arabeyes has degraded to its initial state of being a bunch of general ideas and no conrete goals. It is unthinkable that Arabization is something that we will be doing for the next 20 years. However, there will be one issue remaining which will require constant updates and maintenance -- namely, translation. The question would then be, do we want Arabeyes to end up being a primarily translation effort? This is not to belittle the hard work involved in translating GUI's and various other documents. However, translation alone has and should not be the primary business of Arabeyes. One could say that Arabeyes can be involved in setting standards with the various standardization bodies once it is a legal entity. Even if Arabeyes becomes a legal entity and is able to collect enough donations to pay to join consortiums such as Unicode, W3C, etc., it will not be enough. Going through all of Arabeyes contributors, the reality is, technical expertise is seriously lacking. How many real contributions have Arabeyes volunteers made to OpenOffice [2]? What about Wine [3], KDE [4], GNOME [5]? It is not only a question of time and a flat number of contributors. What no one seems to be willing to admit is that we simply do not have the people with the know-how. Is it not shameful that Arabeyes had nothing to do with the actual development work involved with allowing Arabic support under Debian Installer [6]? How can we even claim fame when we have others doing the real work and all we end up doing is translating a bunch of PO's? In the beginning of 2003, I have posted a few recommendations [7] to overcome this technical lacking by introducing a mentoring program. Despite this being accepted as a 'nice idea' in principle, no effort whatsoever has been put to make it a reality. This is mainly because Arabeyes is too engulfed in its day-to-day activities with no more focus on the big picture. This by no means is to say that the above mentioned recommendations are the only or best way to proceed -- they are merely suggestions that have had a very very short thread associated with it. This simply shows that no real interest has really been given to an otherwise rather important issue. It is a survival issue. Unfortunately, we seem to be more interested in issuing press releases and doing interviews than dealing with the future of Arabeyes as a project. >From what I am seeing today and from personal experiences from the very foundation of Arabeyes, I see no real future for the project. It is the equivalent of building an airplane manufacturing plant but not having the human resources to build anything in it. I will be posting some recommendations that may help us survive the current situation, but if my predictions are true, they will be shelved just like all other long-term vision-based proposals. REFERENCES: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foss [2] http://www.openoffice.org/ [3] http://www.winehq.org/ [4] http://www.kde.org/ [5] http://www.gnome.org/ [6] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ [7] http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/core/2003/January/msg00000.html Regards, Mohammed Elzubeir
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