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India — Let’s get together and be all right
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Reporting live from Pune of beautiful India, with a heavy stomach from the tons of spices eaten the past days, your host would like to warmly welcome you to yet another adventurous (read: long) post on this peaceful blog sailing calmly in the vast blogosphere sea.
FOSS.in 2007 is now over. Now I can honestly say that it was fantastic. You can get a feeling of it from the stories on Planet FOSS.in or a glimpse of it from the flickr photos with foss.in, foss.in tags.
Considering it’s a community-organized event, the people behind it have my admiration. The accommodation (droog house) was cozy (as Sankarshan also mentioned), the transportation and the food were very good, and not having to worry too much about them gave me the opportunity to discuss more with people and get a lot of work done. A big thanks (again) to all the folks behind the event. You guys rock.
[rewind a week back]
Arrived in Bangalore at 5am. The first image once one exists the airport are like 100+ people holding and waving papers with names (hand)written on them. After a couple of somewhat embarrassing model-like up and down walks, I found myself in the unfortunate position to not find the person waiting for me. I arrived at the hotel 2.5 hours later, after a dreadful ride in a 3-wheeler through some very bad neighborhoods trying to look for the hotel. Strange-looking people walking to me from low-lit alleys, dogs barking. Arriving at the hotel, I realized I got charged around 10 times more than the normal amount (in a European setting that could be like paying 500 euros instead of 50). Very creepy experience, not recommended.
Letting bad dreams behind! On to the technical stuff.
Runa’s talk (Bengali maintainer in a handful of FOSS projects, including Fedora) on GNOME’s translation project was interesting and raised some interesting political issues with the Indian languages, which count up to 24. Not dialects, 24 different languages! Very interesting setting, somewhat comparable with Europe’s, with some challenges emerging when you start discussing about a unified localization effort. Interesting stuff. At least one question that came up had to do with the process of contributing translations to GNOME as an upstream project, and Transifex was proposed as the answer, referring to the talk about it the next day.
My talk focused on the community aspect of the whole idea behind Transifex and the exciting opportunities opening up with it. Transifex does try to solve some challenging technical issues, but at the same time tackles overheads in collaboration and maintenance and proposes enhancements to QA. Around 100 people attended the talk and probably 40 the lightning talk (3 minutes, no slides).
Christian Perrier from Debian L10n fame brought to our attention that they are facing similar problems and Transifex not only seems like an elegant solution for them, but also opens up a path for having both communities collaborate under a single instance of Transifex. Achieving having a common gateway to multiple projects across communities would be just awesome — psyched just thinking about it.