Sometime back I had asked whether we were at the initial stages of a change. There was a reason to the introspection.

The roadmap for the Indic L10n began with a demonstration or (to pacify the purists) a Proof of Concept desktop. We have come a long way from there. The times when getting a desktop to be presentation ready was more of an arcane art than straightforward intuitive actions are behind us. We are now slowly but surely moving towards application oriented L10n and framework oriented L10n. Of these 2, the latter model is very significant. A framework model leverages the existing toolkits and provides an extensible platform for developers and programmers to work with. As a logical extension to the Services Oriented Architecture the framework model allows creation of L10n Services which can be commodified into L10n Products.

Commodification of Services is an important aspect required to keep costs down and make deployment affordable. The positioning of L10n in ICT4D is based on immediate relevance and deployment-readiness. A major factor in pushing such choice is cost. Keeping recurring costs to an affordable level while ensuring that service cost centers are present for the developers would lead to a healthier subsystem of service vendor leading perhaps to a more functional ecosystem.

L10n in India has to include a wider range of people bringing in more varied and much diverse skillsets. They need to have an understanding of the deployment scenario, a basic knowledge of project management but more fundamentally – a thorough understanding of the value of L10n provided through FLOSS. Such a group should necessarily include application developers, application service providers, technology managers and the like. For a range of these skillsets there are no real formal training programs available, and thus consequently no codified knowledge. The metadata has to be obtained from field work and from sensitivity to the Indic L10n sphere.

The question still remains as to why I feel these are special times… Very important. Primarily, I see a change in the way Indic L10n is being done. I see a roadmap for the efforts – an initiative to consolidate the resources and create shared knowledge pool. I see an acceptance in government sphere of the deployment readiness of FLOSS based L10n technology stack. I look around and see small components which complete L10n stacks falling into their assigned places in the jigsaw – good quality fonts (and font families), converters, application toolkits, applications, component -driven base framework, localised applications (including Office suite components and others like avsap), collaborative platforms and web application servers such as Plone, Digital Library Information Systems and repositories (like DSpace and Koha).

One of the major factors that favor adoption and acceptance of FLOSS as a technology stack is the lowering of TCO. Moving a bit further, what L10n does is it changes the way groups of developers and end users collaborate and participate. This is a fundamentally important principle. End users want to and if given a chance can be innovators with the technologies they consume. The participatory model of FLOSS is unique that it encourages (and perhaps mandates) such User Driven Innovation. UDI would go a long way in providing a positive push to FLOSS efforts in the Indic L10n sphere. By reducing application development cycle, by putting in more responsive project management ground rules, by ensuring optimal feature and scope creep and by providing rapid prototyping with sharing of knowledge.

Would adoption of User Driven Innovation be the one little thing that will make the big difference ?