Indic L10n is not moving. Neither forward, nor laterally. After the initial burst of energy and explosive shock of languages nothing is happening that will keep it exciting. True there has been sporadic news of community projects in languages being formed, but nothing in terms of concrete roadmap has been coming forward from these.

In a way it is a sad reflection of the state of affairs. The Indic L10n meet at HBCSE had put across a roadmap in terms of formation of a body as well as encouraging and incubating other languages. Not much has happened since then. Surprisingly enough, the existing community projects also seem to be afflicted with some sort of lethargy. The next step towards localisation of the desktop would be selecting applications to localise. Applications matter. And especially in the current scenario, applications which address the various demands of e-Governance workflow would be something that will drive forward OpenSource adoption.

Applications could include software in the domains of Content Management Systems, Workflow and Groupware suites, Collaboration Software, Management and monitoring tools. The community projects could begin to look towards such existing tools which are mature and are i18n ready to take the effort forward. Additionally, there has to be some means to get in grants for the projects. This is primarily related to developing a richer range of OpenSource fonts, dictionary and spellchecking programs. A method is also required to be found out to interact with the various government bodies which have such research projects in progress. Sharing the fruits of the labor would lead to a rapid release of the final product. And perhaps a much stronger Free/Libre OpenSource Toolkit with which to address Government initiatives.

Sometime back I had written about creation of the L10n Framework as part of the L10n roadmap for Indic languages. The need for the Framework is felt more intensely now. Creation of the Framework would allow a greater number of end-users to play with the toolsets. Such user participation would lead to innovation and feedback which will help the L10n process in the long run.