I was reading through The Tipping Point again yesterday evening and what struck me was that it is time that community based Indic L10n needs to find its tipping point as soon as it can.

The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

. For a moment forget about the semantics of the word epidemic and concentrate on how little things can coalesce to bring about big changes. Around a year and a half back, Indic L10n was a mish-mash of teams racing against each other and time to achieve complete translation for the various desktop environments. Today it is time to consolidate those efforts into providing one little push that will go a long way in changing the scheme of things.

With the release of the sub 10,000 INR desktop PC preloaded with Linux, the hardware vendors have clearly sent out a message that on the desktop, there are Linux applications which are complete in their own way. What needs to be put in place is an understanding of the most commonly used applications on the desktop and making them available in the currently active Indic Languages. One method of collating the information could be a wiki page on IndLinux. The idea would be to capture the localisation/translation status for applications as well as rendering and other known issues which could hinder their adoption on the desktop.

For the desktop space, applications should include Office Tools, Media Tools, Graphics Tools and Internet Applications. Once these are streamlined in terms of feature list and translation skew, they can be showcased as a complete desktop. Hope that this meeting at HBCSE figures out someway to find out the Tipping Point