Accounts for translators seem to have gotten stuck in a void – why do you have to make the experience so painful ?

Last time I rambled a bit about building a community around the XO in India. An important aspect of this task would be to obtain buy-in from teachers who are enthusiastic enough to adapt to this new method and tool to impart education. A significantly high percentage of the success rate would be determined by the effort put in towards ensuring that teachers feel comfortable using the XO to teach the children between 6 and 12 years. This means that while new activities are being created, they have to be woven around the ways teachers impart the content of the book. The XO would change the teachers as much as it changes the students by providing learning opportunities for both of them. The XO along with the School Server is designed to provide repositories of information in a manner that is not readily available through the conventional teaching pedagogy. The XO Teacher Community would require sufficient attention towards transparent collaboration in order to ensure that the deployments are effective. This includes going above and beyond just creating activities – it demands that there is communication amongst teachers to understand the impact of re-usability of activities and learning materials that can be shared. A fundamental change that the XO drives is that it creates activities and workflows around the notion of “sharing” and “collaboration” and this thought is evident in the current set of applications and activities that make up the hardware. Do read the Learning Vision page if you think you know an educator who would be interested in this and mail the team if you want to participate.

There is this short and sweet podcast from Nirav which would should be a must listen for first time speakers, non geeks and geeks. He manages to capture in a bit over 180 seconds things on which reams of paper have been consumed – a speech is about the speaker telling his/her story to an audience who have already shown an interest in listening to it. Nothing can go bad in a session of story telling if the story is compelling and the speaker is having fun. Reminds me of a trick I overheard someone_I_know passing on to a nervous and over-prepared speaker – “Imagine there’s a whole sea of naked folks sitting in front of you – there’s nothing more funny than that. Go ahead – kick some serious butt”

For his skill, enthusiasm and enjoyment of the process – the Photographer of the event award goes to Kushal who so nimbly captured the zeitgeist of foss.in
This is right now an unofficial award, but sooner rather than later I think I would get something for him. That guy simply rocks my world !

One can only hope that Vinod Kumar Project IndiX C-DAC Mumbai is not speaking on behalf of his employer – that would be sad.

I have been following what is being termed the “OpenDS mess” through infrequent readings of the blogosphere. I am sure that a statement that would attempt to provide an insight into what truly happened would be available soon and I hope that it provides the complete picture. But what it does for me right now is put a context to the conversation I was involved in yesterday (on #mozilla.in on the mozilla IRC server).

The talk was about “control” and how it is natural for humans to hanker after it. Somewhat simplistically I tend to believe that control and the urge to control is not the true picture. It is natural for almost everybody to be attracted to baubles and thus to property. The notion of loss (or gain) of such concept of property is where the genesis of control lies. However, once there is an urge to control that is generated, it is slightly difficult to step back and observe the potentially disastrous impact of it. For example, look at the FOSS world. A large number of the popular FOSS projects are also supported, sponsored, invested into by companies. Thus, the companies have a vested interest in ensuring that the technology vision for the projects are aligned with the strategic business visions. And there lies the fine line. Participating in a FOSS project really means showing a large amount of commitment and accountability. The fun bit about the last quality is that it is not limited to only the members of a company that sponsors it – but is inclusive of “everybody|community” around the project. This of course means that decisions can never be taken without transparency, authority can never be inherited by folks within the “chosen elite”. Almost all projects these days draw up governing rules and charter that have a single aim in mind “ensuring that the door is not shut to external community members”. So it becomes the duty of the Project Leader and the individual Sub Project Leaders to avoid falling into this elitist mentality. And this awareness is a part of the fiduciary duty they have towards the community who are their raison d’être
In this aspect, I recall (as far as I can recall well) that Seth Vidal is passionate about accessing Fedora bits by *not* using the corporate VPN. It might be an idiosyncrasy, but it provides the perfect “dip-stick” test as to how open a project is. If there is a favorable bias towards the corporate contributors, then surely something is wrong. A project has to have a healthy balance of corporate and community contributors. Because only then do words like Freedom, Accountability, Commitment and Courage make a difference and actually mean anything.

This is a nice relevant read.

. Bad !!

Update : and since blog != bugzilla – there’s a bug too 😛

More Update: And it is now fixed upstream and in Fedora. That’s what I like best about doing things transparently through tools which record issues. User to contributor over an Instant Messenger session. 😉 Yay !!

Runa writes about some difficulties in getting accounts for translators – not so good news 🙁