Quick notes: ANLoc offline & Yahoogroups RSS problem

The African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) website is still down. Although I am not personally involved in its management, hopefully there will be some update to share soon. Hence the site RSS (and that for the subsidiary PanAfriL10n wiki), as seen in the right-hand column/sidebar, are not working.

Also still haven't sorted out how to revive the RSS feeds for Yahoogroups also featured in the sidebar. Hope to resolve or reformat soon. (Per discussions online, this apparently relates to a group setting changed when Yahoo updated the groups features.)

The presentation of sites and groups on Beyond Niamey was discussed more fully in a recent post.

I've also started building some short pages on this blog site, which are linked via tabs below the header.

More notes about all the lists in the sidebar

This blog was originally set up with a side purpose of providing links to various fora (forums) on which African languages and technology were discussed - and these still appear in the sidebar. For some years, some of these fora - email lists and discussion boards - were quite active and had practical impact beyond the important role of facilitating information sharing among diverse people involved in internationalization and localization for (or at least directly relevant to) African languages. They were significant enough, I thought, to be listed under "Facilitating communication about localization" in African Languages in a Digital Age.

The ALDA book was not, however, the place to get into the history of these efforts. A little over 6 years ago, I gave some background about the lists that had been set up under Bisharat and the PanAfrican Localisation (PAL) project (predecessor to ANLoc) in a posting entitled "Some notes about all the lists in the sidebar."

Nor was ALDA the place to discuss specific plans with regard to those lists or more recent forms of social media. I'll take a quick stab at that now, along with other info per "More notes ...."

The "A12n" (Africanization of ICT) lists basically went offline beginning with closing A12-forum and A12n-entraide at the end of 2007, and then A12n-collaboration closing in mid-2009 when Kabissa could no longer host it. The smaller A12n-policy persisted a short while longer. All the traffic on these lists from the end of November 2004 is archived on A12n Archives. However, that leaves out early traffic on three lists, notably the very active first two-and-a-half years of A12n-collab. I am working on recuperating that to post as a file on A12n-archives.

The PAL lists are similarly preserved on PAL-archives.

The QuickTopic boards still exist for reference, but due to issues with spam, most have been closed to new posts. The exceptions are the three boards for the Nigerian "decamillionare" languages - Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba - which are still open. Last August, in the wake of Google Translate's most recent African language machine translation project, which includes these three languages along with Somali and Zulu, I posted on the three related QT boards to see what might ensue. Present thinking is that it's not clear there is a benefit in trying to sustain these as active fora.

There is a similar set of issues for other lists that I have started or co-founded... Like Multilingual_Literacy, which addresses a topic that still seems to me to be under-appreciated (approaches to literacy in school and out, in societies where people speak more than one language). AfrophoneWikis addresses a set of issues that is still very current, but the list is not so active.

So, I will be doing more cleaning of the sidebar soon.

One is left with the conclusion that email lists and discussion boards may have utility depending on the topic and user community, but that they require time and some strong effort to maintain as active communities. Their heyday seems to have passed, just judging (subjectively) by the generally lower traffic on many lists. But at the same time it's not clear that other social media - the Facebook group on African Languages for example - whatever their other advantages, can fill the same role for something like collaboration on localization.

An additional note. A few months ago, I added Google adsense to see what that might yield. It's an experiment, but one that hopefully does not detract too much from the overall presentation. So far it seems to be a waste of space.

Bamako triptych, and resuming again

Since my last posting, which was after returning from a trip to Bamako, I haven't had the time to do much with this blog. Circumstances have changed somewhat, though the focus of my work and essence of the ideas that I am developing are much the same.

The title of this entry remembers that trip to Bamako and alludes to a recent conference on languages and an ongoing one on African development, both in the same city. More on those below.

This blog in the mix of things

This blog, to review, is focused on African languages, ICT and development, with attention to some related matters. I've given particular attention to language-development links.

In addition to the postings, I have arrayed in the left sidebar feeds from a number of lists relating to these subjects, especially the language-ICT links. Part of the concept is that even when I am not posting actively, there is changing & updating material (or links to same). I intend to do more with the main part of this blog but it really is a question of time.

Two things not in the left sidebar that I have been working on in some of my online time over the last few months are two projects on my personal/professional site, donosborn.org: another blog, "Multidisciplinary Perspectives," which concerns a wider rage of topics (and facilitates exploring some ideas); and a collection of information on the International Year of Languages (which is about to end).

Bamako last year and now

My trip to Bamako in May 2008 was mainly an opportunity for Dwayne Bailey, project lead of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) and me to meet with Adama Samassekou and his colleagues at the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). ACALAN, which is now part of the African Union, has been collaborating with UNESCO and to a lesser degree IDRC on issues of linguistic diversity and ICT. It is hoped to work more with them on issues relating to localization of ICT in African languages.

In January (2009/1/19-21), ACALAN hosted a conference involving UNESCO and the MAAYA linguistic diversity network called the Bamako International Forum on Multilingualism. Billed as "A first step towards a World Summit on Multilingualism," this event treated aspects of multilingualism with anaccent on Africa.

Interesting to note that this month - 2009/2/19-21 - the ninth Forum de Bamako is being held. Exactly one month later and in the same hotel as the conference on multilingualism, one wonders if this conference on development (with the theme this year of governance) will boach the topic of languages in development and governance in multilingual societies.

I have not been able to attend either of these two meetings, but I look forward to seeing the Action Plan from the former and the proceedings of the latter. Hopefully I can then follow up with some comments.

In the meantime, I'm trying to catch up on various work, notably for ANLoc on policy relating to localization (language and ICT).

Some notes about all the lists in the sidebar

In another context someone suggested there might be too many lists about localization in Africa - a fair comment if you take a look at the amount of stuff I put in the left sidebar (which still isn't comprehensive - there are some other lists that should be added, and hopefully will be soon).

To clarify what's going on I thought it would be worth a little bit of background. I haven't put all this together in a narrative form yet, though I did do a summary table here (scroll down or earch "Table 7") not long ago.

Back about 5 years ago there really was no list dedicated to African languages and ICT. At the same time there was a dearth of information about what i18n made possible for African languages, and various other issues that hadn't been discussed.

Around late August 2001 I received a question from someone in Fantsuam Foundation about a keyboard for Hausa. I didn't have an authoritative answer so on Sept. 2 I set up a message board on QuickTopic.com called "Hausa charsets & keyboards" as a way of perhaps getting other input to this and related questions.

I later set up similar boards on QuickTopic.com as part of my response to new questions about other languages. In some cases it seemed appropriate to set up the board for all languages in a country, rather than each language. Creation of these message boards - (10 in all - at this point) was in this sense demand driven. Their success has varied, but at the least they continue to serve as places where relevant information can be posted and found by anyone.

In January 2002 I took another tack. Having participated in the Unicode list, being aware of the dearth of information on Unicode in many countries where French is the official language, and having seen the relative success of some French-language Yahoogroups on other ICT in Africa topics, I set up a list called "Unicode-Afrique." This has proved to be one of the most successful, although it is rather quiet lately. (There is some trouble with the RSS feed for this list - still working on it.)

It became clear that it would help to have a specialized list for some technical questions relating to extended Latin characters (commonly referred to as special characters or modified letters). So in March 2002, "A12n-collaboration" was set up. "A12n" was a coined acronym for "Africanization" in the sense of the "last mile of i18n" and L10n in Africa (I briefly discussed this on this blog in a posting on February 06, 2005).

The A12n-collab list was originally intended as a temporary online working group to advance and link efforts to define the needs of African languages in terms of extended characters and diacritics (fonts, keyboards). This list was quite active for a while and facilitated some new work. It in 2004 it was also added to LinguistList's roster of mailing lists.

The traffic on Unicode-Afrique, A12n-collab, and the QT boards pointed to some other needs. First was a portal where people could easily find information, sites, and projects discussed on the various forums. Thus the "A12n gateway" page was created. Currently this page needs updating, but will be reformulated to provide some current information complementary to the PanAfriL10n wiki and retain older material for background.

Another apparent need was for lists that were less narrowly technical and more addressed to applications and localization efforts. So, in June 2003, two new lists were created: "A12n-forum" in English, and "A12n-entraide" in French. Neither list has really fulfilled the hopes for them, though some interesting information has been posted on A12n-forum and to a lesser degree A12n-entraide.

With the beginning of the PanAfrican Localisation project in April 2005 and the preparations for its first workshop in June, a list for communicating about logistics was set up called "PanAfrLoc." Following the workshop, members continued to use it for communication about various topics (the archives only reflect this). One of the problems with this list was that its members included people more comfortable in English or French as working languages, but that it was not possible to translate all traffic.

PanAfrLoc was closed in favor of a new set of lists for different working languages: PAL-en in English, PAL-fr in French, and PAL-pt in Portuguese. Messages to any one of the lists are translated and sent to the other two via a service called Tradauto. All the traffic is additionally reposted to PAL-Archives (the RSS from which is in the sidebar.

There are some additional lists of note from other sources:

[more to come]

La lutte continue ...

Aside from contributions to various lists (see column at left), I'm also communicating off-line re various items (as usual).

I've had touble accessing Blogger/Blogspot, but now that that appears to be slved, hopefully there'll be more soon...