Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

It’s been mostly fun so far at the Open Translation event here in Zagreb. I’ll leave the complaining about Croatian food and other things to my personal blog, when I get the time. The event itself has been fab.

As one of those monolingual American types, I’m learning a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different languages. It is actually pretty mind-boggling. There are issues that relate to encoding, fonts, and character sets, machine translation, interfaces to facilitate human translation, issues of workflow, volunteer and project management, and a whole host of other issues.

It’s also really interesting to see how free and open source fits into all of this.  What are the tools like? How do we replace proprietary tools? How does this all get paid for?

My role has been to gather up the use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That’s been a very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools are present that can do what’s needed, and what gaps exist.

Check out the wiki. Lots of food for thought for NOSI and the future.