Foo Camp: Making the web work for Africa

Why Language Matters

Most tools are wrapped up in language - if you're trying to learn a tool that is wrapped in a different language, it will make the learning process extremely difficult.

Why African languages really matter

Tried to teach some people how to swim - if the teachers didn't use the students native tongue, the swimming lesson would have ended really quickly.
Language is the key to knowledge - for reading the news, doing your homework, browsing the web...
Knowledge is the key to prosperity - for getting a job, selling a product, buying a company
Very few Africans can access IT in languages with which they are comfortable
Local language IT - the killer app for technology uptake
IT master as a path to prosperity: it works in India (for those who speak english), it works for you. How do we make it work in Africa?

Martin Benjamin starting his talk

Swahili Overview:

Started as a participatory "living" project on Gopher in 1994
~70,000 bilingual entries
10M+ lookups
tens of thousands of users in Africa (wish it was more - making an SMS frontend could be huge)
Anyone can edit, but edits must be approved.
free to search, download, and print

PALDO - future of IT in Africa

Pan-African Living Dictionary Online
~2000 languages in Africa
20 language clusters (group of languages that are similar enough that people who know one can kindof/sortof grok another) account for about 85% of the African population, roughly 850M people
Make each language indexed to every other language - so you can go from any language to any other language
Start with 10,000 words in each language, based on popularity in Kamusi
Cross index by machine, later by humans as well
modular - more languages can be added
English as the lingua franca - basis of index and translation
omega wiki - closest project doing a similar thing; PALDO guys are working with them.
Yale currently holds copyright on the data, but has agreed to release it to a new home, which is yet to be decided.

PALDO and the future of IT in Africa

Localization (L10n) terminology from OpenOffice and other F/OSS projects to be included
PALDO will become a central repository of approaches to L10n
Future software/IT products will be localizable for African markets quickly and effectively
PALDO will play nicely with others - OLPC, OmegaWiki, translating software, etc.
With modest funding, specialized vocabularies can be added for many important communication domains, such as Health Care, Law, Business, Agriculture, Environment (conservation)

Needs: