Localization Common Room
Localization Common Room
The Localization Common Room is a place where people may raise issues about localization for the laptop so that they become noticed by people interested in solving such problems.
Here is a link to an attempt to try to produce an application program for the laptop. Hopefully this program will be produced and be localized into a number of languages.
Please join in with the activity.
A part of the localization discussion, and really the project at large, that I haven't seen mentioned is the cultural element... there seems to be an implicit assumption of relatively standard norms of how this machine will be used, and how it will fit in to some widely diverging communities. Certainly it is important to have different applications in different languages, but this is not sufficient in terms of meeting the different needs of communities. Yes, the open-source emphasis does open lots of possibilities for communities to provide for their own needs, but I still see a big gap between what this means to the developers and what it will ultimately mean to the users. Each locality has a different cultural understanding of things as basic as personal property, individual/corporate identity, religious beliefs (and the extent to which those are relevant to computing), value of learning, etc. These things could all have far-reaching implications for how the laptops are distributed and what types of applications are available with them and even how they are made. I hope others have some valuable suggestions of how we can explore the cultural aspects of rollout and community building through this tool, otherwise I fear its success will largely be dependent on the extent to which the receiving communities conform to the cultural paradigm of capitalism, individualism, religious ambivalence toward technical development and education, and openness to new ideas.