[ubuntu-women] Introduction :)

[|| vid ||]

Hello Everybody,

On 2/27/06, Clytie Siddall <clytie at riverland.net.au> wrote:
> Many thanks to Vidya for inviting me to this list!
> अनुगृहितास्मि  (Thankyou, sorta ;) )

<grin> cool... you got the script right too. As for me, still stuck at
shamelessly plagiarising, Chào chi :-)

> I'm not actually an Ubuntu user: I use Mac OSX, definitely my
> favourite OS,

I do hope Ubuntu manages to change that ;-)

> any women I meet there. I don't know what the proportion is like in
> your area of OSS, but there are _very_ few women translators. I think

From an Indian perspective, Linux has not been actively and
specifically promoted in Indian colleges or schools (a single term
paper at best) but that is *(very) slowly* changing now. Generally a
CS or Engineering student (at say IIT) would have easier access to
such tools but the advent of the "Internet" changed the scenario
completely for the common people, especially for individuals
interested in trying out alternatives. This is just the urban scenario
and is in stark contrast to rural pockets.  Recently while visiting a
remote mountainous area, I chatted up a bunch of school girls. Many of
them said they stop schooling after class 8/10 or class 12. Besides
the monetary and other social aspects, the most glaring was that they
had to travel 10-15 km daily to get access to the nearest high
school/college which their families objected to. In all probability
they would be married off by their families at a young age (18-21
yrs).... Sad. However, if projects like the MIT-OLPC are implemented
properly in India, girls living in these rural pockets could continue
learning and benefit from home.


> this could change a lot, if the linguistic process could be separated
> more from the technical process. We probably have a lot of women out
> there with linguistic skills, who don't feel comfortable on the
> command-line, or who haven't had the chance to acquire that
> knowledge, or become comfortable with it.

Lack of access/chance is the major factor and quite similar here too
in some ways.
As I mentioned above, here the FLOSS scenario is very different from
that of a developed Western nation/s.  Its the individual/s effort and
interest that works out finally due to lack of government support or
awareness. Communities like ours have a larger outreach and crucial
role to play via the Internet but the latter is still a luxury in
India.



> That's something we can do here: run some tutorials. :)   Via Jabber
> or IRC. I'd love to run an introductory one for translation, if I
> could find enough takers.

That will be great :-) How about keeping a down-loadable tutorial too
for offline reading? Since we are in different timezones many would
find it tough to be online at a mutually convenient time. They can
always ask here if they ran into problems later.

ciao,
|| vid ||