My Experience with OpenSource projects Part - 4 - Students force

     Since i was working as a full time employee in an organization, it become very difficult for me to Organize the entire translation effort. With in 1 hour lunch time i have to meet students and college Head Of the department get permission.

   I tried to approach Anna university first. Even though they are interested in language computing project the Head of the department denied my proposal. Anna university students are interested in creating Spell checker, Speech recognition software's at that time and not much interested in Linux localization effort.

   Then i got appointment from  Dr Nirmala Prasad Principle of MOP Vishnava College. At first she had some doubt. She asked me are you sure Mr Sujatha Rangarajan is involved in this project. Later she did some background check and gave permission to talk to her MCA students. Most of the students showed interested. After getting overwhelming response, HOD decided to give her computer lab and 40 students for the translation. She gave option for us to choose students based on their "Tamil" and "Computer" proficiency  We installed e-kalappai tamil keyboard driver and po edit for translation in all computers. Gave small test to students and selected 16 students to work on the project.

   Gave one day typing training to students. Worked in MOP Vaishnava College for 2 weeks. The translation was progressing fast. Our dictionary was growing fast. We paid to Mr Felix (Tamil Translator) and requested him to proof read the students work.

     15 days were not enough to complete close to 200,000 strings. So we went to Loyola college MCA students. I gave a presentation about what we are planning to do. The students got more interested and decided to volunteer. We selected 16 students from Loyola College. With Writer Sujatha's involvement we were able to get 40 computers from Dishnet DSL. Sujatha sir wrote article in a famous magazine(Vikatan) and invited all enthusiast to participate in translating Linux.

Celebrities:
On looking at Vikatan article celebrities like James Vasanthan(Famous music director and talk show host) volunteered to contribute . The Tamil PC started growing fast. End of the day we get all files we merge and check-in them.

At the end we reached 100% translation of KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.

We decided to build the product did alpha release of the product.

My Experience Continues