Query results: May, 2008

We will be present at the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (Libre Software Meeting), July 1st to 5th in Mont-de-Marsan, France.

We’ll be giving a talk, The Next 10 Million Users Won’t Have a Beard : Building a global, effective advocacy community for Freedomware. It will be the first conference where two of us share the talk¹.

We will also be holding a booth all throughout the event. From questions about localization, help with translating, to sponsorship, we’ll be happy to address any topic. If you are around, please come say hi.

1. dual-conference should not be confused with conference-duel though [↩]

We are well into the process of migrating LinuxFuerAlle.de and GnuLinux.cat to our on-line translation system, powered by Pootle and Poliglota.

There are two objectives to the migration:

• The visual appearance will be greatly improved, to match that of the English version, French and Castilian translations;
• Subsequent editing and updating of the text will be made much easier (enabling anyone, for example, to correct a sentence).

If you speak German or Catalan, please consider giving us a hand. Most of the copy-pasting work has been done; we now need proof-reading (the strings labled “fuzzy”), and translating of the recently-modified text.

Translating is easy. Everything is done on-line, no special technical skill is required. You can head straight to the web interface, or read more about translating for GNU/Linux Matters. Don’t hesitate to get in touch for any concern you may have.

The participate page is always there for pointers, but if you look for more exciting things to work on,  we have plenty of areas where you could have leg space for creativity and autonomous work.

We are still lacking (human) resources to work on the following topics:

• Link button revolution. We’d like to go from the current ugly stack of buttons, to something authoritative, elegant, and simple —think spreadfirefox. We’d be much better off with five sizes and ten buttons, with a single icon.
• Screenshot perfection. We’re looking for extremely well thought-out sets of screenshots for getgnulinux.org and translations, localized in eight languages. (this is ticket #41)
• Precise visit statistics tracking. If you think that you could write a script that outputs, say, the number of Windows visitors who visited at least two pages in the past week, we’d love to hear from you!
• CSS mastership. We’re maniac about accessibility and legibility, but could still do better. Improving font rendition on IE6, making sure things will display fine when we release a Chinese translation, adapting to mobile devices browsers, are things we’re thinking about.
• Linking module. Managing an affiliate system for linking to our websites will be the first milestone of Animador, our grassroots marketing platform. If PHP development is your thing, you might want to have a look.
• Articulate writing. We have just started working on GetFreedomware.com, the upcoming replacement of SoftwareLiberty.com. We are looking for polished, concise, powerful phrases to get the message to everyday visitors. (more to come very soon in the forum).
• Elegant web design. Our Linux FAQ page has grown to be difficult to read and navigate. Accessibility and simplicity are your mottoes? This might be for you.
• Multi-cultural expertise. If you know what it takes to reach the Japanese community, or what kind of domain name would suit an Arabic translation, or how to best manage cross-border variations in languages —well, you can educate us =)

Enthusiastic coulda-woulda-shoulda talkers are easy to find. Participants who get things done are priceless. If you think you can help, feel free to start working, make yourself known, and we’ll hand you the keys. Thousands of daily visitors will benefit from your skills, and you’ll get eternal gratitude from the rest of us! =)