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GNOME-NL involvement

Friday, August 5, 2005 ★ 22:58 ★ Category Gnome

GNOME is… ehm… well… kind of cool in the Netherlands, but it’s not cool enough! So we at GNOME Nederlands decided it’s time for action. 10×10 is a noble goal, but things of course don’t move by itself. GNOME needs promotion!

Some history

The GNOME-NL project was originally started to serve as a community for Dutch and Belgian translators. As we all know, GNU Gettext enables internationalization (i18n) of all GNOME components, so that the desktop can be used in the user’s native language.

Now that most of GNOME is available in Dutch and GNOME steadily gains momentum, GNOME-NL decided it was time to expand their activities to marketing and promotion. This includes attending seminars and conferences, giving speeches and, of course, kroegmeetings (wasting time in the pub).

My involvement

About 6 months ago I made my entrance to the #gnome-nl IRC channel, which serves as an online meeting place for the translator team and for other Dutch-speaking GNOME enthusiasts. Right now #gnome-nl hosts 20—30 people, both from the Netherlands and Belgium.

I’m a GNOME user since GNOME 2.2; before that time my hardware was too slow to run anything but fluxbox… but it was only for the last couple of months that I really got myself a little bit involved in the project. That includes filing and discussing bugs, contributing small (read: trivial) patches and doing some translations.

When some people suggested the active GNOME-NL community members should get themselves business cards, I stepped forward and designed the first versions of the GNOME-NL business cards, which, after a few minor alterations, are now in use. In my opinion the cards are really cool and I’m really looking forward to having these myself.

New site

Last week some GNOME-NL people got together in Utrecht and after a couple of beers I was asked by some fellow community members to redesign the GNOME-NL website. Right now it looks rather dull and is mostly used by translators to check the translation status for the various branches. It really needs a major overhaul to become a friendly welcome for curious Dutch-speaking people.

Since I was in a good mood and since I’m a pretty ‘okayish’ webhacker, I said yes to the loudly cheering GNOME-NL crowd. So, expect a new website anytime soon (or not so soon, depending on how much time I need to spend to keep up with my university activities).