Workshop Progress Report (Greek/English)

[Konstantinos Margaritis]

Λοιπόν, μετά από καθυστέρηση κάποιων ημερών λόγω υψηλού φόρτου, 
κατάφερα και έκλεψα μερικές ώρες για να ετοιμάσω κάποια reports.  
Κυρίως για σκοπούς απολογισμού, τί κάναμε, τί επιτεύχθηκε, τι μένει 
ακόμη, κλπ.
Το 1ο είναι στα ελληνικά και το 2ο στα Αγγλικά (για να το ανεβάσουμε 
στο www.ellak.gr και να δημοσιεύσουμε το άρθρο στο slashdot :-)

Στείλτε σχόλια, αν είναι να το ανεβάσουμε σύντομα. Εγώ θα λείπω μέχρι 
Πέμπτη απόγευμα, οπότε αν θέλει κάποιος να ανεβάσει το κείμενο σε 
κάποιο wiki και να διορθωθεί εκεί feel free.
Όμως please, μην ανεβάσετε ακόμη τίποτε μόνοι σας σε κάποιο άλλο ξένο 
site, γιατί περιμένω κάποια σχόλια από τη Siemens για το πώς/αν θα 
φανεί στο report.

(Αγγλικά)

1st Developer Workshop in Greece.
The last weekend (July 17-18) was an important one for Open Source and 
Free Software in Greece. The 1st Developer Workshop took place in 
Athens at the OPA (english = Financial University of Athens????) 
labs.

The purpose of this workshop was not just to present the benefits of 
Free Software to the uninitiated, but much more importantly to 
actually gather together the people involved in the advancement of 
FS/OSS in this country and help them communicate, exchange ideas, 
create new projects, help with translations and localization issues, 
etc. 

Initially, the expected number of attendees was around 20 as the event 
was thought to be of small interest except to very few people. But 
the organizers were in for a very pleasant surprise that surpassed 
their wildest expectations with the actual number of attendees  
reaching even 90 people for the first day. Apparently, the Greek 
FS/OSS community in Greece needed exactly this sort of event to 
happen. 

The mood was very nice and friendly and everyone was very excited to 
be part of the first event of this kind in Greece. People from all 
over Greece came to this event and funding for their transportation 
cost was offered by Siemens, while catering and 
administrative/technical support was funded by GRNET.
Some talks were given about a wide range of subjects, but more 
importantly the participants were split in groups that each tackled a 
specific task throughout the day.

A lot of photographs were taken in this event and a lot of video 
material also. The photographs are available in the website of GRNET 
[1]. The video will be available when converted to some form that is 
easy to download (which might take some time, since there are a lot 
of DV tapes to convert).

The following talks and tasks took place in this event:

1. The event started with an presentation of the issue and the future 
of Software Patents in Europe by Dimitris Glezos. This is a very hot 
issue in this period and educating the people about its implications 
is of extreme importance.

2. A talk for encodings and fonts by Alexios. Zavras, how the greek 
language is supported, by which encodings (ELOT 928, ISO-8859-7, 
UTF-8, etc). What Greek fonts are available freely and what is their 
future. Discussion about OpenType and the new font technologies.

3. Presentation about Fonts design and its history by Michael 
Semoglou. Presentation of the custom designed font to be soon 
published with an open source compatible license. This new font will 
cover Latin (of course), Greek (both simple and polytonic) format and 
it is to our knowledge the first known project to have been designed 
from scratch by a professional font designer to be distributed as 
open source.

4. Greek support of OpenOffice.org by Dimitris Korbetis. Mr. Korbetis 
discussed how Greek in OpenOffice.org can be made better and gathered 
volunteers in this direction.

5. Manolis Galatoulas showed a presentation of the tools CVS and 
Subversion (SVN), how they are used in big projects (like the 
debian-installer) and what are their differences and benefits.

6. An important task started in this workshop, that of adding input 
support for UTF-8 encoding in the groff program. A large number of 
developers coordinated by Alexios Zavras and Konstantinos Margaritis 
tried to distribute the effort of adding the much needed support. The 
rationale was that as the default locale entry for Greek in Debian is 
now UTF-8 based, unless groff supports input in UTF-8, it will be 
very difficult to view and process Greek man pages in this OS. Some 
very good head start was made, but of course the task still has a lot 
of work to do.

7. Greek support added for Scribus. Coordinated by Alexios Zavras, a 
number of developers tackled this software and tested Greek support, 
and started localizing this software.

8. Konstantinos Margairtis presented an live introductory tutorial of 
Kdevelop, programming an application with localization in mind (using 
glib's gettext C++ interface) and using Kbabel afterwards to create 
the localized messages. Petros Velonis show the use of poEdit in a 
similar manner.

9. Alexios Zavras gave some very interesting tutorials on GNU Make and 
Tcl scripting, which were very welcome by the viewers.

10. Translation issues. Greek is a very difficult language to 
translate to, and it has to be very carefully done. One important 
issue is the translation of technical terms and jargon. This event 
hosted a fruitful  discussion regarding difficult terms, that is, 
terms that pose problems for Greek translators, and many decisions 
were made in this respect.

11. Testing the localized Debian Installer, coordinated by Manolis 
Galatoulas. Almost every attendee was interested in testing and 
helping the Greek translation of the new Debian Installer (sarge).
A very useful task on its own, as many spelling issues were made

12. Recruiting Greek Debian Helpers/Developers. So far the number of 
Greek DDs was regretably small (just two). In this event there was a 
surge of people interested in joining and helping Debian support the 
Greek language in every way they can, like documentation, testing 
localization issues, but also plain coding and development and Q&A 
testing.

13. Dimitris Glezos advocated the idea of creating a slashdot-type web 
site for Greek users. A lot of discussion took place about this 
subject and it appears that there are many people in favour of such 
an initiative.

14. New Open Source Project started: A real time poll/voting software. 
More details on that as they are made available :-)

15. Keysigning party: Strengthening the local Web of Trust in Greece. 
No comments about that :-)

Yes, we actually did all that stuff! It may seem much, but everyone 
like this event so much that we actually wanted to have more time and 
more tasks. Everyone was really sorry that it ended so soon, but we 
made a promise to host such an event every 3 months or so. The next 
one will take place at Thessaloniki in mid-October, close to the date 
of the international IT event, Infosystem.

Thanks to everyone for attending this event and we hope to seeing you 
in the next one!

The organizers
Konstantinos Margaritis
Alexios Zavras
GRNET
(? who else ?)

(Ελληνικά)
Δεν προλαβαίνω να το κάνω, μπορεί να το αναλάβει κάποιος;