ArabTechies CodeSprint: A New Fruitful Community Initiative
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Last week, ArabTechies has taken the enhancement of Arab users online experience one step further. ArabTechies is the first community to bring together Arab people interested in technology - regardless of their technical background – for real life meeting and discussions through which they could share experiences and learn from each other. The barely half year old community has finally begun to show the fruits of its labor with the release of 10 open source projects that were the product of the community's Codesprint that took place from the 20th to the 23rd of May 2009.
The CodeSprint was mainly made to tackle the problems facing the Arabic language in the web sphere. Having lots of sharp programmers with different specializations from all over the Arab region, the sprint managed to release 10 projects: seven of them aim to solve problems regarding Arabic natural language processing (a conjugater, stemmer, normalizer, ... etc) and the other 3 are aim to enhance the Arabic oriented user's experience with the web. The most amazing thing, however, is that all these projects are free open source software and can be downloaded from the ArabTechies project space at sourceforge.
But why are we talking about this? Having such community initiatives in the Arab world is amazing. The CodeSprint, which brought together techies - including four participants from eSpace-from all over the Arab region, is a testament to the potential that is available in the region and to what we can achieve through cooperation, an idea that eSpace has long been a supporter of. ArabTechies is less than a year old and its members are from 11 different countries- and most of them didn't know each other before the community's single offline meeting before the CodeSprint- yet they have managed to solve long existing issues that a lot of entities failed to solve, or solved as propriety software - forcing every new company to reinvent the wheel. The works that have resulted from this CodeSprint are invaluable to others, as well as to ourselves at eSpace, and we hope that ArabTechies and other communities like it continue to find support in the future. Hats off to them.
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