Proposal: FSCI Localisation Project -- A Project to coordinate Indian localisation effort to reach the masses

I began my journey with free software a year ago with software localisations. But one of the major problems I noticed was that the localisation teams of Indian languages across various projects are entirely dead or extremely inactive with almost no activity in the past 10 years. I've tried reviving some of Telugu language teams but the efforts went in vain as I couldn't gather enough volunteers and keep them contributing to translations and i also had a lot of issues dealing with inactive coordinators.

I made an attempt to introduce localisation to newbies at my talk at MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai but the talk kind of failed due to me not being clear about the talk (happened as i had no sleep the earlier day)

The Situation of Indian Localisation Right Now:

The only language team where I noticed some activity was Hindi across various projects. I often see software being localised into Hindi but rest of the Indian language teams are completely dead.

The major problem is that the bureaucracy behind these projects is way too much especially in GNOME, I had to basically "hunt" down my language coordinator who had zero activity not just in GNOME translations but on the entire internet for the past 10 years. It was so confusing if he's still alive or not but thankfully after 2 weeks after tracking down his email he gave a response and wanted someone to take over the team but that didn't quite work out either as the person from GNOME handling translation infrastructure wanted someone older to take over the team but then the person from GNOME himself went AWOL.

I don't know about other languages but in general I found Indian language teams to be either dead for years or inactive.

Need for Localisation

I think one thing that might come to your mind is why we need translations when we already use everything in English but the thing is that there are a lot of people in our country who cannot read or write English so with localised operating systems and software we can improve our free software outreach and encourage people who are not well educated to use free software.

FSCI Localisation Project - A gist

I chose to do this with FSCI as I've been here for a few months and so far FSCI has been the only community outside Debian that I found to take the philosophy seriously so I'm trusting FSCI with this.

The main goal of this project is to have a centralised communication channel to coordinate localisation efforts across different projects. FSCI will not host any localisation platforms or software but we can use our mailing lists to bring new translators and have discussions and translation reviews.

I felt like proposing this as the current localisation process felt too fragmented without any proper communication.

The project will follow a more democratic approach without the need for a coordinator or some kind of "one person making all decisions" so that decisions can be made more quickly without any kind of bureaucracy.

We can use and create mailing lists in the following list address formats: "fsci-l10n-langcode@lists.fsci.in" or "l10n-langcode@lists.fsci.in"

The project will be implemented in the following phases:

Phase 1: Setting up the infrastructure -- Setting up mailing lists for each language team based on available volunteers

Phase 2: MIA Process -- Basically track down the existing language team coordinators and bring them back into activity or asking if they would like to transfer the coordinator role to someone else.

Phase 3: Work on the important translations -- Translating Desktop environments, tools and software used by a lot of people

Phase 4: Bring free software down to the local level -- Introduce the now localised operating systems to your community to improve the adoption of free software.

This is all I have to say for now but I'm open to discussion about this. This isn't a one-man's feat so we need more brains on this but here's my proposal if anybody's on board with me