Getting Out of the Arabic Mediocrity Loop
28th November 2006 - 19306 Reads
So over the last two weeks I have been surveying the Internet for Arabic technical sites. Things like news sources, development websites, translation websites, even forums, blogs, etc.
One thing I noticed being shared by most of these resources is mediocrity. It’s hard to find some team that is truly exceptional, apart from the good work eglug has shown in organising successful Linux installfests, and Arabeyes’s ITL library and some other bits, there is not much to be really proud of.
However, it seems that every person or small team are happy in their own little world trying to be it when it comes to IT. There is hardly any cooperation. The ego is strong, there is little leadership, most count on only what they do and dismiss the rest. In short, there is much competition on doing nothing or very little. There are 5 or 6 half dead half alive Arabic distributions, with pretty much one or two at most developers, how you can sustain a distribution on your own for a long time, I am not sure. Nobody does/did it. And Nobody wants to cooperate with the next guy. Heck, I have seen people trying to invent an OS from the ground up!
After a while, some eventually sadly get burnt and give it up all together, and I don’t fault them. The work is difficult, there is very little incentive to produce more. People work in parallel and nobody knows what exists. Take as an example, the recent excellent initiative to produce OOo documentation: there are still half a dozen other teams out there trying to reinvent the same wheel. Once done, of course, as they did not build up on previous work, nobody notices their work and they will give up because it seems like nobody is using it.
There is one thing for sure though, we all at some point share the same motivation: Improving Arabic Support for OSS and developing Arabic tools etc. Let me tell you however that the path is difficult, it requires patience, a lot less ego stroking and more cooperation. I am sure you all know the story of the old man who wanted to teach his children about the importance of unity using wood sticks…
* ego: the exaggerated sense of self importance.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Hi Djihed,
where is the understanding that FLOSS is not a technical idea, it is a community! Unfortunately, as a post on planet arabeyes just said, “People are people.’ So not everyone has the same motivation for working on FLOSS or the same understanding of it. As someone who lurks and participates in the Debian project, some are there for the Freedom, some are there for the technology, and other have unknown reasons to participate. I know about the FLOSS movement in the US, UK and Europe from email, f2f meetings and irc. I do not know what type and variety of understating of FLOSS is happening in the Middle east. There are obviously cultural/religious factors that I do not understand that may influence what the Arab world thinks about the FLOSS and technical world and the geeks that inhabit it. Is there some confusion or suspicion about ‘this strange western technology’? What is leading to people not understanding the collaborative nature and communal spirit that I’ve seen in the western FLOSS world. Cheers, Kev
December 1st, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Kevin,
It’s sad that the arabic FOSS movement in the ME is far from being a community. The issue is that the small groups here and there have yet to “grow up” and recognise the need for each other and the endless possibilities of cooperation. In short, everyone wants to get the label of the hero who saves Arabic technology.
Politically, you can say that FLOSS is rather more acceptable, and is believed to be so to a certain degree in the ME. Proprietary software is hated more because of the big western corporatios who produce it more than because of its incompetency. Thus, FLOSS rather represents an elegant escape from the “evil western” propreitary solutions, as it is not owned by any official entity.
December 11th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
I totally agree with your analysis. However, i think that the problem come from the “community” concept. There is no strong IT arabic community on the Net, and the little communities that exists are as you you point it out have a selfish opinion, or don’t want to know what’s going on the arabic Web, or they import the dictatorship on the Internet.
I think that construction of community is very delicate.