FOSS and Māori Language Computer Initiatives
| Time: | 16:45 - 17:30 |
| Day: | Wednesday 20 January 2010 |
| Location: | Ilott Theatre (Town Hall) |
This presentation will summarise the Māori language initiatives that have been developed over the last 10 years on Free and Open Source platforms. As the Māori language is a small minority language there is simply not an economic incentive for large software companies to be involved. Consequently Māori language activists working in computer environments have had to turn to software that was available for no cost and whose products could in turn be shared with users at no cost. Fortunately this ‘communal sharing’ fits comfortably within Māori cultural values of undertaking work for the benefit of the community.
The initiatives that will be discussed include pioneering products like Te Kete Pūmanawa and Te Reo Tupu, keyboard drivers and macron displays issues and workarounds, digital libraries such as Greenstone’s Niupepa Collection and the National Library’s Papers Past, localisation efforts such as Linux in Māori, the Moodle Māori interfaces, the Windows and Office interfaces in Māori, the Google Web Search interface in Māori and Google latest products in Māori.
These products will give examples of the ingenuity and dedication of language work that has been undertaken in the FOSS environment, how important this environment is for minority languages and can suggest what real possibilities exist for future development.
Target audience: minority language communities, users and developers
Te Taka Keegan
Dr. Te Taka Keegan is a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato and also classifies himself as a Māori language activist. He received a Diploma in Computer Engineering from CIT (Wellington) in 1987, a BA (through the Te Tohu Paetahi stream) in 1992 and an MA in 1996 from the University of Waikato. He completed a PhD in 2007 with a thesis titled ‘Indigenous Language Usage in a Digital Library: He Hautoa Kia Ora Tonu Ai’.
Dr. Keegan has taught computer science concepts through the medium of the Māori language since 1993 and has been instrumental in many technological advances for the Māori language including the Microsoft keyboard template, the on-line Māori Niupepa Collection, Microsoft Windows and Office in Māori, Moodle in Māori, and the Google web search interface in Māori. He was a visiting scientist with Google in 2008/2009 working in Mountain View, California.
