[Foundation-l] Promotion of Indian languages

Hello, I just came back from a 3 weeks trip to India, where I got the opportunity for doing research for Wikimedia on two subjects: My tentative to recruit new volunteers directly was not very successful, so it leads me to look for new ways of promotion. However I had a nice wikimeet with three Wikimedians in Ahmedadad. All three are computer students and only edit the English Wikipedia. Hopefully direct contact will enable us to work better together on a promotion campaign. Instead on a bottom-up approach, I would like to try a top-down tentative, writing to officials in universities, goovernments and medias. I already started a page for coordinating this: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Promoting_the_South_Asian_languages_projects… I would like to write an letter in behalf of the Foundation requesting people to spread the word about Indian languages projects. A draft is available on the page above. Suggestions and feedback are welcome. I was also able to meet people from Blossom Charitable Trust, an NGO doing computer education in rural areas (see http://blossomedua.org). They translated computer manuals in Gujarati, the local language, which not very common, but they still use Windows in English. They would like to be part of the One Laptop Per Child project (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home). So we talked about content, free software and using software in local languages. Interesting developments will certainly come here. I was able to get some documents on Gandhi not available outside India: a copy of the "Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" (100 volumes!) and multimedia CDROMs. See http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Collected_Works_of_Mahatma_Gandhi More important, I met people who might be able to give publication permissions for these documents and others. I was confirmed that the images and sound recordings of Gandhi published on Commons are in the public domain and that the claims of the Gandhiserve Foundation are bullshit. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_K._Gandhi Regards, Yann