meetings and conferences

Archived Posts from this Category

Encoding Music at Music Encoding Conference 2016

Posted by on 31 May 2016 | Tagged as: Canada, Keyboard Philharmonic, meetings and conferences, music

A couple of weeks ago the Music Encoding Conference 2016 was held at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. I attended on behalf of the Keyboard Philharmonic project. I was like a kid in a candy store: so many people with so much experience in representing music notation digitally, so many interesting talks, so much friendliness. I also had the temerity to hold, despite my first-time status, a workshop on the first day of the conference: “Encoding Music at Music Encoding”, where we would follow the Keyboard Philharmonic process to encode a short score. The goal was to release it to the public domain by the end of the conference. Here is how we did.

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“Building Localization Capacity Through Non-specialist Developers”, at IUC 39

Posted by on 30 Sep 2015 | Tagged as: meetings and conferences, software engineering, Unicode

I’m delighted to be presenting, once again, to the 39th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC39).  The conference is the gathering of my “tribe”, people who are as enthusiastic about language, text, and software as I am. If you like this stuff, it’s the best place in the world to be for those three days, so please register and join us there.

My presentation is, Building Localization Capacity Through Non-specialist Developers. Here’s the abstract: Continue Reading »

A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (3) Where, When, and How

Posted by on 28 Feb 2015 | Tagged as: culture, i18n, language, meetings and conferences, multilingual, software engineering, Unicode, Vancouver

Our little meetup now has a name: Vancouver Globalization and Localization Users Group, or VanGLUG for short. Follow us as @VanGLUG on Twitter.  We had an outreach meeting in late January. So it’s long past time to conclude this series of thoughts about VanGLUG. Part 3 discusses “Where, When, and How”. Earlier in the series were A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who (Oct 31, 2014), and A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (2) Why, Naming (Dec 31, 2014).

Where

One challenge of an in-person meeting is where to hold it. The usual habit for such events is to meet in downtown Vancouver. This can be inconvenient, not to mention tedious, for those of us in Surrey or Burnaby. But I expect this is how we will start.

I would, however, be delighted if there was enough interest in other parts of the Lower Mainland to start up satellite groups in other locations as well.

Could we meet virtually?  In this day and age, it should be cheap and practical to do a simple webcast of meetings. Some may want to participate remotely. An IRC channel or Twitter “second screen” may emerge. But in my experience, the networking which I suspect will be our biggest contribution will come from in-person attendance.

When

In an era of busy schedules, finding a time to meet is likely an overconstrained problem. Our technology industry tends to hold meetings like this on weekday evenings, sometimes over beer, and I suspect that is how we will start. But it is interesting to consider breakfast or lunch meetings.

When to get started?  The arrival of Localization World 2014 in Vancouver got a dozen local localization people to attend, and provided the impetus to turn interest into concrete plans. After Localization world, we started communicating and planning. The net result was a first meeting in mid-day of Monday, December 8, 2014. Despite the holiday distraction, we were able to land a spot guest-presenting to VanDev on 6 essentials every developer should know about international. Our next opportunity to meet will likely be April 2015, perhaps March.

How

The Twitter feed @VanGLUG was our first communications channel. I encourage any Twitter user interested in monitoring this effort to follow @VanGLUG. We have 37 followers at the moment. We were using the twitter handle @IMLIG1604 before, and changed that name while keeping our followers. The present @IMLIG1604 handle is a mop-up account, to point stragglers to @VanGLUG.We created a group on LinkedIn to use as a discussion forum. This has the snappy and memorable URL https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=6805530. If you use LinkedIn, are in the Lower Mainland or nearby, and are interested in localization and related disciplines, we welcome you joining the LinkedIn Group. We are also accepting members from out of area (for instance, Washington and Oregon) in the interests of cross-group coordination. But for location-independent localization or globalization discussion, there are more appropriate groups already on LinkedIn.

Subsequent communications channels might perhaps include a Meetup group (if we want to put up the money), an email list, an outpost on a Facebook page, and other channels as there is interest.

GALA (the Globalization and Language Association) is one of our industry organisations. It has a membership and affiliate list that includes people from the Vancouver region. I spoke with one of their staff at Localization World. They are interested in encouraging local community groups. I believe this initiative is directly in line with their interest: we can be the local GALA community for here.  They have included us in a list of regional Localization User Groups. We are also on IMUG’s list of “IMUG-style” groups.
Do you want to see this meetup grow? If so, I welcome your input and participation. You can tweet to @VanGLUG, post comments on this blog, or send me email at jdlh “at” jdlh.com. Call me at +1-604-376-8953.

See you at the meetings!

A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (2) Why, Naming

Posted by on 31 Dec 2014 | Tagged as: culture, i18n, language, meetings and conferences, multilingual, software engineering, Unicode, Vancouver

I am helping to start a regular face-to-face event series which will bring together the people in the Vancouver area who work in technology globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation (GILT) for networking and learning. This post is the second in a series where I put into words my percolating thoughts about this group.  See also, A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who (Oct 31, 2014).

Happily, this group has already started. We held our first meeting on Monday, Dec 8, 2014. Our placeholder Twitter feed is @imlig1604; follow that and you’ll stay connected when we pick our final name. And we have a group on LinkedIn for sharing ideas. The link isn’t very memorable, but go to LinkedIn Groups and search for “Vancouver localization”; you will find us. (We don’t yet have an account on the Meetup.com service.)  If you are in the Lower Mainland and are interested, I would welcome your participation.

Continuing with my reflections about this group, here are thoughts on why this group should exist, and what it might be named.

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A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who

Posted by on 31 Oct 2014 | Tagged as: i18n, language, meetings and conferences, multilingual, software engineering, Unicode, Vancouver

The time has come, I believe, for a regular face-to-face event series which will bring together the people in the Vancouver area who work in technology globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation (GILT) for networking and learning.  The Vancouver tech community is large enough that we have a substantial GILT population. In the last few weeks, I’ve heard from several of us who are interested in making something happen. My ambition is to start this series off by mid-December 2014.

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IUC38 tutorial, “Building Multilingual Websites with Drupal 7 and Joomla 3”

Posted by on 31 May 2014 | Tagged as: CMS, drupal, Joomla, meetings and conferences, multilingual, Unicode

I’m delighted and proud to have been invited back to give my tutorial to the 38th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC38) this November in Santa Clara, California.

Title: Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla 3
Date: Monday, November 3, 2014, 10:30-12:00. Track 3, tutorial morning session 2.
Here’s my abstract:

A practical look at the language and locale capabilities of Joomla! 3 and Drupal 7, two leading free software content management systems (CMSs). They let you build more powerful, more international websites faster. We look at: their core internationalisation and locale services, and localisation of UI and content. Each platform just had a major release, with advances in internationalisation. You will leave with specific tips for building your own site. We don’t assume Joomla or Drupal experience, but do include material for advanced practioners. A good tutorial for web site product managers, web designers, developers, and managers of international web teams.

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Open Data Day 2014, and a dataset dataset for Vancouver

Posted by on 28 Feb 2014 | Tagged as: government, meetings and conferences, Vancouver, web technology

Again this year, I joined Vancouver open data enthusiasts in celebrating Open Data Day last Saturday. Despite limited time and schedule conflicts, I was able to make progress on an interesting project: a “dataset dataset” for the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue.

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A good-practice list of i18n API functionality

Posted by on 30 Nov 2013 | Tagged as: culture, i18n, meetings and conferences, multilingual, software engineering, web technology

Think of the applications programming interface (API) for an application environment: an operating system, a markup language, a language’s standard library. What internationalisation (i18n) functionality would you expect to see in such an API? There are some obvious candidates: a text string substitution-from-resources capability like gettext(). A mechanism for formatting dates, numbers, and currencies in culturally appropriate ways. Data formats for text that can handle text in a variety of languages. Some way to to determine what cultural conventions and language the user prefers. There is clearly a whole list one could make.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, and useful, to have such a list?  Probably many organisations have made such lists in the past. Who has made such a list? Are they willing to share it with the internationalisation and localisation community? Is there value in developing a “good practices” statement with such a list?  And, most importantly, who would like to read such a list? How would it help them? In what way would such a list add value? Continue Reading »

Trip report: IUC37

Posted by on 31 Oct 2013 | Tagged as: drupal, Joomla, meetings and conferences, Unicode

Delightful!  Last week I came home from the gathering of my trip, the 37th Internationalisation and Unicode Conference. My tutorial on Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 3 again went well. And I found inspiration, new knowledge, and old friends there.

Those of you looking for my slides and handouts, they are at the preceding link. You are welcome to share them, per their Creative Commons license. I’d appreciate credit when you share them. And I’d appreciate your feedback on this blog’s comments. Continue Reading »

“Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla 3″ (IUC37 tutorial)

Posted by on 30 Sep 2013 | Tagged as: drupal, Joomla, meetings and conferences, Unicode

I can’t believe I didn’t announce this before now. I’m delighted to be asked, once again, to present a tutorial on Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 3, at the 37th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC37), this October in Santa Clara, California, USA.

This is my abstract, from the Unicode conference program for my talk: Continue Reading »

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