Along with cooking the chef's daily stew at the Kamusi Project - working with data, working with language partners, working with the tech team, scrounging for funds to keep the project alive and growing - are a plethora of smaller pots that often simmer on the back burner for months or years.

One of these little tasks has been updating our "favicon" to resemble the new logo that we introduced last year. The favicon is the tiny image that sits next to the page title in your browser tab. Often a favicon will be a single letter in the website's title font, such as the T in New York Times or the f in facebook. Other sites attempt a miniature version of their logo, such as UNHCR or Pepsi. (Coke doesn't even bother.) The problem with the favicon is that the image is only 16 by 16 pixels, about as small as an image can get on a computer. One pixel is a single dot with a single color. A favicon has a total of 256 dots in a tiny square that has 16 columns and 16 rows - not much room for clarity, and almost no space for art.

Kura imekwisha. Asanteni!
Twaomba utusaidie kuchagua picha ndogo tutakayotumia katika kichupo juu ya kila ukurasa wa kivinjari katika tovuti ya Kamusi Project. Piga kura hapo chini, mwisho 16 Agosti. Asante!

Voting is complete. Thank you!
Please help us choose which very small image we should use on the top of every Kamusi Project browser tab page.Cast your vote below, ending August 16. Thanks!

People often ask for current news about the Kamusi Project, so we have put together a new booklet with up-to-the-minute information about the organization and the work that we do. I'm happy to share the book for your reading pleasure: http://kamusi.org/kamusi_book_2011

To celebrate this release, we are offering a special membership opportunity, because we need a strong membership base to support our unique work. Everybody who joins the project between now and 19 August 2011 (the next ten days) will have their name put in a hat to win their choice of Kamusi-themed gear from the Awards section of our shop. This is in addition to the ongoing random awards drawing every time we get 100 new members, so join today to get an extra chance to win great Kamusi clothing, bags, or even our famous Swahili clock! (Existing members will also have their names included in this drawing.)

Completed Terminology Sets

ANLoc partners have completed work on 2500 Information and Communications Technology terms, with a particular eye to software localization, for the following languages: Akan, Amharic, Arabic, French, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Songhay, Yoruba, and Zulu. We invite you to download the data and make use of it in all of your localization and ICT activities.

I'm pleased to announce a new program we're introducing to encourage people to join and stay as members of the Kamusi Project. From now on, membership in the Kamusi Project will include eligibility to receive awards of Kamusi gear, such as shirts, bags, and the ever-popular Swahili Time clock.

The concept is simple: every time 100 new members join the Kamusi Project, two things will happen. First, one person from that group of 100 will be selected randomly to receive their choice of Kamusi merchandise from the items shown in the Awards section of the Kamusi Project Duka. Second, one person randomly chosen from among the entire membership, including new members and loyal long-time members, will also be selected to receive the item of their choice from the Awards section. (The exact items in the section may be changed from time to time, as we phase designs in and out.)

Those of you who have tried to use the Swahili Discussion Forum have probably experienced a great amount of frustration. You log in, click to the next screen, and are asked to log in again. And again. And again. If you are very persistent, you can eventually post your comments, but you are more likely to give up.

Earlier this week we launched the new logo for the Kamusi Project, in conjunction with our receiving full legal status as a tax-exempt NGO/ public charity in both the US and Europe.  After two years of slowly working on the design, the compliments that people have sent in have been gratifying.

However, hours and hours of effort to get the logo onto attractive shirts, mugs, and other fun items has so far resulted in ... not a single sale.  Since the Kamusi Project only earns about $5 for every shirt sold, and $15 for every clock, we need to be selling a lot more than zero in order to raise funds for the work we do. We will soon announce other plans to ensure the project's long term sustainability, as well as describing the work we plan to accomplish with the funds we raise. For today, though, we have installed a little widget that shows off the merchandise on the right of every project page, so that you can easily buy Kamusi gear for yourself and all your friends.

Please admire the designs, and then please buy Kamusi stuff! These are not just stylish sweatshirts and bags - they are an important part of the financial plan to help the project achieve its objectives. It works like this: You buy things. We do work. You use the results of our work. And, you use the things you buy.

It's a cool system, but it only works if you visit the shop and go wild!

I am enormously pleased to officially unveil the new logo for the Kamusi Project.

Unicode Consortium is partnering with ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern computing on the African continent. ANLoc's vision is to empower Africans to participate in the
digital age by enabling their languages in computers. A sub-project of ANLoc, called Afrigen (http://www.it46.se/afrigen), focuses on creating African locales. During the last 12 months, no fewer than 150 volunteers have teamed up with Afrigen-ANLoc, and gathered locale data for 72 African languages. The Afrigen-ANLoc data collection tool was developed by Louise Berthilson of IT46 (http://www.it46.se), and the project is managed by Martin Benjamin, director of Kamusi Project International (http://kamusi.org).

According to Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com), there are an estimated 2,100 living languages spoken in Africa. The Afrigen-ANLoc project's stated mission is to create viable locale data for at least 100 of the many languages that are spoken in Africa, and upstream the data to Unicode Consortium's Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR http://cldr.unicode.org) project and OpenOffice.org. Implementation of fundamental locale data within CLDR is a critical step for providing computer applications that can be localized into these African languages, thus reaching a population that has perhaps never before had the ability to use their native languages on computers and mobile phones.

Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages. Unicode CLDR is by far the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization: adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones, numbers, and currency values; sorting text; choosing languages or countries by name; transliterating different alphabets; and many others.

The upcoming 1.8 release of CLDR will incorporate data for a total of 54 different African languages. 41 of these languages are completely new to the CLDR project, while 13 others existed in CLDR and were enhanced with additional data. These languages are spoken in 26 different countries
spreading across the entire African continent. The Afrigen-ANLoc project selected approximately 200 candidate languages, including all official languages recognized by a national government and all languages with at least 500,000 native speakers; additional languages are also incorporated in the project when volunteers step forward. Data is collected through the Afrigen-ANLoc project by native-speaking volunteers around the world, and entered via a web-based utility designed specifically for this purpose. The data is then reviewed for accuracy and merged into the CLDR repository.

"The partnership with Afrigen has been a huge benefit for us," says John Emmons, vice-chair of the Unicode CLDR technical committee and lead CLDR engineer for IBM. "The Afrigen effort has allowed us to bring many new languages on board that we wouldn't be able to do through our normal
process, while still maintaining the level of quality and consistency that we require for every language."

Good news on the Swahili ICT terminology project: we have been able to extend the period by one week. The final deadline for input from the community is this Sunday, March 14.

Habari nzuri kuhusu mradi wa istilahi ya kiteknolojia: tunaweza kuongeza muda wa wiki moja. Siku ya mwisho kupokea maoni kutoka wadau ni Jumapili, 14 Machi.

We have also added one more set of terms, so there are about 150 terms in total that need feedback from the community.

Pia, tumeongeza seti moja ya istilahi, hivyo kuna maneno 150 jumla yanayohitaji maoni kutoka kwa jamii.