Using Kamusi as testbed for the ACALAN project?

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Some forward movement with the new interim leadership at ACALAN. Basically, the institutional commitment to a discourse-like communications platform remains, but there is no chance of a near-term financial commitment. The working model for now will be for partner organizations like Kamusi to incubate projects as surrogates, and then deliver them to ACALAN at term.

We recently turned off the “under construction” notice at Kamusi - there’s plenty still to build (the attached image shows online data vs the next push, which could be this week), a solution we’re finalizing for certain complexities with diacritics, and a few known bugs we’re working on (particularly for pivot displays regarding South Asian languages), but the relaunch is finally functional for 29 languages. Let me rephrase that: the relaunch is finally functional for 29 languages :bottle_with_popping_cork::clinking_glasses::fireworks::balloon::tada::partying_face:

Having reached stability on our core structure, we can take on tasks like the communications platform. Back in the old days, when the Internet was young and I was young and naïve, I tried to host a discussion forum for African languages on the site. No good deed goes unpunished, and the forum gradually became an unmanageable hellhole of spam comments and registrations. At some point, we just had to hit the kill switch, and haven’t tried to go back for 20 years.

This is all preface to say that it would not be out of place to now develop a modest discussion platform on Kamusi. This would serve as a way for us to connect the African language development community in the context of our parochial linguistic data focus, while also acting as a proving ground for a more robust platform we can export to ACALAN. Most immediately, the existence of a working prototype would demonstrate its utility and viability to potential users and funders around the continent. Additionally, we would be able to work out a lot of the kinks, and fully understand how Discourse works, before going to scale with numerous languages (including 22 official language commissions).

From my side, May is good for pushing forward. June gets trickier.

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Thanks for the update! Congratulations on your great achievements with kamusi!

Discourse is definitely miles better and a different universe from whatever forum you were using back then. It has great baked in antispam functionality, so you won’t have to worry about that.

I love what you are doing and would love to get involved in some projects in Africa again, but right now I don’t have bandwidth to help out on a a pro bono basis. :cry: So if you have no budget, my suggestion would be that you spin up a free site at https://discourse.org/pricing. Or you can try the official install instructions to self-host, which I personally would always choose because you have access to all plugins and features without the limitations of official hosting. Maintaining a self-hosted site is not that hard. In either case you can always download a full backup anytime to restore it again on a different server if you decide you need more flexibility. (I just did that here for this site!)

Keep us posted here on your progress and let us know if you have questions or feel free to post here if you want to bounce ideas off others who have used Discourse before. Also meta.discourse.org is a great place for getting help from others so I would not hesitate to ask questions there.