Hello!
When a small community is under pressure of a larger dominant culture, what can they do? Language has always been a major element for building a society's identity and it is not different for indigenous peoples in Brazil. If a language have less space and less space in its speakers' lives, it will shrink and may become endangered. To avoid it, one must seek all available resources to strengthen minority languages and give them more room to grow.
An NGO (Kamuri), and a Drupal Shop (Chuva Inc. - Southern Drupal) have joined forces to open spaces for indigenous peoples' languages on the web and empower them to buil their own web. The pilot project is a community website for the Kaingang, one of the largest native communities in Brazil, with more than thirty thousand people. Kanhgag.org is live and being adopted progressively, thanks to digital inclusion workshops and efforts to bring computers and satellite Internet connection.
This talk will present this work in progress, its motivations, roadmap and current status. Moreover, we will show why Drupal has presented itself as a powerful ally, allowing us to build low-cost, effective and feature-rich websites, combining social networks', blogs' and wiki's characteristics into a single project. Last but not least, we will present a few suggestions of what you can try at home.
Liked it? Curious?
This is a session proposal for DrupalCon Paris.
Interested to hear more? Support it. Please :-)
http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/session/drupal-minority-languages-and-ind...
Anyway, let's meet in a BoF? http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/session/drupal-good-meet
I'd like to hear about the goodness made with Drupal around the world and it'll be a good place to share experiences and ideas to fight evil! ;-)
See ya there.
José San Martin