A GREAT week in India - but LOTS to do!

Team,

     I had a number of GREAT meetings this week and we have follow up to 
do.  Let me cover this by meeting:

_*Tuesday - e-sahitya.com meeting*_

This meeting was put in place by MDK and team and was very eye opening.  
I met with a group of 3 representatives from e-sahitya which is a 
non-revenue, non-profit organization designed to publish books 
exclusively in Marathi!  They have about 400 authors who have put books 
on their website and they have about 500K subscribers.  They currently 
publish in ePub2 format and want to move to PWP as their next version.  
They have a major issue with their ability to increases the number of 
writers they support as they are mainly writers, not technologists and 
are looking for a standards based platform to help them meet the 
expected demand. From our Programme prospective I think they can provide 
two things: 1) bodies to do both the gap analysis and remediation for 
Marathi and 2) introductions to people who could fund the work.

I'd like to thank MDK for sending one of his team members to the meeting 
who just happens to be an author using this platform! ( Sorry, but I 
don't remember his name and didn't get his card).  If we go with a model 
that says we have a focus point / task force leader by language I think 
we should consider this individual for the work around Marathi.

_*Wednesday - BarrierBreak*_

I met with Shilpi Kapor (Managing Director / CEO) who supports our goals 
but won't be working on the programme with us as her clients are 
primarily in the Nordics.  She did, however, e-intro me to Balendu 
Sharma <Balendu.Sharma@microsoft.com> and Alok Lall 
<Alok.Lall@microsoft.com> who responded to that introduction and were a 
part of the discussion I had on Thursday with Kalika Bali.

Richard and Ralph - If we have needs for similar work around the Nordic 
languages then Shilpi would be interested in working with us.

_*Thursday - Microsoft*_

I had a GREAT meeting with Kalika Bali - thanks to Alolita for the 
introduction.  She is VERY SUPPORTIVE of this programme and was glad to 
see the introductions to Balendu and Alok.  She told me that Microsoft 
currently supports 9 Indic languages in their products and that she 
could see them potentially providing both people and money to support 
those languages.  At a meta level she sees us working with Microsoft in 
two ways.  First if we can arm her with what would be needed to do a gap 
analysis she would get an intern or two to do that work under her 
guidance in Microsoft Research.  Second, we need to work with Alok (for 
money) and Balendu (for commercialization) to get Sponsorship of the 
Programme.  These two gents should also be convinced to help us get 
resources from the team in Hyderabad to do the actual work. So a number 
of actions coming out of this meeting:

 1. I need to work with Richard to have a presentation / document put
    together that says HOW we want a Gap Analysis done.  This should
    include where things would be kept (assume github) and what the
    review / qa process would be from this team.  I then need to send
    that to Kalika and Reverie (more on them below)
 2. WE need to decide how we want to manage the Gap Analysis for Indic
    Languages.  More on potential conflict below in Reverie notes.
 3. WE need to identify an individual (either Abhijit or MDK or both) to
    meet with Balendu and Alok in Delhi to pitch a Sponsorship package. 
    OK - guess we need to figure that package out first, and before that
    we need to have a general idea of how we're going to "divide and
    conquer" the work between MSFT, Reverie and others.
 4. I (or maybe Ralph?) need to send a note to Mike Champion about this
    so that he can make sure the team in Hyderabad gets the message that
    supporting W3C in this work is a good thing to do.

Bottom line - Kalika is signed on to support us and wants to help bring 
Microsoft in as a significant contributor!  She also sends her regards 
to Richard, Alolita and Abhijit - she's excited about who's on the team!

*Friday - Reverie*

I met with two of the three founders - Arvind and Vivek Pani. THEY WANT 
TO BE A MAJOR PARTICIPANT IN THIS PROGRAMME!! They believe they can do a 
Gap Analysis on MANY of the 18 Indic languages pretty quickly as they 
have fundamentally done the work already for a project they are doing 
for the government.  We need to provide them the same information we 
provide Kalika around Gap Analysis.  They are extremely reluctant to 
work too closely with any "big company" as they haven't had great 
experiences doing that.  This means we need to carefully define what do 
we give to them vs. what we give to MSFT vs. what we give to e-sahitya.  
The next steps with them are:

  * Get the technical package to them
  * Define who gets what languages and leadership
  * Define how big of a Sponsor they will be

I'd like to get all that done in the next 2 weeks if possible.

_*General Thoughts*_

While more is better, I think we have the nucleus of the team we need to 
get things done.  In addition to these meetings I had a great 
conversation with Abhijit on Thursday to discuss how we might implement 
this.  At the end of the day it's Alolita's call as we need you to be 
the overall leader of the work and make sure people stay focused on 
results.  What feels like a tactical implementation might be this notion 
of a "task force" for each language where an in-country individual from 
e-sahitya, C-DAC, MSFT or Reverie drives the first step Gap Analysis so 
we know how big of a problem we're trying to solve.  I suspect that the 
people who could do this could handle more than one language.  By 
example Kalika said she would drive her interns and Vivek at Reverie 
would drive the SMEs from their team.  I think once we get these three 
nailed down then Abhijit should be in position to have discussions with 
others to help us out and that may primarily be a Sponsorship discussion 
vs a technical discussion.

I think we need a call but it may be a challenge this next week as I'll 
be in China.  Having said that, however, I'd like to propose that we do 
a call on my Wednesday night so it would look something like this:

  * Alolita - 0700
  * Ralph (optional) - 1000
  * Richard - 1500
  * Abhijit & MDK - 2030
  * Me - 2300

Let me know what questions / comments you have and let's capture the energy!

Cheers,

Alan

-- 
J. Alan Bird
W3C Global Business Development Leader
office +1 617 253 7823  mobile +1 978 335 0537
abird@w3.org    twitter @jalanbird