Arab Techies has organized a Code Sprint, that was held in Egypt 20- 23 May 2009, with the goal to find solutions to known Arabic language processing problems.

Background

Arab Techies has organized their first gathering in Cairo, December 2008 with the goal to bring together a varied group of techies who vigorously utilize their IT skills to support their communities on the route of development and social change, to share experiences and knowledge, learn from each other and collaborate on solving common problems.

In that event, participants identified several Arabic support problems and were committed to solving these problems as part of the group activities. Many of these problems are not hard to solve, many of them were solved before but in proprietary products and so it never really helped in improving the state of the art or the web in general. Some of these problems - though not technically complicated - are not to be solved by individuals, such problems need consultation, especially on ambiguity around language features or due to regional differences, for example Arabic search stop words, and thus came the idea of the Code Sprint.

The Code Sprint

15 participants from 8 countries in the Arab World attended the 4 day sprint, that was held in the Swiss Club in Cairo. They worked in teams on several Arabic support problems, to improve the user experience for Arab users, and to create solutions and build tools to improve Arabic language processing.

Interested in the details of what happened in those four days of sprinting, read the blogposts on Arab Techies.

Arab Techies Project Space

The Arab Techies Projects space was created to host the outcomes of the Arab Techies Code Sprint 2009, and become the platform for future collaborations among a growing community of Arab Techies, who are eager to work together and help each other, instead of reinventing the wheel each on her own.