When I first heard of the project Texto Livre, the very first thing that went through my mind was how to use it to improve (and even speed up) the documentation process for the Brazilian GNOME and Ubuntu projects!

Texto Livre is a support group with the objective of offering linguistic support for the documentation of open source software, as well as introduce university-level students to to open source as a tool for research

Though I don’t yet know all the details, the ideia is to create a ticketing system where other projects would fill out a support ticket, specifying what needs to be documented or translated. These tickets would then be assigned to a group (this could possibly be the students of a class) and periodical notifications would be emailed to the responsible parties, with detailed information about the progress of your “issue”. Right now, the detailed explanation for this process can be read here (portuguese only for now as far as I could see).

Using the Brazilian GNOME project as an example, the statistics for the current status of translation for the packages installed by default on any GNU/Linux distro show us that only 17% has been translated. Since this work is performed by volunteers in their free time, it is nearly impossible to maintain a stable and continuos workflow. That is when Texto Livre comes into the picture!

Imagine several university-level students working on these documents fulltime as part of their curriculum!!!

In any case, if you happen to be in Porto Alegre during this year’s FISL event, take some time to talk to the guys from the Texto Livre project, as well as meet the representatives of the many different GNU/Linux distros that will be present, so you can learn a bit more about open source and its benefits!