User:Balasankarc/SMC

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC) is a community driven initiative to define, develop, enhance and maintain Free Software based language computing technologies in the Malayalam Language. SMC, having "My Language for/on My Computer" as its motto, works towards the development, localization, standardization and spreading of Free Software in Malayalam Language.

History
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing has its roots to the "Malayalam Linux Online" community started in 2001 by Mr. Baiju M, a student at NIT Calicut, which was rebranded to Swathanthra Malayalam Computing in 2002. The first activities of the community was the localization of different GNOME modules. It expanded to addition of Malayalam locale in in GNU/Linux, addition of inscript input scheme to XKB and a initial works of localization of the GNOME Desktop Environment. The community have undergone an inactive period of 4 years between 2002 and 2006, and in October 2006 it was restarted with the goals defined to fix rendering issues in Pango and ZWJ-ZWNJ issue in Xorg keyboard layout. The major task completed during this rebirth period was the successfull localization of Debian Installer to Malayalam Language. Following that, SMC volunteers contributed heavily in fixing different rendering issues of Malayalam Language in Pango.

GSoC Selections
SMC is the only Indic Language community to be selected 3 times for Google Summer of Code. SMC has been selected as a mentoring organization in 2007, 2013 and 2014. The different projects developed as part of GSoC are

Activities

 * Fix rendering issues in Pango rendering Engine
 * Localization activities
 * GNOME
 * KDE
 * Debian Installer
 * Mozilla Firefox, Firefox OS, Fennec
 * Diaspora distributed social network
 * Fonts
 * Malayalam Language Technologies - Hyphenation, Sorting etc
 * Free Softwares related to NLP in Malayalam Language

Language Technologies

 * GLibc Collation Rules for Malayalam
 * Hyphenation Rules of Indic languages, including Malayalam
 * Spell Checker support for GNU Aspell
 * SILPA

Fonts developed and/or maintained

 * 1) Rachana
 * 2) Meera
 * 3) Dyuthi
 * 4) Anjali
 * 5) Chilanka
 * 6) Keraleeyam
 * 7) Uroob
 * 8) Suruma
 * 9) Kalyani
 * 10) Raghu

Computer Softwares Development

 * 1) Malayalam input methods
 * 2) Swanalekha - Phonetic Input Method for SCIM
 * 3) Lalitha - Phonetic Input Method for XKB
 * 4) Dhwani Text to Speech System
 * 5) Payyans and Chathans - ASCII to Unicode converter engine and GUI frontend

Mobile Software Development

 * 1) Indic Keyboard - Keyboard for Android supporting 23 languages and 54 scripts
 * 2) Malayalam Keyboard for Android

Bibliographic Activities

 * Digitization of Malayala Grandhavivaram

Games

 * 1) Tux Type

Other

 * 1) Digital Rain screensaver with Malayalam characters

Organizational Activities

 * Licensing support for Kulasthreeyum Chanthappennum Undayathengane, by Smt. J Devika
 * Licensing support of Spoken Tutorials by FOSSEE

Collaboration with Governmental and Non-Governmental Institutions

 * Contributed in developing Free Software based IT infrastructure which serves as a base for IT @ School and Malayalam Computing campaigns
 * Digitization Contest in collaboration with IT @ School, Kerala Sahithya Akademi, Malayalam Wikisource and CIS-A2K, Bangalore
 * Technical Support for Offline Wikipedia CD and Offline Wikisource CD

Meetings, Workshops and Trainings

 * FUEL Review Meet
 * Font Development Workshop
 * Debian Release Party
 * Many Free Software related talks and workshops throughtout Kerala

Achievements

 * 1) FOSS India Award - Dhwani and Tux Type