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Welcome to the Children's Internet Gateway Project Wiki!

For general Wiki help instructions, see the Help. To experiment, use the SandBox page.

Please visit our ToolPage: we're using Python with Pygame, Zope, and Plone.

Email us is you're interested in helping out with the Children's Internet Gateway Project.

Meeting in Boston

February 21, 2004. Tom Hoffman, the Technology Coordinator and education researcher from the Feinstein High School in Providence, RI, visits Anoush and Steve in Boston. Tom is the author of a set of Python, Zope and Plone tools used by FHS. Many thanks to Tom and Jennifer for a most illuminating discussion!

February 19, 2004. Created a School Intranet Portal Site for Spitak School #8, a school with a computer lab connected to the Internet by Project Harmony. We are looking forward to collaborating with PH in the area of development of intranet portals for schools. Sasun Asatryan, proud member of our Children's Internet Gateway Project Team, works for the school, and will be in charge of the new portal.

February 18, 2004. Created an Intranet Portal Development site for Spitak Boarding School for Orphaned Children. SpiTux? has old ties to the school. The school's computer lab is not connected to the Internet, but the school does have a network. We are encouraging SpiTux? veterans (such as Boarding School seventh grader Gagik Petrosyan and School #5 eighth grader David Shiroyan) to work on this site.

Installing Zope/Plone

February 2, 2004. We installed a fresh version of Python, Zope and Plone on the Spitak server. The idea is to try to get the Content Management Framework going in Spitak, to make it easy for the kids and NGOs? and others to host their websites on the server, without having to learn HTML.

New Member

January 26, 2004. Sasun Asatryan, working for the computer lab at Spitak School #8 joins our Armenian School Intranet Project effort.

Plone Armenian i18n Part of Plone 2.0

January 15, 2004.  Our Plone Armenian Internationalization file is now included in the official Plone 2.0 download! The Plone Internationalization (i18n) project is hosted on SourceForge. You can experience our translation at the Armenian i18n Test Site. Courtesy of the translation team: Emilia Bostanchyan, Laura Bostanchyan, Armine Danielyan, Edik Ehtibaryan, Mariam Grishkyan, Naira Harutunyan, Anoush Najarian, Alvard Nazaryan.

January 1, 2004.  We wish you a Happy New Year!

School Intranet

December 30, 2003.  We launch the School Intranet Site (in Armenian, for now), a part of Tziatzan where we are developing a prototypical intranet site for the Armenian schools.

Intercontinental Chat Session

December 29, 2003.  We hold another Intercontinental Chat Session, to discuss the next assignment (in Armenian) hosted on Tziatzan, our Armenian i18n site for the Plone Content Management System. Chatters: Alvard, Armine, Edik, Emilia, Lala, Mariam, Naira, and Anoush.

Tziatzan Chat Session

Seminar: Introduction to Zope, Plone, and Python

November 8, 2003. Armen Yolyan's second visit, giving an Introductory Seminar on Zope, Plone, and Python. Armen will be traveling to Spitak once a week for the two coming months, delivering a series of seminars.

Continued: Plone Armenian l10n Revisions

November 6, 2003. Edik Ehtibaryan, IATP Spitak Site Administrator, and Program Director for the Shogher Youth Center, submits the fourth, and penultimate, chunk of revised translations for the Plone Armenian Localization.

Zope, Plone, and Plone Armenian l10n Install in Spitak

November 1, 2003. Armen Yolyan, a Yerevan professional, travels for Spitak to coordinate the install of Zope and Plone at the SpiTux Lab. These complete successfully, after much hard work. This is the first in a series of 8 visits Armen will make to Spitak, all planned out as hands-on seminars on Plone, Zope, and Python.

Test Drive Armenian Plone

October 28, 2003. But please be forgiving: it's work-in-progress. Or be constructive: send us your valuable comments! Visit the Plone Armenian l10n Testing Site which demonstrates our current experimental Armenian localization.

Plone Says Its First Words in Armenian

October 24, 2003. We collect our preliminary translation of the Plone interface and feed it into the Plone Translation Service. And it works! We'll be done with the translation within a week, and will put it up online for you to test out.

Armenian Localization for Plone

October 18, 2003. Spun off Plone l10n (localization = l + 10 letters + n) as a separate subproject. Which it really is. We are about half the way through with the translation effort. It is pretty nice how we organized our labor: Anoush translated what we have so far, and Edik, Mariam, Emilia, and Naira looked it all over for typos and corrections. We are working on the second batch of translations now.

Sister Project: TuxType 2.0 Armenian Theme

October 15, 2003. We set up TuxType, namely the Armenian Theme for TuxType 2.0, as a new Armenian Typing Tutor Project on opensourcearmenia.com. The goal is two-fold:

• to fuel the development effort for a TuxType 2.0 Armenian Theme
• to make the TuxType 1.0 Armenian Theme more easily accessible in Armenia: ease of download is everything!

ProjectPlanWiki

October 10, 2003. Debut of ProjectPlanWiki, a place to learn about the Children's Internet Gateway Project components and schedule.

PloneI18?nWiki

October 6, 2003. Made PloneI18?nWiki where we store our i18 efforts (currently, excerpts from the plone.pot file).

Migration to opensourcearmenia.com

October 4, 2003. Migrated this Wiki to opensourcearmenia.com.

Expert Committee Approves

October 2, 2003. Armen Shahverdyan, Project Director for opensourcearmenia.com, let us know our project is approved!

Plone i18n

October 1, 2003. Started an Armenian i18n group for Plone, on plone.org.

OSS Project Enters Computer Clubhouse

September 26, 2003. Anoush joins the Flagship Computer Clubhouse in Boston, and is looking for Clubhouse members to join in on the OSS Project, to enrich it, and change it, sure. The organizational meeting for the OSS Project will be at the Flagship Clubhouse, Friday 10.10.03, at 4 pm.

OSS Project Assignments

Absolutely all of what's below is subject to change and will greatly benefit from your input. Things to do in preparation for the project:

1. Browse the Web for related resources: visit
   • Kidlink,
   • PBS Kids,
   • Yahoo Kids,
   • Lissa Explains,
   • Children's BBC,
   • Kids Like It
2. Look for more ideas at Interesting places for Kids.
3. Talk to experienced sysadmins to see how we can work the email server. The problem being, issuing email accounts will potentially entail a lot of traffic, and a lot of disk space. What can we do? Should we stay away from this?
4. What services would we like this gateway to provide? (Obvious) examples: email, chatting, message boards, some for of Web hosting, CGI tools (such as counters and polling), maybe (Anoush's favorite) wikis, games (which?), educational resources (how to make a webpage, for example), music, cartoons. What else?
5. What programming languages are going to be involved? Right now, the answer seems to be PHP, Perl, Python (with Pygame). What existing sites can we use? The story is, a lot of individual country sites are not top-to-bottom original work. They can be just a front end. Who would want to cooperate with us though, what do we actually need, and what can we make use of? Same list of sites as above applies.

Intercontinental Chat Session

August 30, 2003. We held a chat session to discuss the open source software project we are starting to work on, on spitux.org, between the SpiTux? kids (in Spitak), a Yerevan State University CS MS student Nara Haruytunyan (in Yerevan) and Anoush (in Boston). (We're launching a special webpage about this OSS project shortly! And do step up if you're interested.) We discuss the two main ideas we have singled out to date:

1. an Internet gateway for Armenian kids, a place with Armenian-language-friendly email signup, nice Armenian message boards and newsgroups, art displays, games, and endless possibilities for expansion. (This suggestion belongs to Edik.)
2. a game generation environment -- a piece of software to allow a kid make his/her own games. Our thinking is, this environment can be sitatued online. John proposes to have two teams working on the project -- one team working on the environment, and the other team, on an example game, -- this would be useful for the first team as a source of ideas, and should hopefully produce a nice game all of us can enjoy playing. (John and Anoush came up with this idea.)

Our choice is to go with project #1, the children's Web gateway. Killing two birds with one stone (where did we get these violent expressions?), one could develop the game generation environment (project #2) as one of the features of the children's Web gateway (project #1)! But that's too wicked. Let's just say we choose project #1 tout court.

Meeting in Boston

August 28, 2003. John and Anoush meet up to talk about the OSS project. We discuss the following list of ideas:

1. stuff for grown-ups:
   • keyboard driver (or rather, a friendly app with a picture of the keyboard - that sort of thing exists, but apparently not open-source?)
   • crossword-puzzle maker (with online plugin)
   • email client
   • software using speech-recognition libraries (like, voice commands?..)
2. stuff for kids
   • games
   • environment in which kids can create their own games
   • animation-maker software

The Beginning

August 10, 2003. We are starting to consider ideas for an open source project proposal to be submitted to opensourcearmenia.com. We're looking at this as a possibility for collaboration with students at Yerevan State University. Edik, who is in Spitak, is very interested in this project. We also have two Boston area volunteers (John Davis-Cooke and Anoush) willing to help out. If you - yes, you reading this page! - are interested in getting involved, we love that, and we want you in. Do drop us a line.