An Open Source tool helps a global community of professionals shift from traditional contacts and annual meetings to continuous interaction on the web
Dec 12, 2011 5573 views 
The challenges of maintaining and developing a multilingual web site with open source software tools and crowd-sourced translations, for a community of professional translators and terminologists working for international organizations and multilateral bodies where that "community" has no budget, depends on members' contributions in kind, but continues to grow, and has been growing since 1987. Using an Open Source tool which supports multilingualism to provide a complex support site for an international working group on language issues. How use of the Tiki CMS Wiki Groupware software made it possible to provide an ongoing interactive support site for JIAMCATT, helping convert the "International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology" into an ongoing year-round affair. The site, which is run without a budget and on the spare time of members, nevertheless is fully bilingual English-French, with parts in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish (all official languages of the United Nations) as well as some German.