Together for Burundi!

As 2014 draws to a close, Kamusi has a bit of news to share with our supporters.

Most exciting, we have received a small grant from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation to begin work on a Vietnamese component for Kamusi, together with the Vietnam Institute for Lexicography and Encyclopedia. This will kick off with a week of student training in Hanoi in February, with data to flow in for the rest of the year.

The Vietnamese project will be the first to use the social and gaming methods we've been developing behind the scenes. We'll be hooting and hollering about these new features as soon as they go live - launch date is scheduled no later than January 25.

Meanwhile, work has been going nicely on the Kirundi language of Burundi. Nine students of Translation at the University of Ngozi receive stipends that make their studies possible, for which they work on dictionary entries for their language and receive specialized training. This is a model that we hope to replicate in other places, with proposals in process to potential funders.

Things have been greatly speeded up by the server upgrade we were able to afford thanks to our September funding campaign. We still have a lot of pending programming upgrades that are functional on the development server, but haven't been pushed to live, because we are finalizing some important security issues - basically, the new social and mobile apps involve a lot of data exchange between different systems that could open holes to hackers, so we need to batten down the hatches before the big code release. Follow us on Facebook to be sure to hear the news when the new features are launched.

Our financial situation remains bleak, but the back-end work of 2014 should be bringing visible results in the near future that, we hope, will excite new support in the year to come. Many thanks for the support you've shown, and we look forward to the innovations we'll therefore be able to show you in 2015!