Together for Burundi!

The last few months of 2015 were not a highlight in Kamusi history. We were not able to resolve the server problems that had been introduced by the massive growth in data that we'd brought in during the summer, basically because we still do not have the funds to implement the obvious (but expensive) technical fix needed to scale to hundreds or thousands of languages. This is incredibly frustrating, both because it is abysmal to keep giving people pages saying "server error" instead of giving them access to the shiny new dictionary model that was functioning before we fried the server, and because we've got a ton of new data and programming features piling up behind the server impasse.

When we break through the logjam, we have data ready to import that will bring us to about 10 million terms interlinked among 50 languages, totally unlike any other language resource. When we can afford management for the large volume of incoming data, we are also ready to introduce the games we've been developing for Facebook, and soon for mobile devices, that will be fun and compelling for speaker communities to grow data for their languages worldwide. The problem is that the "relational" database that makes chains from Language A to Language B to Language C, etc, was fine for relatively small amounts of data, but gets overwhelmed by millions of links. What we need to do is convert to a "graph" database, along the lines of what Google and Facebook use to handle their vast amounts of associations within their data. It's not a mystery how to do it, only how to pay for it.

On a positive note, we made good progress in building partnerships that will lead in great directions once we get beyond the current technical problem. I have to be coy because there are still some signatures that could take a while to gather - hopefully the agreements will fall into place before the next quarterly update.

I'm also happy to report that we've made significant progress with the Vietnamese data we've been working on. We've run into a bit of a problem that we ended up with close to 240,000 entries (190,000 English to Vietnamese and 50,000 monolingual Vietnamese) instead of the 10,000 that we'd anticipated for the first year, so processing the data has been a lot bigger task than we'd planned, especially with the server offline. However, this is a good kind of problem, and will work itself out once we are able to set the games in motion that will enable Vietnamese speakers to work the data into shape.

Finally, you will see that our focus on Global Giving at the moment is the campaign to raise funds for our Kirundi component. Kirundi is the language of Burundi, and for the past few years we've been working with the University of Ngozi in that country to produce a dictionary for their national language. It has been a fantastic relationship. We squeezed funds from the tail end of a grant, with which we were able to pay the university costs for about 10 students in Translation Studies each year. We trained the students in how to write dictionary entries and in the necessary computer skills, and they produced the beginnings of a great free dictionary for their country. However, two bad things have happened this year. First, our funding pot for the project ran completely dry. Second, Burundi has been in political turmoil, so the university has not been able to operate as normal. Conditions in Ngozi seem to be stabilizing, so the students are ready to get back to work. However, because we've scraped the bottom of the barrel with our bank account, we cannot bring on the next round of students until we have funds on hand to support their work. It's remarkably low in dollar/euro/sterling terms to fund a student for a year to both pay for their studies and pay for their contributions to Kamusi - just $300 per student - so we are hoping that this campaign can cover their stipends and the other costs associated with making the project run in Burundi. Please watch their video on the Global Giving website, and let's pull together to see what they can do for the students of their country!

Thanks for your continued support, and best wishes for 2016,

Martin