Manuel Ortega explains the workings of the spellchecker

Last Saturday, the new version of the open source spell checker for Papiamentu was launched. This happened during a well-attended conference in the ICUC the Brionplein.

The Foundation Curaçao Open, who released the spellchecker in 2011, has used funding from the UNESCO Participation Programme, to update the spellchecker and to make a promotional video that will be shown on TV in the coming weeks.

The importance of a spell checker that works on the Internet, is that it works while writing emails, and discussions on Facebook. The spellchecker works in the Internet browser ‘Firefox’, which is also free and open source.

Besides the release of the open source spellchecker, a ‘locale’ for open source programs was presented. This locale describes digital characteristics of a language. Did you ever notice that the date format on a Dutch version of your favorite spreadsheet program, is very different from an English / American version? Precisely, this is because both languages ​​have their own ‘locale’ that establishes this.

Papiamentu has a locale since Saturday, October 31st and the next few months it will be integrated as much open source software as possible.

A third innovation concerns the ‘banko di palabra’, a website for words. This site allows you to search for words that exist in the Golden Booklet, but also to add words. The new words can be voted on and the intention is that in this “open” way, through crowdsourcing, an official commission regularly will be adding new words to the spell checker.

tinyurl.com/ad-spell-1

tinyurl.com/ad-spell-2

papiamentu.info

tinyurl.com/ad-spell-3

Presentatie Software Freedom Day (21 sept)
http://prezi.com/kl3cv0jajzzn/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

We are also on the Software Freedom Day Event Map! http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/map/

In April 2013, Mrs. Michele Marius visited Open Curaçao to conduct a survey about Open Standards, Open Data and Open Source in the Caribbean for UNESCO.

From left to right: Mrs. Michele Marius (for UNESCO), Mrs. Elly Hellings (secretary), Mr. Henk Lubbers (treasurer), and Mrs. Marta Dijkhoff (president). Not in photo: Mr. Urso Wieske (member of the board).

Papiamentu Spellcheck for Firefox (What is Firefox?) can be found here.

Papiamentu Spellcheck for Thunderbird (What is Thunderbird?) can be found here.

Thanks to Manuel Ortega for making those available.

UPDATE! Thanks to Manuel Ortega, a spellchecker for Papiamento (Aruba, pap_AW) is available!
https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/diccionario-papiamento-aruba/

For LibreOffice (What is LibreOffice?) you can download the spell checker based on the official word list here.

Interested in the official wordlist, created bij FPI? Just click here.

What is this OPEN SOURCE you speak of? Is it FREE SOFTWARE?

Maybe you wanted to go here for the spellcheckers

Foundation Curacao Open (Fundashon Kòrsou Habrí) is happy to announce that the language institute FPI released the ‘list of words in papiamentu‘ under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license since Sept. 16, 2011. That’s quite a step forward for our beautiful island.

Foundation Curacao Open released a spellchecker for Open/LibreOffice on Software Freedom Day, Sept. 17th, 2011.

You can download the spell checker based on the official word list here.

HOW TO INSTALL THE SPELLCHECKER

1. Dowload this file from http://opencuracao.com
2. In Open/LibreOffice, go to Tools -> Extention Manager
3. Click ‘Add…’ and then navigate to the file you saved in step 1.
4. You should see license and other info.,
5. RESTART OpenOffice/LibreOffice!

6. Make a new document.
7. Go to Tools -> Language -> for all Text
8. Choose ‘Papiamentu (Netherlands Antilles)’
9. start typing!

During the 1st international conference on governance for sustainable development of caribbean small island developing states, March 4 till 7, 2011, on Curacao, the following presentation was given. Download here (.pdf): 2011-03-05 Free Software and Education

After the presentations, the speakers formed a panel discussion, chaired by Prof. Jeanne de Bruijn.

The Curaçao Business Council for Sustainable Development organized a 2-day seminar on Renewable Energy on 6 and 7 October 2010. Suares & Co made a presentation about Open Source related to Energy. You can dowload the presentation:
– as PDF (for viewing on any computer)
– as ODF (if you want to edit the presentation and use it for your own)

Here’s a list of links to the examples in the presentation: read the rest of this post

During the kick-off meeting various presentations where held, by Monique Raphaela (Introduction to OLPC), Ricardo Lochan (The future of laptops), Percy Pinedo (The future of education), Harry Hoeve (Integraging ICT into Education) and Ace Suares (Teach the teacher training).

Most importantly, teachers and staff from the Reina Beatrix College in Bonaire and the Prins Bernhard School in Curacao expressed their intentions to use the laptops in the classroom. The Oranje School in St. Maarten, who couldn’t attend the meeting, also has high expectations of the project.

Commissioner Rosalia (Education) explores the OLPC XO laptop during the OLPC pilot project kick-off meeting

The pilot project is financed by Bureau Telecommunicatie en Post, and sponsored by Postspaarbank and Nieuwe Post NV. DEZ, Suares & Co and Stimul-IT also invested in the project.

The “One Laptop per Child” pilot project is a project of Kennisplatform Curacao. For more info: info@stimul-it.com of www.stimul-it.com, +5999 738 6299.

During the kick-off meeting, three short videos where presented, showing parts of the teach-the-teacher trainings.

How to Open the OLPC laptop (1:51)

St Maarten ICT-team speaks out after the first day of training (1:31)

OLPC Training Prins Bernhard School (7:19)

OLPC Activities – teachers from the OLPC Pliot project doing activities (8:38)