Hi Jim, My name is Stan Baptista. I'm a Native Hawaiian recently returned home after living in New England for many years working for a variety of software companies.
Firstly, > I had hoped to 'name' the project with some (set > of?) Hawaiian words > that describe "freedom". "kuokoa" is the Hawaiian word for freedom without the appropriate kahako (dash over vowels) and 'okina (glottal stop, signaling a halting of breath before a vowel). You can get away with this: "ku'oko'a" To see the correct spelling go here and type "kuokoa" in the fill-in field: http://wehewehe.org/ This project caught my attention because David Lovell (cc'd) and myself are beginning a process of connecting/networking various efforts in the community that help Native Hawaiians particularly with respect to technology. David is a Director at the Research Center of the University of Hawaii-Hilo (RCUH) and also on the Board of Directors for Alu Like, a large non-profit that aids Native Hawaiians (http://www.alulike.org/about/about_directors.html). I work in the IT section of the Hawaii Tax Department most recently focused on examining audit cases related to Act 221/215. For the past few months we have been working on ethical issues in the biotechnology industry in Hawaii as it relates to Native Hawaiian culture. Through that work we have come to realize that there is a larger issue to address, i.e., there are many groups and individuals working on behalf of Native Hawaiians in a variety of ways. We want to start "connecting the dots" to gain synergy and this email is our first step for this project. If you decide to move forward with it, we can help you in your efforts to find an audience. Let's talk. Perhaps Linux will become part of the Hawaiian mo'olelo:-) Mahalo, Stan PS Julian: We spoke about Python, Zope/Plone a little while back when you were still in Australia. I guess you made it here. How's it so far? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com