http://gaelicguerilla.com/?p=88&cpage=1#comment-17

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‘CELTIC LEAGUE – PRESS INFORMATION

AGM: RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED

The following motions were adopted at the recent meeting of the Celtic League
AGM in Kernow:

Branches

Alba Branch

1 – The Celtic League congratulates William Robertson (Uilleam MacDhonnchaidh)
and Michael Bauer (Micheal Bauer) on making Dwelly’s Gaelic Dictionary available
online for the first time at http://www.dwelly.info We further note that they did this
without subsidy or financial reward.

(Background – Dwelly’s dictionary is the finest in existence. Edward Dwelly
compiled, collated, illustrated, bound, printed, and sold the work by himself.
Messrs Bauer and Robertson keyed in the entire tome without being given any
subsidy whatsoever – which is a great tribute to them, and Dwelly himself. Other
much less worthy Gaidhlig projects have received substantial funding.)’

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@Art
“But surely there is room for several networking sites?”
Categorically no. This was something that was fairly extensively commented on in the early days of MySpace vs Bebo vs Facebook.

The point of a social network is that all your friends are in one place. For those friends to be there, it has to be useful to them — so all their friends have to be in one place. And all their friends, etc etc ad nauseum. There was a time when different networks held prime position in different countries, but international travel’s getting cheaper so the boundaries blurred and Facebook is now a near monopoly in real terms.

Anything taking place outside of Facebook will now be specialist stuff, and Gaelic is a minority language, not a specialist pursuit.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but to me MyGaelic monumentally missed the point. While BnG is (laudably) talking about making Gaelic more a part of everyday life, MyGaelic once again made the Gaelic language the self-conscious focus of Gaelic language policy, at every level. If people are expected to go to a special digital ghetto for Gaelic, it’s not part of everyday life.

And the name just tops it off. If we can get more Gaelic initiatives that have the self-confidence to launch themselves in Gaelic and without the words “Gàidhlig” or “Gaidheal” in their names, then maybe we can stop feeling that Gaelic is a language for its own sake, and start thinking of it as just another everyday language.

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Fòram na Gàidhlig emerged towards the end of 2007 after the demise of the old forum on Save Gaelic.org. The foram on that site had been going a number of years but not with out a few problems.
Savegaelic.org still exists but the membership of the forum and the webmaster went their seperate ways. Folk contacted each other through Tìr nam Blòg and other sites and the survivors started up again in one or two places but the user friendly Fòram na Gàidhlig caught on and since then Gun Chloc has added a few more functions to the site.

2006-2009, three years is an eternity in web terms. To move forward in a rapidly developing e-Society environment the Bòrd will have consult more with the users of the new technology. Something that is perhaps hard for any government department but the thing is that the web is shifting the foundations of our society, challenging everything. As the bigger culture we all live in gets a huge shake and wake up call what place for Gaelic that has a precarious place within that bigger culture?
No place on the talking machines in Marks and Spencer Inverness anyway
Will there be a place for top-down institutions in the future in the way that there was in the last millenium? Everyone is a potential organiser now, you don’t need a centralised institution to set everything up for you anymore. In web terms organic solutions do seem to work better.
oidhche mhath a charaid

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When was Fòram na Gàidhlig set up? I don’t think it had been set up when the Bòrd embarked on developing mygaelic. There was very extensive research done by a company called Progressive in advance of the decision to commission the site (2006, I think) and there seemed to be a gap in the market for such a site.

Perhaps in the time between the research being done and the site being developed, other sites got in first. But surely there is room for several networking sites? mygaelic was never set up with the intention of it being ‘controlled’ by Bòrd na Gàidhlig to punt our own points of view.

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http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50133327997

Lìon sòisealta a’ cleachdadh lìon sòisealta leis a leithi seo.
A social network using a social network with the like of this.

‘Caillidh 125 duine an cosnadh thar cheithir bliadhna anns na h-eileanan. 125 – 200 jobs are to be lost in the Western Isle as the MoD make an attempt to cut costs.

Dè do bheachd? What do you think?
Innse dhuinn aig mygaelic.com. Tell us at mygaelic.com

http://mygaelic.com/groups/view/99

‘

I would feel inclined to perhaps make a comment and link to a good article I read (in Gaelic) about that subject in the P&J but if I were to do it I’d be more inclined to make it out in the open in Facebook rather than inside the clumsy groups structure on mygaelic.

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I think this is an untapped learning resource that the internet has now made ‘easy’. I wonder how the two come together – now the internet (Skype, msn, discussion forums) have made this relatively ‘easy’? Whether there are Gaelic speakers keen to devote their time for free, I don’t know, although live-mocha seems to work quite well on this principle. I know there is also evidence of this on FnG, but considering your suggestions that BnG develop a free learning program, this would fit in nicely with mygaelic.com

@Charles: I think your use of the term ‘corral’ was apt – it feels like mygaelic.com could almost be an attempt to catalogue and sterilse the messy, organic online Gaelic community. This feeling was reflected in the research mentioned above, where participants commented that:
In Scotland Gaelic seems to be presented in a formal way and in Cape Breton it is more about having fun. In Scotland there is a lot of competition around Gaelic such as what happens at the Mòd. That never occurs in Cape Breton.
“The unfortunate thing is that many in the Gaelic learners’ family are far too scholarly – not a lot of fun.”

I don’t want to be unfair though – it could just as easily be said that the site is BnG’s attempt to be less formal (with social networking and all that). And at any rate, any new development aimed at Gaelic learners is of interest to me so I have signed up and will make use of the site where I can to see how it takes off.

(btw, ‘deciphering’ would be a better term than reading over at FnG as most comments were in Gaelic – a great learning tool as one automatically assumes threads a few pages long must be VERY interesting so it’s over to Faclair Gàidhlig air loidhne to try and find out what everyone is talking about!)

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I suspect there’s a further factor here which relates to the amount of community buy-in on the project (See the comments on traffic and the paltry 24K mygaelic.com trumpeted recently). The dichotomy between funded, more corporate projects and unfunded or partially-funded projects is most visible in a comparatively small field like Gaelic where it is easy to see how the online audience has been inadvertently polarised by the central organising body’s highly-funded, highly-marketed solution. The community-built websites using existing software are continuing to be successful at mygaelic’s expense because there is absolutely no attempt at trying to corral Gaelic speakers into one corner of the internet — by definition these community sites are integrated into the net and represent its vibrant informality.

And at core there is a further reason that myGaelic will continue to suffer – With the site, BnG have entered an area of the internet which is essentially user-led, informal and socially-oriented — it is an organic space, and one which a body like BnG will struggle to respond to appropriately because, I would argue, its raison d’etre is specifically very formal and very focussed. And this is where I think you hit the nail on the head: BnG should be providing courses in gaelic online, for free and associated or linked to the pre-existing online Gaelic community rather than trying to create something new. Will it happen? I wouldn’t hold my breath. On the other hand the more people like you who decide to learn the language the more chance a critical momentum will be reached and a site like myGaelic will eventually really take off!

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I first came across Gaelic after travelling/living in Scotland for a few years as a backpacker. At that time I felt my interest in Gaelic was not taken seriously by the hardcore clasarch/camanachd playing locals and after getting caught up one summer in a nasty battle between the Fios and SYHA (insert smiley lol) I figured an Aussie learning the language was a (bag)pipe dream.

However, back in Australia I discoverd there was an ONLINE Gaelic community with learners from everywhere. I started learning ‘BBC Gaelic’ and visiting sites such as Taic, as well as joining a local self-help class (too far away to visit regularly). I also spent a small fortune on An Cursa Inntrigidh. SMO’s course was good, but insanely expensive in Aussie dollars and the real benefits seem only to come via a visit to Skye for in-person workshops – a journey beyond my means.

The most valuable resource by far has been Foram na Gaidhlig, except they don’t have a course attached to the forum, or tutors taking skype calls and checking assessment each week (although there is a wee bit of this). In my opinion, as a struggling distance learner, what the online Gaelic community needs is something that blends the content of the BBC and Taic with the community of the Forum – preferrably FREE to allow access to anyone (indeed many people have been flabbergasted to hear that I have paid to learn Gaelic, saying that it should be the other way around!)

As far as mygaelic.com goes, I am not sure it is bringing anything NEW to the table, and I am curious to know whether the creators even realised FnG existed before constructing their new site, and if so, why were resources not put into making it more useful to learners, rather than creating a new site?

I hope it is not because FnG is not explicitly linked to any one Scottish organisation and therefore ‘out of the control’ of the higher powers of Gaeldom, because in my mind the best thing about mygaelic.com is that the Scottish Gaelic community finally appear to be acknowledging the international Gaelic community. I hope things become more tangible, such as allocating points for migrants who speak Gaelic, or extending the current Gaelic teacher recruitment drive to include overseas teachers.

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>:(

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http://nairnshire.blogspot.com/2009/06/discover-another-of-scotlands-languages.html#comments

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As for our article on mygaelic’s recent newsletter, I think ‘extremely’ is over-egging it slightly don’t you? We’re not exactly foaming at the mouth with admiration.

Personally I think the note that the newsletter celebrates “24,000 visits it has now had from 80 countries worldwide” says more about the site than anything else. For the last three months ForArgyll has averaged over 1,000 unique visits a day ( http://developing.forargyll.com ) – 24K since mygaelic’s launch, including press, is small beer.

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The article published here more recently about Mygaelic is extremely complimentary:

http://forargyll.com/2009/05/newsletter-no-3-from-mygaeliccom/#comment-2805

Too much so, in my opinion.

I agree with anyone who says the money could have been spent better in furthering Gaelic in other ways, and some of your suggestions are fine, though I am not sure how receptive the target group would be to ‘training in how to use F na G’, for example. But grass-roots schemes and building up a free / cheaper internet presence would be good starting points.

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moran taing a charaid!

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GunChleoc: These are good figures to have to hand when we look at where mygaelic.com have pitched themselves. I doubt, mygaelic.com is doing that much better (and probably worse) despite the publicity that their evidently well-oiled and well-funded PR machine generates. The more I look at the situation the more I think we are on the money with our analysis that BnG could have more simply and cheaply implemented open source software to fulfill their requirement. Indeed had they used http://buddypress.org they’d have benefitted from a precipitiously steep development curve which is seeing the platform take off across the world. Plus, the funds they used to develop the gaelic version would have had a double impact when the translation was published into the open source environment.

BTW. We’re talking at the moment about implementing a buddypress installation on top of this site, and we’d necessarily be looking at creating a gaelic version — we have a top secret test installation which is looking very fruity tho’ still only in English …

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Only the users who posted at least once show up in the statistics in order to help weed out spammers. We actually have 235 registered users, of which 139 have posted.

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