[i18n] introduction and a bit about this list

[Erika]

Hi, my name is Erika Meyer, I live in Portland, Oregon.  I've been 
around the evolt.org community, on and off, since the late 90s. In terms 
of my professional life, my main activities are web content production 
and front-end development.

We set up this list to focus exclusively on internationalisation and 
localisation issues for evolt.org.  Evolt.org has always had an 
international reach, but in terms of language, it's been English only, 
with most of our membership residing in the US, UK, and Canada.

However, we have always wanted to be *more* international.  We have 
wanted to be multilingual.  This was first brought up, to my knowledge, 
in late 2001.
http://lists.evolt.org/theforumarchive/Week-of-Mon-20011112/thread.html
(about 1/3 of the way down, thread started by Isaac.)

At that time, our progress was blocked mainly by technical concerns 
(whether our custom-build CMS could handle multiple languages), and so 
internationalisation fell back in our list of priorities.

Now that our site is running in Drupal, which I understand can handle 
multiple languages, and now that we are upgrading software and 
front-end, it makes sense to actively plan and move towards that 
long-held vision of becoming a more truly international community.

Like all evolt.org lists, this i18n list is publicly archived and what 
we do here will serve as an example to those who come after.

Welcome, and thank you for signing on to be part of this effort!

Erika