Exciting on-line resources

I was very pleased to find out about the Open Scriptures group on the Internet. They have a website at OpenScriptures.org but nothing posted there since July. The current action seems to be over in GoogleGroups (note the hyphen in that URL). They've also had data and code in GoogleCode but seem to be moving to GitHub now (hyphen gone again).

It was great to listen to some of this group (and many other speakers) at the BibleTech site. I've learnt a lot from listening to the 2008 and 2009 talks there (scroll down the page).

It's exciting to find a group that seem to have many of the same interests, particularly in working towards providing free and open Scriptures (original languages and translations), along with software and webware tools that will use standardized interfaces to make it easier for programmers and others.

I'm still learning about their goals and projects, but I'm hoping that I can find something to do to help them by around the second quarter of 2010. There seem to be four main areas of work:

1. Overall planning and design, especially XML formats
   
2. Preparing and checking/proof-reading data files (HUGE job)
   
3. Writing utilities to convert data files between various formats
4. Designing and writing software to access and use the available data.

Of course, my specialty interest is minority-language Bible translation, so I'm hoping to eventually get to #4 above as we consider our experience in a translation project and how computer tools might have better assisted us.