A certain amount of excitement exists for every project an engineer is involved in, most especially collaborative projects solving a community problem.
The Yoruba Names project has the potential to create a foundation for many other Nigerian/African language technological intervention projects. As it will hopefully be a long-term venture, it presents an unlimited scope for innovation around language and the possibility of bringing together intellectuals for radical innovations.
Just thinking about the sheer potential of such an enterprise was enough a motivation to lend my time and join the already amazing Yoruba Names team as a volunteer developer. Besides, working with a team spanning multiple continents to build an online library of names for a language which is itself spoken across several continents, is an experience not very many projects afford one.
To my mind, the idea of satisfying some simple use cases for anyone desiring to find out more about Yoruba names would be enough to justify the time we’ll be spending on this project. Being able to help that one guy trying to study the language and needing a real tonal text to speech library; or that app developer who wants to build a service based off a language name API; or even simply providing a service for a person anywhere in the world who wishes to look up a name: these are some of the possibilities this project offers, and the reason I’m a part of it.
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Tola Odumosu is Web & Mobile Application Developer, you can read more about him at ttola.me or follow him on twitter @ttola