Welcome!

Our organisation

Vox Humanitatis is a not for profit organisation that cares about less resourced cultures (scope). We start from maintaining the culture by creating contents in the various languages and localizing software going the way of the so-called cultural localization. Of course one main point of our activities is helping education for and within less resourced cultures taking their usage back into everyday business. Many connected activities will help us to survive as an association.

Some notes on our history

First Vox Humanitatis was thought to go to Great Britain, but soon we understood that we would not be able to cope with it in terms of traveling and time expenditure. Italy then was the next logical destination for us. Wanting to concentrate on our goals to reach and to minimize time expenditure for travel and organisational tasks we talked with an association we know well: GoPiedmont, we organised the Festa dël Piemont 2008 with them. They offered us to integrate also because our goals are very much the same: them concentrating on Piedmontese culture, us on less ressourced cultures on an international level. So that is how Vox Humanitatis now has its base in Alba, Piedmont, Italy.

Projects and Communication

Vox Humanitatis works in various projects, partnering with universities and/or associations or just internal projects. We also support external related projects whenever possible.

As a consequence of our no double effort internal guideline, building alliances and partnerships has become possibly our most important field of activity.

The quantity of world-wide ongoing efforts is simply amazing, both in variety and quality. It's a pity that very often such efforts simply aren't aware of each other. We try our best to help increasing the inter-communication degree and you can help us do better. Please tell us about your projects!

Scope and Practical Goals

Scope
The association Vox Humanitatis is focused on developing opportunities for less resourced cultures, so that they can be perceived by their native bearers as an element of dignity and an opportunity for social promotion. Thus it is establishing a “virtuous circle” that can help reinforcing cultural diversity, while at the same time spreading “knowledge about the other” and tolerance among different native communities. This includes peculiar communities that do not have an ethnic base, like sign-language communities and the likes.

Your help is needed

All our projects are open source or open content and therefore we work with volunteers.

In this specific moment you can help with:

1) the dictionary by adding and/or translating existing entries and there are two possibilities: or your work following your interests or you contribute to the OFWB (online specialist dictionary) of the University of Bamberg. For OFWB we may issue certificates signed by the university and Vox Humanitatis and also stages can be created.

2) Ambaradan, our software is still under development and help is needed in various parts, in particular the creation of various user interfaces for the most different usages of the database would be appreciated.

3) Collecting African languages to open content. Everybody should have right to study in their own native tongue. Now we start a project for learning's dictionary in African languages. There are several hundreds of languages non-visible here in internet. If you care about your language – join the team!

For further information please contact us directly at: info at voxhumanitatis dot org
 (just substitute the "at" with "@ and the "dot" with ".")

Supported Products

Vox Humanitatis aims to help less resourced cultures find their place in the globalised economy. Economic weakness has a deadly effect on smaller cultures. They cannot stop globalisation and eventually they are erased and substituted by bulk imported behaviours and products.

Yet, they can use the ongoing processes to export their own economic and cultural identities, thus becoming attractive to a world-wide consumer base, a consumer base that can actively help in their protection.

Most of these cultures have no choice whatsoever. Whether they like it or not they will be joined anyway, so all we can address is how much control they retain on the ongoing process.

The Ambaradan project


Ambaradan is an open source storage system for language based information, whether textual, spoken or gestured. It allows both semantic annotation and a simple management of individual and co-operative translation processes.

It aims to serve third parties, that can use it to store, share and manage information through its API. It shall eventually develop into a distributed repository, so that users can become direct donors of server space.

Further reading: Ambaradan: an open source storage system for language based information, whether textual, spoken or gestured

The i-iter network

The i-iter network is a federation of on-line communities that are hosted and maintained by Vox Humanitatis. The aim of this service is twofold:


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