In the first Arab Techies gathering, participants identified several Arabic support problems and were committed to solving these problems as part of the group's activities. These were common problems that appeared as challenges for almost all the topics discussed in the workshop, for example the Arabic search issue intersected with many topics: those working in new media and citizen journalism need better search to cope with the ever growing content, at the same time improving the search will lead to improving indexing which will simplify detecting trends that affects those working on social applications and digital activism, etc. In that workshop, participants also had an insight that improving status of Arabic digital content, is directly related to improving language processing tools.

Many of these problems are not hard to solve, many of them were solved before but in proprietary products and so it never really helped in improving the state of the art or the web in general. Some of these problems - though not technically complicated - are not to be solved by individuals, they need consultation, especially on ambiguity around language features or due to regional differences, for example Arabic search stop words.

Hence the idea of a code sprint, to bring together a few of the passionate, talented Arab developers and get them to fix some of those problems within an Open Source solution.

The Arab Techies will invite 10 to 12 Arab developers, some of whom attended the first Arab techies gathering, the others will be from a pool of new people. This way, the event will also be a good opportunity to extend the Arab techies group.

The code sprint will be a four days event of intensive coding, in a comfortable, informal setting, with fun activities in the evenings. The participants will choose the challenges they want to work on and which tools/programming languages to use for solving them.

The Arabic support problems list has some highly ambitious challenges, but the rest are quite doable time and resource wise. The participants will try to work on as many as possible of those items, to produce well specified open source libraries, ready for use and adaptation on the platforms/applications used by the Arab techies members. Participants will also create the infrastructure that will allow them to continue working on the solutions, and in helping each other and other people in using the produced code in their applications, online.

If participants have the time and interest, they might hash out the details of the more ambitious challenges, describe the problems better and specify how they can be solved.

• News and blog posts from the codesprint
• Codesprint Agenda