Category: Cymraeg

  • Technology and Cymraeg

    Technology and Cymraeg

    Technology and Cymraeg

    In June 2024 Welsh Government launched a ‘call for information‘ on what is needed to make technology more friendly to Cymraeg.

    I produced a response to highlight the power of open source in enabling low-cost, high quality and ‘translation-friendly’ services. I post the response in full below.

    Hashtags:

    Recommendations

    • The value of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to health and well-being in Wales is so profound that it should be supported through a fund or equivalent of approximately 0.001% of the NHS budget
    • Public bodies in Wales should be required to use a FOSS equivalent (where one exists) of any existing proprietary social media platform, and to contribute to Welsh translations of the platforms

    Philosophy

    Technology is never agnostic. The deployment of technological tools depends strongly on the philosophy of those who created it. My response to this call for information is therefore predicated on the standpoint that open source solutions are generally preferable to commercial and proprietary alternatives. 

    Open source (also known as FOSS – Free and Open Source Software) has four freedoms:

    • Freedom 0: The freedom to run the software as you wish, for any purpose.
    • Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the software works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
    • Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
    • Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.  

    The beauty of FOSS to Wales is:

    • Using FOSS eliminates the leakage of money from Wales for licencing costs for using proprietary software
    • FOSS usually makes it very easy to translate, greatly reducing barriers to adoption for people who would like to use the Welsh language. 
    • Using FOSS can help upskill people within Wales (see freedoms 1 and 2).
    • Using and supporting FOSS directly helps achieve Wales’ future generations goal of ‘Globally Responsible’, because any improvements that are supported or produced from participants, volunteers or donors in Wales, are freely available for use or adoption by anybody globally, reducing the barriers to participation by the poorest in society (in Wales this supports the socio-economic duty)

    In the European context, Wales is a poor country within a poor unitary state, particularly if London is excluded. Issues of ownership and licensing are very important in this context. The use of proprietary software effectively means that the people of Wales are paying people elsewhere so that we can de-skill ourselves.

    In February 2022 I produced a White Paper entitled: “Why Wales should embrace free and open source software”. In it I made the case for open source against several Welsh Government objectives in the Digital Strategy for Wales. FOSS directly supports the following components:

    • Digital inclusion – creating digital public goods
    • Digital skills – widening participation in learning, and participation in communities of technology and interest
    • Digital economy – for some sectors, savings of more than 80% have been achieved through the use of FOSS

    For further details see the White Paper.

    The benefits of Cymraeg

    The use of the Welsh language produces numerous benefits for the individual, and still more for the community at large. Some of the individual benefits include:

    • Improved health outcomes
    • Improved career prospects
    • Increased performance in learning additional languages
    A mind map showing the links between the Welsh language and a range of positive well-being indicators

    Some of the benefits of using Cymraeg, all of which are evidence by peer-reviewed literature

    The health, educational and economic benefits are so profound that I believe the case should be made to divert a tiny proportion (say 0.001%) of the budget for the NHS to establish or fund an independent organisation aimed at improving understanding and adoption of FOSS in Wales.

    Cymraeg and communication technologies

    Welsh public institutions have been ‘captured’ by the early proprietary communication platforms to the extent that most use X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or other platforms without a thought as to the rationale, or the case for using alternatives that better support the Welsh language.

    The use of proprietary platforms indirectly enriches far-right voices, and certainly leads to a leakage of money and skill to (usually) America-based organisations through advertising and data harvesting.

    The proprietary platforms are not generally responsive to requests for making their interfaces multi-lingual, in direct contrast to their FOSS equivalents. 

    In order to properly implement the requirements of the Well-being of Future Generations Act, as well as the Welsh Language Act, public bodies in Wales should therefore be required to use FOSS social media platforms (where they exist) in addition to, or as a replacement for, their existing use of proprietary social media platforms. 

    This would give the opportunity for them to also contribute to the Welsh language translations of these platforms, making them more suitable for Welsh-language users.

    Other blog posts relevant to this article:

  • In praise of Mike Clubb – and volunteers everywhere

    In praise of Mike Clubb – and volunteers everywhere

    In praise of Mike Clubb – and volunteers everywhere

    My dad, Mike Clubb, spent his whole working life as a history teacher. Bridgend for the most part, but also Cwmbrân and Zambia.

    It’s hard for a son to objectively assess his father’s quality as a teacher; but from conversations I’ve had with ex-pupils, he seems to be fairly high regarded, even by the ‘naughty kids’ (strict but fair being the general feedback).

    The Welsh Arsenal

    His love of history was given a particularly local flavour when he took a significant interest in the lives of the people, up to 32,000 of them, who worked in the arsenal in Bridgend during WW2. Most of those people were women who were suddenly faced with employment opportunities and a wage – things not necessarily in great supply for women in the ’40s.

    Dad wrote a book in 2007, ‘The Welsh Arsenal’, which kick-started a campaign to have the workers recognised for the part they played in the war effort.

    The campaign, led by the Bridgend Civic Trust, culminated in a public plaque and ceremony, attended by Huw Irranca-Davies, who read out a letter from Gordon Brown (Prime Minister at the time).

    Photo of the plaque unveiling, from a South Wales Echo story

    Since the book was published, dad has spent countless hours of his evenings and weekends traveling the length and breadth of south Wales to educate others about this unique historical legacy; and to inspire others to take an interest in their own local histories.

    Dad didn’t grow up speaking Welsh; he has learned it as an adult. So it was amazing to see him able to participate in an S4C programme about disability recently. His grandchildren were delighted too (apparently being on telly still has some caché even for kids today!)

    Excerpt from the S4C programme “Y Frwydr: Stori Anabledd”

    In praise of volunteers

    My dad’s obvious love of history, and his passion to share it with others, is simultaneously both mundane and extraordinary.

    It’s mundane only in the way that, across Wales, hundreds of thousands of us volunteer in our own ways every day, making life a bit better for people in our local communities, or communities of interest further afield. In other words, it’s ‘commonplace, ordinary’.

    But what an extraordinary gift of love and mutual cooperation.

    From the local history societies, civic societies, local museums, to the environmental organisations that are showing a path to local activism and love of nature, to every form of social, community, health and sporting activity. Our lives are supported by the invisible threads of generosity of spirit, of time, and frequently of money.

    You may have heard people say that society doesn’t matter. That only economics matters, only markets matter.

    They couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is the current system broken, using the commons as a convenient place to dump pollution, and harvesting financial wealth as a compensation; but a market-driven approach, with every transaction needing to carry an equivalent monetary exchange, can never provide the rich experiences that humans need to fulfill their true potential.

    Next time you hear someone talk about ‘consumers’, remember that they really mean people; and each of us has our own part to play in forging a better society.

    The wonderful people who give freely of their time, energy and love are worthy of our huge thanks. So here’s to my dad, Mike Clubb, and to everybody like him who gifts their time within their local communities across Wales and beyond.

  • Welsh learner podcast

    Welsh learner podcast

    Hear about my experience of learning Welsh – and other languages.

  • What the Romans can teach us about the value of the Welsh language

    What the Romans can teach us about the value of the Welsh language

    Rome from the river

    What the Romans can teach us about the value of the Welsh language

    The Roman Empire was pre-eminent in terms of trade, agriculture and international networks of information and trust.

    Not until industrial times did the earth see a city as large as Rome, and as needing such huge quantities of food – and wine. How was it that the Roman empire was able to sustain a population of 1 million people in a city – a population that required nearly 250,000 tonnes of grain annually? And how could it sustain itself at that population for half a millennium?

    In principle, transactional costs at each step of the way, say from the food producing regions of the Nile, through to the trading houses at Alexandria, and on to Rome, should have crippled this market, and Rome should never have become a pre-industrial metropolis.

    And yet, in the face of informational uncertainty, and these transactional costs, the city survived – and indeed thrived – for hundreds of years. Not until the London of the 19th Century did a city become bigger.

    It was estimated that the additional cost premium of moving grain from Spain to Rome, rather than from obtaining it close to Rome itself, was just 16%, which was a pretty remarkable achievement for the time.

    Part of the reason for this success was the ability of the Roman state to eliminate transaction costs at certain parts of the supply chain, through (effectively) a salary, or the promise of gifts due to services rendered.

    The benefit of transactional cost efficiency, however, comes at the price of moral hazard – in other words, a misalignment between the interests of the people who want the profits, and those who generate the profits. For example, people making bread in Rome had to pay for future deliveries of grain at an acceptable price, and they had to do that at risk – for what was to stop the farmer at the far end of the supply chain from reneging on their part of the agreement? One must have considerable confidence in the likelihood of generating a return on capital before it is going to be put to work in a far-off land.

    The Romans solved this problem partly because they had an efficient and functioning legal system which could be used to verify the contracts. However a strong legal system – on its own – is insufficient for constraining agency costs. This formal legal system was underpinned by an informal ‘moral contract’ of behaviour which was embedded in the relationships between slave owners and freed men who mutually gained from the reputation of the other. 

    Trust and reputation therefore acted as a way of constraining systemic agency costs in Roman times, just as it still does today – although it is transferred and imbued in very different ways.

    The Welsh language

    The Welsh-speaking community is relatively small within the UK context, and extremely so within the international context. This means that the ‘six degrees of separation’ concept – the idea that any two people on the planet are, on average, six or fewer social connections from one another, shrinks to maybe two or three degrees of separation within the context of Welsh-speakers.

    This creates a relatively higher level of social risk associated with acting in bad faith, or fraudulently, within the context of the Welsh language, than in the English language. 

    In the same way as a trader within a small village lives – or not – by the quality of their service and their reputation – traders who embrace the Welsh language are making a commitment to the quality of their product or service within the ‘village’ of the Welsh language.

    This reputational alignment brings benefits to organisations both small and large. Small companies benefit from provision of Welsh language services by demonstrating their understanding of, and commitment to, language issues, which could arguably be seen as a proxy for their commitment to Wales as a national entity. Large organisations who offer services in Welsh – whether based in Wales or not – benefit from the perception that they have invested sufficiently within the language to understand the value of it to the people of Wales, and further that they value it sufficiently to employ people to be able to deliver their services through the medium of Welsh.

    In other words, using Welsh in the world of commerce reduces the risk to the purchaser that the supplier will provide sub-par products or services.

    There’s another benefit – to the ‘resilience and prosperity’ parts of Wales – related to organisations domiciled in Wales, and paying local and national taxes, because companies trading through the medium of Welsh are overwhelmingly likely to be domiciled within Wales, and furthermore to be of insufficient scale to avoid paying their taxes here.

    So by using Welsh as a preferred language of commerce – for those of us privileged to be able to do so – we are both reducing our risk as users of products or services, and increasing the likelihood that the profits retained from our purchase of said services will be taxed within Wales. For those of us who aren’t able or confident enough to use our Welsh, we can still benefit from the increased levels of trust in those companies that are providing their services through the medium of Welsh.

    Do I personally buy all my products or services from companies with a Welsh-language service? No, and partly because that information isn’t readily available. Whilst the likes of Ffônlyfr from Menter Caerdydd are helpful local tools, what Wales needs is a location-based map, response for mobile devices, where you can search for your nearest cafe, pub, hairdresser or professional service that can deliver that service through Cymraeg. This is my challenge to Wales’ vibrant developer community! And I think that there’s a sound business model for such a product. For example, my own company, Afallen, would happily pay a monthly subscription for inclusion in such a directory.

    I believe that the growing confidence and numbers of Welsh speakers will have a small but positive impact on our society and economy, and particularly for those organisations who can offer all their services through the medium of Welsh. Now – where’s that app for Welsh language businesses…I fancy a take-out coffee.