Mochio Umeda
is a Japanese IT enterprise management consultant, and one of the most well-known commentators on IT and Web 2.0 issues in Japan. He is the president and founder of the Silicon Valley-based MUSE Associates, and holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Keio University and a Master of Information Science from Tokyo University.
He, at the publication of his 7th book, "シリコンバレーから将棋を観る 羽生善治と現代 'Yoshiharu Habu and Modern Shogi'", announced on his blog that he would allow anyone to translate the book into any language without permission from him or the publisher (20 April, 2009). 4 days after the publication of the book on 25 April, a Japanese college student announced on his blog that he had started a project to translate the book into English, which immediately attracted many collaborators. A French version of the project also commenced around the same time.
Within a week since its inception, the first draft of the English project was finished and made public, making it possible for anyone to participate and make corrections regarding English, whose quality was not perfect since no professional translator was a member of the initial group of this project. The leader of the project emphasizes the characteristics of the project as open-source, asking for unexpected contributions from unexpected places (eg. A non-Japanese shogi lover might make a film explaining some difficult shogi moves in the book and post it on YouTube, or she might want to create a computer shogi which is stronger at shogi than human.) In this regard, it is possible to say that this project not only helps spread shogi, which is one of the most prominent Japanese traditional cultures, to the world but also contributes to introducing open-source-mindedness to the Japanese web.
External links
ja:梅田望夫