Yes — entirely. The Playbook content is community-maintained and openly licensed, and the Masakhane Tool annotation platform is Apache 2.0. There is no closed version, no paid tier, and no commercial fork. Use it for research, teaching, internal projects, or commercial work — attribution and the original license terms are all that's asked.

Yes — contributions are very welcome. The recommended flow:

1. Open an issue with a brief outline of the chapter you'd like to write (so two people don't write the same thing).
2. Fork the repo, write your chapter as a Markdown file under the relevant section folder in docs/.
3. Open a pull request referencing your issue.

The full step-by-step guide — including frontmatter conventions, sidebar configuration, math/admonition syntax, and image handling — is in the contribution guide in the README.

Every chapter page has a "Cite this page" link in the footer that gives you the BibTeX for that specific chapter. The dedicated citation page provides BibTeX, APA, MLA, Chicago, and a machine-readable CITATION.cff (which GitHub renders as a "Cite this repository" button on the repo page).

If you cite a specific chapter, please include the chapter title and the URL of the chapter page.

Yes. The Tool is Apache 2.0 licensed and ships as a Progressive Web App, so you can:

• Self-host it on any machine that serves static files and a backend.
• Install it on a phone or tablet for offline-first annotation work (sync when connectivity returns).
• Deploy it inside an institutional network with no external dependencies.

Pilot deployments are currently running at Bayero University, Kano and Bahir Dar University ICT4D Research Center. The codebase is community-maintained and you can contribute back to the upstream.

The site UI is translated into 6 languages — English, Hausa, Amharic, Swahili, French, and Portuguese — with chapter content gradually following as native-speaker reviewers translate each chapter.

The Tool itself supports any African language and script through Unicode, with virtual keyboards for non-Latin scripts (Ethiopic, Tifinagh, etc.) and right-to-left text handling where applicable. New language localisations can be added by contributing a translation file.

There are several ways, depending on how much time you have:

• 5 minutes — Star the repo on GitHub or join Discord.
• 30 minutes — Translate one paragraph, fix a typo, or add a missing reference (the "Edit this page" link at the bottom of every chapter takes you straight to GitHub).
• A few hours — Write a blog post case study about a real-world dataset project.
• A few weeks — Lead a chapter. See the open Call for Chapter Development Proposals (USD $1,000 honorarium per accepted chapter, open through 30 June 2026).

They're complementary public goods, not competing products:

• The Playbook — this site. An end-to-end guide covering data collection, annotation design, quality assurance, modality-specific tasks, documentation, governance, evaluation, lifecycle management, and community collaboration. It's a manual you read.
• The Masakhane Tool — a mobile-first, offline-capable annotation platform built for African contexts. It's a piece of software you run.

You can use either independently. They were designed together so the practices in the Playbook are directly supported by the workflows in the Tool.

• Bug in a chapter (typo, broken link, wrong information): open a new issue with the URL of the page and what's wrong, or click the "Edit this page" link at the bottom of the chapter and submit a fix directly.
• Bug in the Tool: open an issue on the Tool's repository (linked from the Tool page).
• Feature request: open an issue describing what you'd like and why.
• Open-ended question or discussion: prefer GitHub Discussions over an issue.

The Roadmap page lists shipped milestones, work in flight, and what's planned for upcoming quarters. It's updated as work moves between columns.

The project is anchored at Bayero University, Kano (Nigeria) and Bahir Dar University ICT4D Research Center (Ethiopia), in collaboration with the broader Masakhane NLP community. See the About page for the full mission, anchor institutions, and partner communities.