I am on a mission! And if you are from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain or Germany then you might understand why.
Maybe it is just my impression but I believe that users from these countries make up quite a notable faction of the international keyboard enthusiasts scene. There would be significantly more users if you also count the keyboard enthusiasts engaged in local, non-Englisch communities.
Most of the larger keycap/keyboard community GBs are focussing on ANSI-US as the only properly supported language, sometimes you see a grain of UK support or - in Signature Plastic GBs - you might encounter a NORDIC kit that barely reaches MOQ because it adds another 40$ to an already expensive keycap set.
I would like to change this but had to realize this wouldn't be a simple task. I am working on two factors here:
- Create and refine an optimized set of keycaps that will give the best support for users from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK and Germany with the smallest amount of keycaps possible. Bear with me, no one will get all the legends perfect to the last detail but I just hope many of you can live with what I came up with:
More details and discussion here:
workshop-f7/designing-the-ultimate-nord ... 14443.html
- The second factor is getting together a group of people interested in customs keycap sets from the covered countries. This is almost as important as getting the keycaps selected right. I want to be able to "sell" this ISO-International add on during their Interest Check phase and advertise any GB that is including these keycaps to all of you. The more people we can collect here to focus our common interest, the more likely it is we will be seeing good support for our locales in customs keycap sets.
Now I know that especially the NORDIC keyboard enthusiasts have often resorted to switching to ANSI-US due to lack of nice keycap sets in their layout. You are a very strong group though and I need your support here. The same thing applies to German users - at a lower scale though because Germans can rely on a solid supply of Vintage Cherry keycaps - please support us even if you gave up hoping for a nice, customs ISO-DE keycaps set long ago. Together we can make it happen!
The most important part is spreading this message in ANY local communities you know about or are a part of. We have to get the members from local keyboard communities on board and make them aware of nice ISO-International keycap sets. My perception is most of the smaller local keyboard communities stopped bothering about nice customs keycap GBs long ago because support for their local was never found and with their man power it was difficult or impossible to make an impact. This is why I want to get everyone together from the international communities (Deskthority, Geekhack, /r/MechanicalKeyboards) as well as the smaller national communities.
As an additional idea, I offer to collect orders from EU participants and handle the international shipping & import. If we find a GMK GB run somewhere around the world with 25€ shipping to the EU per order, we can collect our orders during the GB phase. I will collect payment and place one large group order and then distribute the keycap sets within the EU for cheaper shipping and no additional Tax/Customs hassle.
My idea to setup this group was a simple mailing list. I call it the "NordEUk Union". A mailing list doesn't require anyone to create a new account somewhere and check it for messages or get annoying notifications from a service. I will use this mailing list to inform members about upcoming GBs that I find interesting or that were forwarded to my be other members. I will gauge the interest of the union members through online polls or surveys and based on the results approach the IC/GB runner about adding ISO-International support.
Please be aware that we are talking about 100$+ keycap sets here. It will mostly be GMK keycap sets made from doubleshot ABS.
Looking forward to read your feedback
LINK TO THE MAILING LIST SUBSCRIPTION:
http://eepurl.com/cnrzTj
