HISTORY
	The Scouting Dictionary is a result of world-wide non-profit co-operation. It began from a tiny three language (finnish, english and swedish) dictionary called Pieni Partiosanasto (Small scouting dictionary), which was published in two parts on Scouting magazine "Partio" by Guides and Scouts of Finland (first issue was 6/1991). Nowadays there isn't very much in common with these two dictionaries. Kazam copied the dictionary from the magazine to a piece of paper and carried it with him. He had met an estonian scout on a finnish jamboree 1990 and later Kazam asked him to translate those words also into estonian. In 1994 Kazam begun his studies of computer engineering. Some time after that he made his first journey to IRC (Internet chat program). On channel #Scouting he met a swiss scout called Etienne and sent the dictionary by email to him and words got translated in german and soon after that in french. At this point the Scouting Dictionary was transferred to the Net. Thanks to Etienne and Internet, something that had been a small project got out of control and the Scouting Dictionary was born. The main reason for the growth of dictionary was WWW, because people sent to Kazam new languages. After 6-7 languages the dictionary did not fit anymore on the screen and Kazam had to add a cgi-script for selecting languages. As an active scout on the net, Kazam got busy in the end of 1997. The finnish scouting channel #Partio on IRC grew to the point that its members (incl. Kazam) decided to organize the Jamboree-On-The-Internet event in Finland 1997 at science museum Heureka. The event was a success and in the beginning of the year 1998 the people involved founded an assosiation named The Finnish Netscouts (Nettipartiolaiset ry). In the summer 1998 started www.partio.net, the Internet server of this assosiation, and Kazam belonged to its maintainers. One of the first services on www.partio.net was -of course- The Scouting Dictionary. Few years passed and The Scouting Dictionary did not get much attention. But in the end of 2001 the long-planned change into a database will take place. There has also been discussion of integrating other services of www.partio.net such as "the Links pages of Finnish Netscouts" to this dictionary. Thanks to IRC and world wide web (WWW) The Scouting Dictionary consists now of 19 languages (situation 18.9.2001) and more languages are hopefully coming.
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