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Hello all,
Firstly, a formal meeting announcement:
Event: ILUG-Delhi meeting
Date: Fri., May 9th
Time: 6.30pm
Agenda: o Brainstorming for working with NIXI. Please
see details below.
Participants: All on this list.
Venue: BB/3G, DDA flats, Munirka.
Contact: Me (9868527992)
We had an interesting meeting today with some people from
NIXI, the National Internet Exchange of India, which is now
set up as a not-for-profit company. Briefly, NIXI wishes to
play the role of a bridge between industry, government, and
the FOSS community, and has certain advantages over normal
government agencies when it comes to funding projects in this
area.
Here are some ideas mooted from their side. Please note
that these are open to people from anywhere in India, and
they would like to see country-wide participation:
1. Preparing for roll-out of internationalised top-level
domain names, i.e., web URLs entirely in Indian languages.
ICANN should be approving this in some 6 months time, so
NIXI wants people to participate in an experimental setup
on a private (to India) network which can go public on the
Internet on ICANN approval. This work would include the
preparation of a write-up on potential issues involving
canonical representations for Unicode names, phishing and
other security loopholes, etc. Sarai might be hosting an
informal seminar to introduce this topic, in a week or
two.
2. ipv6 roll-out: NIXI would like to have a parallel ipv6
network in 1-2 months time. They have already done training
and awareness sessions for ipv6 routing, but largely using
proprietary tools. They would like community folk to hold
training sessions for (a) MCA-level students, and
(b) technical folk in small/medium enterprises, universities,
or other institutions.
3. Software for, and management of .in domain name registry:
Currently, they use proprietary software, and databases,
and would like to switch to open-source alternatives.
4. Community participation in the Internet Governance Forum
(IGF) meeting to be held in Hyderabad from 3-6 Dec., 2008:
http://www.intgovforum.org/ NIXI wants the community to be
there, as this is supposed to be a meeting for public
comment, and I think that it is important that we take
part. In particular, names are being solicited for
be part of the advisory group, and the deadline for that
is May 21st. For more on the IGF, please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Governance_Forum
5. Of particular interest to IndLinux is that NIXI is willing
to (a) fund localisation work carried out by distributed
community groups in the country, (b) fund projects aimed
at polishing open-source Indian language tools, and deploying
them, e.g., making sure that OpenOffice, and Mozilla
Indian language packs get built, and distributed, and
(c) provide bandwidth, and hosting to such open-source
projects.
6. Deployment of Indian language, and other open-source
software developed in India, and/or targeted at an Indian
population. Their examples were Hindawi, Dhvani, etc.
The goal here would be to (a) put together software that
demonstrates the use, and (b) convince people using
proprietary alternatives to switch.
7. Survey of sites in the .in domain: Someone to carry out
a study of .in sites (which are currently some 4.5 lakh
in number), categorise them, and give awards to the best
sites in various categories, e.g., best Hindi/Indian
language blogging site, best open-source site, etc.
8. Rework syllabi at elementary, and middle school levels
to replace references to proprietary applications with
generic teaching, and/or references to open-source
alternatives.
9. Bring your own ideas: NIXI is also very interested in
hearing about your ideas for possible open-source
projects. Please feel free to contact us at Sarai,
or to directly get in touch with Mr. Rajesh Aggarwal,
IAS, Additional CEO, NIXI, or Mr. Ajay Tripathi,
Technical Officer, NIXI. (Their email addresses are
in the list of recipients.)
Regards,
Gora
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