On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Gautam John <gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:

On 24 February 2011 10:12, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline@gmail.com> wrote:

> Even though Central Government has adopted Unicode as the encoding standard,
> the case is not the same with most State Governments. As far as I know only
> few state goverments (Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kerala,...) had adopted Unicode
> standard. Many are still in the ASCII era.

Thank you, Shiju. A question - what are the hesitancies for
Governments to move to Unicode as the encoding standards? Is it the
tools they use? The workflow? A legacy issue - "we'll never be able to
open our old files"?

I'm trying to map this space out - it's just that I am coming to see
it as being really really important and want to try and do something
here.

Also, the GoI is slowly making some noises about standards and
openness etc. and I am hoping this are small points that can add up.
For example, the TAGUP report:
http://finmin.nic.in/reports/TAGUP_Report.pdf

>From the Executive Summary:

"Chapter 6 points out some key design considerations for the solution
architecture. The solution architecture should be designed to be
ﬂexible, reusable, extensible by stakeholders, and free of vendor
lock-in. Given that many Government projects touch end-users such as
citizens and ﬁrms, the Government should also play an active role in
promoting banking and accessibility for all. This can form the basis
of a platform for delivery of services.
Chapter 7 addresses openness in implementation of Government IT
projects. It describes the relevance of open standards, open data, and
open source. The Government should not only be a consumer, but also
strive to produce and facilitate open standards, open data, and open
source. It also suggests the creation of an open source foundation for
open sourcing software from Government projects.

Give me a little hope.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://social.prathambooks.org/

_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l