In West Bengal there are no Govt announcement regarding Unicode and KB layout.Our Govt are still in the ASCII era in all department. But they adopted Unicode by *Society for Natural Language Technology Research* (NLTR) (http://www.nltr.org/) and released Baishakhi Linux 2.0http://www.nltr.org/SNLTR/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=118&Itemid=119(inbuilt unicode supported all Indic Language as like other Linux distro) .The society has been seeded by the Govt. of West Bengal (Dept. of Information Technology) with initial funding and support. NLTR promote Bengali computing through Unicode and Baishakhi KB which is more similear as Inscript Bengali.
But my personal experience is not very good, when I go any govt office in West Bengal( Writers' Buildinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers%27_Building), they use Windows OS (pirated?), ASCII Bengali interface like i-leap and Bijoy etc. I dont know why they funded for Baishakhi Linux 2.0http://www.nltr.org/SNLTR/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=118&Itemid=119?
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Gautam John gautam@prathambooks.orgwrote:
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/
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