Last updated on Mar 04, 2017.
Etherpad: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC17-DotBharatAdoption
In 2014, The Government of India unveiled DotBharat country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is available in Devanagiri script and covers eight languages Hindi, Dogri, Maithili, Bodo, Marathi, Konkani, Nepali and Sindhi. The other Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odiya are also in the process of being included. Domain names are to some extent windows to the Internet and have socio economic impacts for individuals and organizations alike. The Chinese and Japanese language TLDs were opened up in 2007.
Though the number of TLDs are more than 1,300, apart from .com that contributes to about 50 percent of web sites, the adoption of non-English domain names is very poor. This session intends to cover the following:
Prof. Amit Prakash will moderate the session. Dr. V. Sridhar will introduce the context of the panel and provide some empirical evidence of the adoption of non-English domains. The speakers will be Dr. Srinivasan Ramani, K.A. Dayanand, and Vivek Pani. This will be followed by Q&A from the audience.
There will be a few articles written on the techno-socio-economics of domain names that will be written in business newspapers or magazines by the chairs of the session prior to the conference to motivate the theme. Post the conference, there will be a short essay of about 2,000 words prepared and published by the chairs on the outcome of the panel.
Target publication outlets:
Not applicable.
Dr. Amit Prakash is Associate Professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore, India. His research and consulting interests lie in the area of information systems and public policy. He has worked extensively on advisory assignments related to public policy and governance during his prior employment at Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and, on design and deployment of large digital systems for the government while at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). He has a graduate degree in engineering from IIT Roorkee and a doctoral degree in information systems from IIM Bangalore.
K.A. Dayanand (Director, Department of Kannada and Culture, Government of Karnataka) has managed a large number of projects for the Kannada and Culture department of the Government of Karnataka and was instrumental in completely digitizing all activities in the department.
Dr. Srinivasan Ramani is Global Connector inductee in the Internet Hall of Fame 2014, and former Director of C-DAC (NCST), ERNET and HP Labs. Dr. Ramani proposed an Indian Academic Network in 1983, and this contributed to the launch of the ERNET project, involving a number of institutions that created R&D teams in networking. Earlier in his career, Dr. Ramani led a team to create communication software for an Indian-made computer in 1976-77, using it in the education field. He played a key role in connecting three cities in 1981 through an experimental satellite-based packet switching network, and co-authored a pioneering paper proposing a Low Altitude Equatorial Satellite for computer messaging in 1982. Dr. Ramani joined an elite rank of notable icons who have been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for their significant contributions to the advancement of the global internet in the year 2014. The Internet Hall of Fame inducted Dr. Ramani for his contributions to the growth, connectivity, and use of the internet in India. Dr. Ramani is also the first Indian to make it to the Internet Hall of Fame.
Dr. V. Sridhar is Professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, India. He is the author of two books published by the Oxford University Press: The Telecom Revolution in India: Technology, Regulation and Policy (2012), and The Dynamics of Spectrum Management: Legacy, Technology, and Economics (2014). Dr. Sridhar has taught at many Institutions in the USA, Finland, New Zealand and India. He has been a member of Government of India committees on Telecom and IT. Dr. Sridhar has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, U.S.A. His work can be accessed at: http://www.vsridhar.info.
Vivek Pani (Co-founder and CTO of Reverie Technologies) is the key driver behind Reverie’s language as a service platform and its consumer apps initiatives, and leads his teams towards the goal of delivering unparalleled language experience across devices. After graduating as an Electronics and Instrumentation engineer from CET, Bhubaneswar, India, Vivek began his language computing journey at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing, CDAC. Here he led the language computing team and pioneered several tools including the first free text transliteration from English to Indian languages for regular text and names.