... Continued from Part I

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