[gnso-idn-wg] [Fwd: Joining GNSO IDN WG as an observer]

["GNSO.SECRETARIAT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <gnso.secretariat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI



Greetings,

Statement of Interest

My name is D. S. Maniam and I am the chairman of the IDN Commitee (2000 til
present) of The International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil   a
8 yr old organisation devoted to facilitating and bringing the 4000 year
old
Indian language Tamil to the Computer and Internet era. Tamil is spoken
by over 70 million people spread all over the world and is amongst the
top ten languages spoken globally in rank order. While most Tamils live
in Tamil Nadu State in India, several million live abroad and acer
concentrated in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, UK, USA, Mauritius,
Maldives and Canada. It is an official/national language in a few of
these countries. Over the years INFITT has contributed to several
standards including spearheading a collective petition/thrust to get
Tamil support included in the Microsoft O/S  as the first Indian
language. (In fact as much as half of all the computer programming
outsourcing done in India by foreign companies  is done by Tamils in
Tamil Nadu.) INFITT has annual conferences rotating around several
countries, with local Prime Ministers and Heads of States routinely
launching them. Routinely many hundred of Tamil-computing related
research and papers are presented at each by the Tamil diaspora and at
some of the conferences attendee turnout has exceeded 100 000 people.

INFITT has a strong  interest in IDN and IDN email addresses for Tamil
since 1999 when the first Tamil IDN domain and email addresses were
demonstrated in Asia by APNG (Asia-Pacific Networking Group, the group
that spun-off APNIC and created the largest Asian Internet meeting
series APRICOT) in collaboration with the National University of
Singapore. In fact Tamil was the second language, after Chinese to have
been demonstrated as viable IDNs during the year-long Asian-region wide
(12 country NICs) IDN testbed conducted in 1999. INFIIT thru its IDN
committee, formed a number of years ago, has followed the early
developments in IDN, both as a technology and as IDN TLDs, in Asia and
then later in ICANN until ICANN's loss of interest in furthering IDN
after the launch of IDN.ascii early on.  Given that there now seems to
be some 8 years  later some momentum in creating full IDN TLDs at ICANN,
after so many false starts, we had considered participating a few months
ago but came to understand that participation was not easy. However as
things have seemed to change very recently we would like to contribute
to the ICANN IDN debate once again from a  Tamil/ Indian perspective,
even though it appears much of the discussion period is over with only
two more phone calls to go.

Regards
D.S.Maniam
www.infitt.org <http://www.infitt.org>


--
Glen de Saint GÃry
GNSO Secretariat - ICANN
gnso.secretariat[at]gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org