Re: IETF Internationalised Domain Name mailing list: calling for more Asia voices

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

It is good to hear that there will be more Asian participation in the 
discussions, even if it is not at the same pace as we are going now. The 
more committed and involved participants, the better. I believe that we are 
trying to go a tad faster than some IETF work partially because we have 
heard of the strong desire from Asia for non-Western domain names.

At 11:17 AM 1/29/00 +0800, tinwee@pobox.org.sg wrote:
>However, there doesn't seem to be too many Asian
>voices in this mailing list.

Please don't judge the voices by the spelling of their names or of the 
quietness of their voices. :-) There are a number of people on this list, 
both vocal and quiet, who are fluent in Asian languages and have spent 
years studying the i18n issues of them. (No, I am not one of them...) It is 
good to have more, of course!

A concern of mine is that I believe we do not yet have as much 
representation of people intimately familiar with Arabic and Indic scripts. 
These scripts tend to have more complicated writing issues that the Asian 
scripts, and they share with the Asian scripts the important property of 
being written by well over a billion people. I know some of the so-far 
silent readers of the list are familiar with the scripts, but I don't know 
how many (if any) are first-hand speakers.

>Recently, at a Beijing meeting, key Internet "elders" in the Asia Pacific,
>have concluded that to promote such discussions among the various Asian
>peoples, we have to allow them to use their own language in the preliminary
>stage at least, before requesting them to consolidate their responses
>and translate into English, and vice versa.

This is wonderful. Please do let this list know of how those discussions 
are taking place so that those already here who can participate can listen 
and contribute.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium