World Wide Web holds the key to shape societies and cultures into knowledge ones. What is perhaps more important to consider is the cultures and languages who dominate the Internet presence will have more dynamic growth and digital inclusion than those with less Internet penetration.
It is a well known fact that information content on the Internet is skewed and languages are not represented equally well on the Internet. Globally, only few languages are dominant on the Web which means efforts towards digital inclusion is still skewed. English appeared to be the universal language of the Internet for sometime but now there are other languages establishing themselves. Some of the dominant languages of Internet are English, Mandarin (Chinese), Japanese, Korean, German, French and Spanish. In fact, recently Mandarin language has overtaken English as the most popular language on the Internet. While, these dominant cultural communities continues to do better in language content, Web access and digitally inclusive growth, the others continues to rely on such dominant platforms, mostly English, to meet knowledge and content needs. This has serious implications to local problems, local culture, local content, Internet access and digitally equitable growth world over. The intention of societies and governments world over is and therefore must be to promote culture specific languages to reach out to its own constituencies in a better and informed manner. Ttis is all the more critical in a multicultural country like India.
The proposed workshop aims to address the following key issues pertaining to local language content, access transformation and digital inclusion:
Scarce local language content still digs in digital divide, development gaps and knowledge resource deficits in communities
There are serious skill development, capacity building lagging issues in tune with ICT programmes and development packages hampering local content coming up and serving the last mile
There are greater faults in policy focus, interest, pro-activeness at both local and national authority levels in a bottom up digital policy framework serving the vast undeserved communities using Internet technology and local content
Focus is absence on cultural specific research on Internet technology and Content. The reasons varied across lack of resource funding, policy deficits, qualified human resources and others.
Technology challenges for better Internet penetration of languages includes: better input methods for language content creation, better rendering and display of the content and better search technologies. Creating content in local languages is a challenge particularly because of the sophistication of language scripts which calls for adequate research including local language standardisation. Lack of tools and other support for local language scripts creates a major bottleneck for web publishers in terms of creating content. This affects the viewership because most of the available content is not searchable and hence not reachable.
Workshop Objectives:
1. Understand the magnitude, context behind lack of local language content resources impacting digital divide, development gaps and knowledge resource deficits in communities
2. Deliberate on key issues in technology research, skilled human resource pool, capacity building vis-a-vis ICT programmes and development packages hampering local content flourishing
3. Understand the gaps in policy focus, interest, pro-activeness at both local and national authority levels in a bottom up digital policy framework serving the vast undeserved communities using Internet technology and local content
4. Focus on areas pertaining to research on Internet technology and languages content and factors progressing and hindering local content creation and penetration.
Workshop Outcome
1. Bring out 5 key issues in local content, Internet access and digital inclusion for development having policy and development focus
2. Bring out 5 core points as solutions to bridge gaps in Internet access having relevance in language content, creation, access and usage
3. Highlight 5-10 key success stories of local language content, access and knowledge enablement of communities