ICANN day 2
The best part of the day was going over the character sets for the Ga language (Accra area of Ghana) and the Ewe language (elsewhere proximal to Ghana). The worst part of the day was listening to an independent reviewer construe the mission and purpose of the At Large Constituency as being best uncorrupted by having voting rights on the ICANN Board, and by their unsullied purity, the guardians of the public trust.
Never mind that the Board of Directors of a California 501(c)(3) public trust corporation have a dual trust duty, to the public trust and to the entity which the Board governs. Either California law no longer applies, something to task Jerry Brown now that he's AG, or the existence of a Vestal Virgin entitles the Corporate Senate to whore about with swine and wine.
Other bits of the day were (spear) fishing for registrars and stupid tricks ISPs are now using to add value (or why everything now points to a Yahoo! monitized ad page for users of several ISPs, Hughes Network included). Odd how "stability and security" of the Internet is recited like a meaningful mantra by ICANN staff whenever discussion turns to what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-internationalized-domain-names, while elsewhere, an inconsistent DNS is now the norm, not the exception.
Our perennial favorite was the new gTLD workshop, where staff again recited the process now another ICANN Freedman equivalent unit translated into the future, unless the IDN mess really blows up at the August IETF meeting in Dublin, see para supra, at which point IDNs are dead for the foreseeable future.
So, I'm now one half of the working group on Roman (and drug or doG crazed ("missionary inflicted" if you prefer) phonetic dingbat) character sets used by West African languages, in addition to being a contributor to the Arabic Script IDN Working Group. Thank goodness there's a bunch of university students in Accra who don't know that to me they look surprisingly like people with shovels standing proximal to where I imagine a ditch should be.
Pity my grand's pass on, I could use some kitchen Scots.
Comments
Ga is imported from Nigeria, but is mostly in Accra. Ewe is mostly specific to Ghana, but east of Accra. You hear Fanti to the west of Accra, Asante to the north, and Hausa to the farther north. I think there are >30 languages in Ghana besides Ga and Ewe.
Posted by: squid | June 28, 2008 12:58 AM
Thanks squid. Dr. Nii Quanor organized the ICANN meeting in Ghana those many years ago, and he and I re-met in Paris this week, and picked up where we left off -- the characters lacking (in Unicode, and other references for code points for the representation of characters) for scripts used to write West African languages.
There's a passel. So, in high-level handwaving, there's the Arabic Script block (of Unicode and its equivalents) used for writing African languages, the Roman Script block (ditto) for writing African languages English and French influenced, and everything else.
We also discussed .africa as a TLD proposal, which I'm going to follow-up with in a seperate post.
Posted by: ebw | June 29, 2008 09:59 AM