[UA-discuss] Happy birthday to a super hero: DOCTOR DATA!!!!

[Don Hollander]

Caution: A Very Nerdy Post (VNP – not VPN)

Today celebrates the birth of a fellow who lives to his own values and has given significant time to institutions that we’ve both been involved in – me professionally and he quite voluntarily.

Dr Ajay Data has marched to his own drum beat and has worked to make the Internet a more inclusive space.

For those that don’t know, the Internet is very much at its core English Centric.   Regional and global gatherings are conducted in English.  And the underlying code and parameters are also English (or ASCII for those who want to be pedantic) based.

More than a decade ago, the parameters that are more visible to the eye (domain names and email addresses) began to cater for non-English languages.  Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, a dozen different scripts used in India, Māori, Russian, Thai and more.  [Arabic and Hebrew are not only different scripts, they read right to left which adds additional complexity!]

Ajay heard about this and thought that he saw an opportunity.   He set his programming team to the development of some software that would support these scripts in the Internet.  He started with email and went on to other email adjacent utilities.   There were a few others who were also pursuing this prize – one in China, another in Taiwan, another in Thailand.   But none made it as far as Ajay’s team.  He had a commercial product that he was able to adjust for every language and script and it was accessible at a relatively reasonable price.   

But it wasn’t flying off the shelf, so to speak.

There was a group called the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) that was working to encourage all developers to make adjustments to their own software to support all domains and all email addresses.   But it was for many years only Ajay’s XgenPlus that was readily available.   

So, he decided to join and participate with this UASG group.  He was quite active, he supported his staff being active, and he went on to become The Chair – a position he held for four years.   

Progress in getting other applications to support all these new scripts has been surprisingly (to me anyway) slow – even Glacially (pre climate change) slow.

Ajay has retired from the UASG – he was term limited – and moved on to other things.  But we see him popping up at a lot of events in India that will encourage young people to get involved, to become entrepreneurial.  

Ajay and I had different strategies for achieving the UASG objectives.   I thought we should just raise awareness of the issues to CIOs or their counterparts around the world and problem would be solved lickity-split.   Though raising awareness was hard enough, when we did reach people they told us there was no real world demand and they had plenty of other tasks to work on.

Ajay’s strategy was to generate demand by going to large countries where English is not so endemic and get their governments to include UA capabilities in their own purchasing criteria.   While this worked at a state level in India, not wider – because there were too few suppliers who could meet the requirements.   And these governments had plenty of other things to pursue.
For the people who care about the plumbing of the Internet, this is another quixotic objective.   They have been working on IPv6 and DNSSEC for even longer – and still with limited success other than places where there is one or two very influential people who have effectively mandated success – Sweden, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands come to mind.

But this is a note to recognise Dr Ajay Data (great name for an IT guy) and his birthday and to thank him for his efforts, his achievements, and his friendship.
Sent from my iPad