Subhashish Panigrahi

1332 points
Somewhere in Mumbai in a moving local train.
Bengaluru

Subhashish Panigrahi (@subhapa) is the founder of OpenSpeaks, an award winning project that helps grow open resources to digitally-document marginalized languages. He co-founded O Foundation (OFDN), a nonprofit that works towards addressing issues that lie in the cusp of people, culture, and technology with Openness in its core. He is the Chapter Development Manager for Asia-Pacific at the Internet Society, and has worled in the past at Mozilla, Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program, and Wikimedia Foundation to deepen the growth of open knowledge/source communities across Asia. Follow Subhashish at @subhapa on Twitter.

Authored Comments

Hi, agree to your point about ISCII and Unicode. I have seen demonstration of a Kannada proprietary OCR myself. As it is not available to download, not open source and the developer clearly stated about not even selling the package, I would refrain from giving details about this. It is against my fundamental motivation behind contributing for open source. The other widely known OCR is Tesseract. it of course needs a lot of training and collaboration. I do not have personal and/or professional time to spend on this at the moment. But will continue to reach out to people. Who knows, there might be someone to take it to some level?

Dear Randompie, I appreciate your interest in this topic and sharing useful information. But let me clarify that I mentioned policy level changes post Classical language declaration for Odia. All of those policy reforms in the 90s are not valid in this particular case. It is a different thing, despite of everything you've mentioned there exist multiple Unicode standards which do not talk to each other. I face the real problem every single day. Anyway, that's not the matter of discussion. Talking about the openness and transparency of the government agency, let me share two facts. A CD containing language tools has lot many blank folders as compared to the PROPRIETERY WINDOWS specific software. A well funded Odia OCR project has never made public in the last 8 years for users to test and give feedback but just has given personal name and fame to the person heading it. But assuming good faith, I would not intend to argue here on this matter that you stated as they are unrelated. Would love to discuss these over email (psubhashishatgmaildotcom). My last pie for @randompie, ISCII is history and lets respect what happened then. But in the age of Unicode, talking about ISCII will be pointless. Thanks and period.