By Ibrahim Olukotun
Lagos. April 25, 2013: The Local Internet Content Forum (LICF) seeking to reverse the current capital flight from Nigeria due to low interest in the country’s DotNG domain name by the local Internet community opens today in Lagos.
The growing registration of non .ng domain names and hosting of contents on foreign servers is undermining efforts to grow non-oil that could be generated by the Nigerian economy.
The two-day scheduled to hold at the Muson Centre in Lagos from today hopes to galvanise stakeholders to fashion ways of addressing the dearth of online content in the country.
Organisers say they are working in tandem with the goal of the Internet Society (ISOC) to reverse the content hosting ratio in Africa of 20:80 where 80 per cent of the African content is hosted outside and 20 per is hosted locally, to 80:20 in favor of the continent.
The Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) and the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) are collaborating to host the forum that aims to stimulate the momentum from content consumers to producers within the ecosystem.
“It is meant to alter the default mode of consumerism by Nigerians, transforming them into Content Producers”, according to organisers.
The ultimate goal according to them is to “is to introduce and harness content produced in Nigeria by Nigerians on the internet; domesticate the content and build the Nigerian Cloud.”
The duo of IXPN and NIRA reckon that this will be “setting the nation on the right course and free her from the present Internet consumerist culture.”
They noted that aside from the capital flight the initiative will reverse the trend of non-generation of local contents and security risk of hosting data from Nigeria on foreign countries’ servers.
LICF plans to reach out to major stakeholders who create contents in the public and private sectors, publishers, authors, writers, print and the electronic media.
Other include movie producers, musicians, bloggers, banks, webmasters, the academia, research institutions; Internet service providers, among others to create a linkage between them and service providers who are committed to providing reliable service at hosting digital contents locally.
Speakers are drawn from different sectors to discuss topics like Infrastructure for Content Hosting, local Content as Tool for Economic Development, Broadband Penetration, Content Creation and its challenges, Strategies to stimulate the production of local content, E-government: the journey so far and monetizing content development: Getting profit out of your creativity.
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