A2K Main
TTT 2015
The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) conducted a four day training workshop for Wikimedians all over India in order to facilitate conducting and organising outreach activities for promotion of Wikimedia activities within Indian language communities. Wikimedians from 21 language communities had participated in this training workshop including Wikipedians working for Nepali and Maithili Wikipedia.
Touch Point Report: Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University and St. Aloysius College, Managalore
CIS-A2K conducts Wikipedia in Education programme at St. Aloysius colege, Mangalore. This partnership is unique as it provides to us a pool of editors for three Wikimedia projects, i.e: Kannada, Tulu and Konkani.
Analysis of Institutional Partnerships: University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs
University of Mysore considered to be one of the most prestigious institutions in the country has been famous for its innovative pedagogic techniques and opening up for students various avenues of knowledge acquisition.
Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource
CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation in order to prioritise and streamline the work on Wikisource projects across FLA. Due to the commitment of volunteers from the respective FLA and the institutional partnerships that A2K has developed we have been able to bring a large corpus of content under free licence into our Wikisource projects. CIS-A2K promotes both content donation and content acquisition strategies in order to bring in free licence content.
30 Books of Odia Author and Historian Jagannath Prasad Das to Come Online on Odia Wikisource
The article was published in Discover Bhubaneswar, a web portal on Odisha on December 4, 2015.
Odia author and cultural historian Jagannath Prasad Das has recently permitted to re-license under a free license Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 for 30 volumes of his notable works. The author, popularly known as “J P” or “JP Das” has been honored with Saraswati Samman and Sahitya Academy award for his significant contribution in fiction, historical research of Odisha’s cultural heritage in his books Puri Paintings, Chitra-Pothi and Palm-leaf Miniatures apart from his Odia books “Prathama Purusa” and “Bhabanatha O Anyamane”.
“I made a rather late and hesitant entry into the internet and digital world, but it has since become an integral part of my life. My introduction to digital books was through Srujanika’s digitised version of Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha – all of 95,00 pages in seven volumes — which was impossible to handle on the writing table. That made me think how wonderful it would be to have all Odia books available on the internet that could be easily accessible to every interested reader”, says Das.
“As a beginning I decided to put my own writings on the internet. Many of our young Odia writers are are quite active on the social media. I hope they will take the initiative to get more and more Odia books available on the internet with the help of Odia Wikisource”, he adds.
This contribution opens up a whole new window to his books being accessible to readers for free online. Recently the scanning of the original books were made by the Bhubaneswar based non-profit and science education research organization Srujanika which will now be made available after converting them into text form.
Apart from Dr Das, many other notable individuals like Padma shree Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Dr Subrat Prusty, Manoj Panda, Bharat Majhi and organisations like Aama Odisha, Manik Biswanath Smrutinyasa have taken the noble step of sharing their works online with free licenses using Odia Wikisource as a platform.
Odia Wikisource, a sister project of the Odia Wikipedia, is available online at or.wikisource.org. There are over 238 books already and all of the books are either under Public Domain or under the above mentioned Creative Commons Share-Alike license which gives the freedom of accessing the works for free, reuse them and even correct if any mistakes found, of course following the guidelines made by the Wikisource community. Currently about 10 Wikisourcers are actively contributing to digitize books of various genre, ranging from science to fiction to even the Odia classics.
With more authors generously opening up their work online, it feels like they are worried of the books becoming obsolete from the new generation leaving them with no way to learn about their own language and literature. Regional languages like Odia are facing the struggle to selling more books with the growing trend of English-centric education and rat race for jobs. In such a tough situation more popular Odia literary content is certainly going to give a boost to readership and will take the language to more people.
Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership
Incorporated in 2013, Guru-G is the world’s first gamified platform for teaching and teacher training.
Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books
As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.
ORF India-UK Technology Partnership Conference
As the consequence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much anticipated visit to the United Kingdom, representatives from stakeholder groups such as government and industry came together at Observers Research Foundation, Delhi, to deliberate upon various facets of India-UK Technology Partnership.
Guerrilla GLAMː An alternate way of doing GLAM in indie-way
I have been working on a concept called the Guerrilla GLAM. Here is a very quick summary about the concept that was published in the GLAM-wiki newsletter for November.
National IPR Policy: Mapping the Stakeholders’ Response
The first draft of the National IPR Policy was released last December. Following that, a plethora of comments and suggestions was submitted to the DIPP on the same. In this post, I will focus on the comments that were available online and analyse the trends that I was able to find in the same and also highlight the many suggestions put forth by the stakeholders.
The Procedure of CCI in cases of Anti-Competitive Agreements and Abuse of Dominant Position: A Flow-Chart
The Competition Act, 2002 defines and prohibits two things- Anti-Competitive Agreements, and Abuse of Dominant Position. The cases under the Competition Act are adjudicated upon by a special tribunal called the Competition Commission of India. As with any judicial or quasi-judicial authority, the Commission is bound by certain procedures to give effect to its duties. The following flow-chart, then, explains such procedures as followed by the CCI in adjudicating upon matters concerning anti-competitive agreements and abuse of dominant position.
A Study of J. Sai Deepak's Comments on Competition Law in India
In his blog, 'The Demanding Mistress', J. Sai Deepak has commented on the competition law in India, using provisions of different acts, case judgments and amendments to these acts. He has also included a comment on India’s patent law. This review studies his comments to the Competition Act, 2002 (“Competition Act”) and the Patents Act, 1970 (“Patents Act”).
Ministry Clearances for the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015
This is to declare and share the clearances received from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of External Affairs for the organisation of the fourth Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest during December 15-17 in Delhi.
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Information Received from IIT Roorkee
This post provides a factual description about the operation of Ministry of Human Resource Development IPR Chair’s Intellectual Property Education, Research and Public Outreach (IPERPO) scheme in IIT Roorkee.
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା (Need for an Odia-language Wikisource)
This post is about the Odia library movement and the conventional archival, touch-bases on the problems with dissemination of knowledge with more public domain books that are entering into the "rare and perishing" category, a comparative study of the conventional and new medium--like Wikisource--for book archival. It sheds light on how Wikisource functions as a collaborative platform in engaging with readers for digitizing books that are yet to be digitized.
Odia Wikisource to Celebrate Its First Anniversary in Bhubaneswar
Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library is celebrating its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar tomorrow i.e., 25th October, 2015.
National IPR Policy Series: Quick Observations on the Leaked Draft of the National IPR Policy
Earlier this week, the “Don’t Trade Our Lives Away” blog leaked the supposed final draft of India’s National IPR Policy (“leaked draft”). This article presents quick comments on this leaked draft.
Comparison of National IPR Strategy September 2012, National IPR Strategy July 2014 and Draft National IP Policy, December 2014
This is an analysis of the first draft of India's National IPR Policy with an earlier document "India's National IPR Strategy".
CIS-India Projects: Overlaps with Digital India
This post documents the overlap of CIS India's work with the nine pillars of the Digital India campaign. The list reflects work completed/underway as of September 2015.
WikipediansSpeak: Telugu Language Library Catalog Project Helps Wikipedia Grow
In 2013, the interview project “WikipediansSpeak” was launched in response to observations that many noteworthy Wikimedians were being underrepresented both locally and globally. Not just them personally—their work, and the communities they represent, were also unknown to the Wikimedia community and the outside world.
