Blogs
Fueling the Affordable Smartphone Revolution in India
- March 16, 2016
Smartphones have emerged as the exemplar of mankind's quest for shrinking technologies. They embody the realization of a simple premise – that computing devices would do more and cost less. This realization has been responsible for modern society's profound transformations in communication, governance, and knowledge distribution.
Read more →Can Wikipedia revive dying Indian languages?
- February 29, 2016
Yes, by encouraging content and involvement, Wikipedia language communities keep languages relevant.
Read more →Looking ahead to the future of the Kannada Wikipedia: Vasanth S.N.
- February 29, 2016
Vasanth S.N. has edited the Kannada-langauge Wikipedia since 2006. As part of the WikipediansSpeak series, I caught up with Vasanth to learn about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia, which just celebrated its 13th anniversary. In the discussion Vasanth shares his long time involvement in the Wikimedia movement, and what drives him every day to edit Wikipedia and helping other fellow Wikimedians.
Read more →This little innovation is bringing a revolution in the Odia language
- February 27, 2016
Depicting human language within computing environments has always been a challenge: a given language's script and alphabet needs to be mapped to a coding system that a computer can process digitally. This is done by way of an encoding system that basically maps each character to a unique numeric code.
Read more →Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles
- February 27, 2016
Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.
Read more →Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER
- February 27, 2016
My submission titled "Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER" under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.
Read more →କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର ଯୁଗରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା
- February 27, 2016
In 2013, the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a project to create a typeface and input methods for for Ol chiki script that is used to write in the Santali language. Santali is one of the many victims that has large number of native language speakers but really low activism to preserve the language though it is not yet among the 196 endangered languages as identified by UNESCO.
Read more →ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଏକ ଅନୁଶୀଳନ
- February 26, 2016
On the day of the International Mother Language Day, it is important to look outside and draw inspirations from several success stories of digital activism for languages. Hebrew, an ancient language that was almost dead for over 1500 years was revived from ashes like phoenix. Even after being honoured with the classical language status in the same category of Sanskrit and Tamil, Odia has not seen much progress in the digital sphere.
Read more →ମାତୃଭାଷା ଦିବସ: ଆଜିର ସମସ୍ୟା ଓ ଆହ୍ୱାନ
- February 26, 2016
The article was published in the editorial section of Odia newspaper the Sambad on February 21, 2016. This piece explains about the challenges of expanding a knowledge base in Odia language and helping it grow beyond just the literature and to a language of knowledge.
Read more →Standard Essential Patents on Low-Cost Mobile Phones in India: A Case to Strengthen Competition Regulation?
- February 25, 2016
The realization of the promise of the sub hundred dollar mobile device as a facilitator of access to knowledge is contingent inter alia on its availability in the market place. In turn, the market availability of the sub hundred dollar mobile device is influenced by the existence of an enabling environment for producers to produce, and consumers to consume. From a regulatory perspective, the enabling environment itself is a function of existing laws and policies, and the ‘developmental effects’ of certain laws and policies (Saraswati, 2012).
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