June 2019 Newsletter

Highlights for June 2019

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in May:

• 5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; June 6, 2019).
• Staying silent about cyberbullying is no longer an option (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 16, 2019).
• Facebook sees its salvation with its cryptocurrency Libra (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 30, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

• Plugging into India’s broadband  revolution (Navadha Pandey; Livemint; June 4, 2019).
• Banking on artificial intelligence: In hiring drive, Bots are calling the shots now (Anjali Venugopal; Economic Times; June 4, 2019).
• Fragmenting Cybersecurity Norms through the Language(s) of Subalternity: India in the East and the Global Community (Riccardo Vecellio Segate; Columbia Journal of Law; June 6, 2019).
• Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today (Abigail D. Pershing; Yale Journal of International Law; June 6, 2019).
• No Fintech company meets every single privacy requirement under IT Act: CIS report (Shilpa S. Ranipeta; Newsminute; June 10, 2019).
• Facebook to pay Indians to give up privacy: Experts raise questions (Geetika Mantri; Newsminute; June 14, 2019).
• Chasing fame and fun 15 seconds at a time: Why TikTok has India hooked (Tora Agarwala, Surbhi Gupta, and Karishma Mehrotra; Indian Express; June 23, 2019).
• Facebook’s Libra: A bit too ambitious? (Rajmohan Sudhakar; Deccan Herald; June 30, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Copyright & Patent

Research Paper

• Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone SEP Litigation (Rohini Lakshané and Shweta Mohandas; June 30, 2019).

Wikipdedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

• What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference? (Sailesh Patnaik; June 5, 2019).
• Karavali Wikimedians at All India Radio, Mangaluru (Bharathesha Alasandemajalu; June 13, 2019).
• Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019 (Subodh Kulkarni; June 22, 2019).
• SVG translation workshop Kannada (Gopala Krishna; June 29, 2019).

Jobs

CIS-A2K team is seeking applications for the following posts:

• Communication Officer
• Project Tiger 2019 Coordinator
• Wikidata Advisor (Consultant)

Event Organized

• Wikimedia Education SAARC conference (Christ University; Bangalore; June 20 - 22, 2019).

Openness

Innovation and creativity are fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of the Internet radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software.

Event Hosted

• Discussion on Open Standards with Bernd Erk and Jiten Vaidya (CIS, Bangalore; June 20, 2019).

Participation in Event

• Rootconf 2019 (Organized by Has Geek; NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore; June 21 - 22, 2019). Karan Saini participated in the event.

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Blog Entry

• The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet (Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover; July 3, 2019).

Event Organized

• Setting the Agenda: A Behavioural Science approach to Data Privacy (Organized by Centre for Social Behaviour Change; Ashoka University and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi). Amber Sinha attended the meeting.

Participation in Events

• Pranesh Prakash as Resource Person for ITD seminar on Competition (Organized by International Institute for Trade and Development; Bangkok; June 24 - 26, 2019). Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker in the session on Consumer Protection and Digital Rights- Defining Welfare and Fair Competition.

Cyber Security

Free Speech

Participation in Events

• ICANN Masterclass (Organized by ICANN, Bangalore; June 19, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.
• ICANN 65 (Organized by ICANN; Morocco; June 24 - 27, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions.

Article

• 5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Organizing India Blogspot; June 6, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Essay

• Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers (Sadaf Khan; June 11, 2019). This was written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives.

Participation in Event

• Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi (Organized by the University of Manchester, England; June 14, 2019). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon presented their research on 'Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South'.

Blog Entries

• Patreon: Understanding the Intersection of Art, Artiste, and Labour (Upasana Bhattacharjee; June 1, 2019).
• #ArchivesForStorytelling (Aliyeh Rizvi, Bhanu Prakash, Dinesh, Malini Ghanathe, and Venkat Srinivasan; June 1, 2019).
• #DigitalIdentities (Anjali K Mohan, Harish Boya, Janaki Srinivasan, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sarita Seshagiri; June 11, 2019).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

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