Centre for Internet & Society

Edit-a-thon organised at Christ University Bangalore to celebrate Women’s Day

A day-long edit-a-thon was organised at Christ University Bangalore on March 12, 2016 to celebrate the Women’s Day and grow the women-related articles on Kannada Wikipedia.

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Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India

This post compares the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, with India's data protection regime as articulated in the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011.

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FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill

This FAQ attempts to address the key questions regarding the Aadhaar/UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 (henceforth, Bill). This is neither a comprehensive list of questions, nor does it contain fully developed answers. We will continue to add questions to this list, and edit/expand the answers, based on our ongoing research. We will be grateful to receive your comments, criticisms, evidences, edits, suggestions for new answers, and any other responses. These can either be shared as comments in the document hosted on Google Drive, or via tweets sent to the information policy team at @CIS_InfoPolicy.

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Monitoring Sustainable Development Goals in India: Availability and Openness of Data (Part II)

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an internationally agreed upon set of developmental targets to be achieved by 2030. There are 17 SDGs with 169 targets, and each target is mapped to one or more indicators as a measure of evaluation. In this and the next blog post, Kiran AB is documenting the availability and openness of data sets in India that are relevant for monitoring the targets under the SDGs. This post offers the findings for the last 10 Goals. The first 7 has already been discussed in the earlier post.

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Surveillance Project

Surveillance Project

The Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.

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A Large Byte of Your Life

With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage. We commit to storage to free ourselves from remembering.

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Mapping MAG: A study in Institutional Isomorphism

The paper is an update to a shorter piece of MAG analysis that had been conducted in July 2015. At that time our analysis was limited by the MAG membership data that was made available by the Secretariat. Subsequently we wrote to the Secretariat and this paper is based on the data shared by them including for the years for which membership details were previously not available.

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CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalyzing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008. Since September 2012, we at CIS-A2K, have been actively involved in growing the movement in India through (i) a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 - June 2014, (ii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 - June 2015 and (iii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2015 - June 2016. Based on the productive experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed this work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.

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Dataset: Patent Landscape of Mobile Device Technologies in India

Patent landscape of mobile technology patents and patent applications held by 50 companies operating in India. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.

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Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources

Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources

The 4th edition of the Global Congress 2015 was organized at the National Law School of India University in New Delhi from 15 - 17 December 2015. The largest ever in Asia, the Global Congress was jointly organized by the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) in association with National Law University, Delhi, Open A.I.R., CREATe, Columbia University and American University.

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Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey

Though India has the second-largest wireless subscriber base in the world, with more than 150 mobile device vendors, it has, until recently, remained relatively unaffected by the global smartphone wars. Over the past three years, however, a growing number of patent enforcement actions have been brought by multinational firms against domestic Indian producers. These actions, which have largely resulted in judgments favoring foreign patent holders, have given rise to a variety of proposals for addressing this situation.

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8 Challenges In Growing Indian-Language Wikipedias

While speaking at BHASHA: Indian Languages Digital Festival, a day-long discourse at New Delhi on Indian languages and their state in new media, especially digital platforms, I touched upon Wikipedia in Indian languages. Most people, in fact, do not even know that Wikipedia exists in many Indian languages.

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TRAI Consultation on Differential Pricing for Data Services - Post-Open House Discussion Submission

The Centre for Internet and Society sent this submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) following the Open House Discussion on Differential Pricing of Data Services, held in Delhi on February 21, 2016.

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Report on eSpeak with NVDA Screen Reader and Assistive Technology for Visually Challenged

Report on eSpeak with NVDA Screen Reader and Assistive Technology for Visually Challenged

The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore and National Association for the Blind, New Delhi in collaboration with Centre for Differently Abled Persons, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli organized a workshop on eSpeak with NVDA Screen Reader and Assistive Technology for Visually Challenged at Centre for Differently Abled Persons, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli on January 21, 2016.

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Consultation on 'National Geospatial Policy' - Notes and Submission

The Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, has constituted a National Expert Committee for developing a draft National Geospatial Policy (NGP) to provide appropriate guidelines for collection, analysis, use, and distribution of geospatial information across India, and to assure data availability, accessibility and quality. A pre-drafting consultation meeting for the NGP was organised in Delhi on February 03, 2016. Ms. Anubha Sinha represented CIS at the meeting, and shares her notes.

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Eight Challenges That Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome

Eight Challenges That Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome

Even after a decade of existence, Indian language Wikipedias are not yet known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia, being the largest available encyclopedia made in the human history, it what it is today because of the hundreds and thousands of volunteer-editors. But while native-language Wikipedias are becoming game-changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. In my experience, here are a number of challenges that Indian-language Wikipedias are currently facing.

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8 Challenges for Improving Indian Language Wikipedias

8 Challenges for Improving Indian Language Wikipedias

After more than 10 years in existence, the Indian-language Wikipedias still are not known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in history as a result of thousands of volunteer editors.

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Report of the 30th Session of the WIPO SCCR by the Centre for Internet & Society

This report was edited by Nehaa Chaudhari, Programme Officer; compiled with assistance from Nisha S.K., Administrator, and, Aarushi Bansal, Amulya P., and Saahil Dama, interns.

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Too Clever By Half: Strengthening India’s Smart Cities Plan with Human Rights Protection

Too Clever By Half: Strengthening India’s Smart Cities Plan with Human Rights Protection

The data involved in planning for urbanized and networked cities are currently flawed and politically-inflected. Therefore, we must ensure that basic human rights are not violated in the race to make cities “smart”.

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