All Blogs
Report on use of eSpeak Bengali with NVDA
NVDA team conducted a training programme at Turnstone Matruchaya, Siligudi, West Bengal from September 7 to 9, 2015. Fourteen delegates attended. Nirmal Verma was the language trainer.
The Buzz Around TV White Space
Large blocks of underused spectrum lie tantalizingly out of reach, waiting for enabling regulation, administration, and to some extent technology, to accelerate our move towards Digital India.
Breaking Down ICANN Accountability: What It Is and What the Internet Community Wants
At the recent ICANN conference held in Dublin (ICANN54), one issue that was rehashed and extensively deliberated was ICANN's accountability and means to enhance the same. In light of the impending IANA stewardship transition from the NTIA to the internet's multi-stakeholder community, accountability of ICANN to the internet community becomes that much more important. In this blog post, some aspects of the various proposals to enhance ICANN's accountability have been deconstructed and explained.
ISO/IEC/ JTC 1/SC 27 Working Groups Meeting, Jaipur
I attended this event held from October 26 to 30, 2015 in Jaipur.
Konkani-language books from Konkani-language culture center Mannd Sobhaann to enrich Konkani Wikipedia
Mangalore based cultural centre Maand Sobhaann has recently relicensed 3 of their publications under a free license so that the books could be digitised on Konkani Wikisource and enrich Konkani Wikipedia.
Connected Trouble
The internet of things phenomenon is based on a paradigm shift from thinking of the internet merely as a means to connect individuals, corporations and other institutions to an internet where all devices in (insulin pumps and pacemakers), on (wearable technology) and around (domestic appliances and vehicles) humans beings are connected.
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.
Do we need a Unified Post Transition IANA?
As we stand at the threshold of the IANA Transition, we at CIS find that there has been little discussion on the question of how the transition will manifest. The question we wanted to raise was whether there is any merit in dividing the three IANA functions – names, numbers and protocols – given that there is no real technical stability to be gained from a unified Post Transition IANA. The analysis of this idea has been detailed below.
The 'Global Multistakholder Community' is Neither Global Nor Multistakeholder
CIS research shows how Western, male, and industry-driven the IANA transition process actually is.
A Kannada Wikipedia brochure for newbies
This brochure has been created keeping readers and new Wikipedia editors in mind. This would come handy to learn editing Kannada Wikipedia and creating/editing articles in Kannada.
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.
Crowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India
In the context of several ongoing threads of debates and policy discussions, we are initiating this effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital/online/telephonic privacy of persons and organisations in India. The full list of submitted incidents is publicly shared, under Creative Commons Attributions-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please contribute and share with your friends and colleagues.
CIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report
This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.
Comments on the Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly’s Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (WSIS+10)
On 9 October 2015, the Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly's Overall Review of implementation of WSIS Outcomes was released. Comments were sought on the Zero Draft from diverse stakeholders. The Centre for Internet & Society's response to the call for comments is below.
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".
Peering behind the veil of ICANN's DIDP (II)
In a previous blog post, I had introduced the concept of ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (“DIDP”) and their extremely vast grounds for non-disclosure. In this short post, I have made an analysis of every DIDP request that ICANN has ever responded to, to point out the flaws in their policy that need to be urgently remedied.
Contestations of Data, ECJ Safe Harbor Ruling and Lessons for India
The European Court of Justice has invalidated a European Commission decision, which had previously concluded that the 'Safe Harbour Privacy Principles' provide adequate protections for European citizens’ privacy rights for the transfer of personal data between European Union and United States. The inadequacies of the framework is not news for the European Commission and action by ECJ has been a long time coming. The ruling raises important questions about how the claims of citizenship are being negotiated in the context of the internet, and how increasingly the contestations of personal data are being employed in the discourse.
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.
