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Principles for Internet Governance: NETmundial 2014 — What do the Contributions Reveal?
The Global Multi-stakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial) is scheduled for April 23-24, 2014. Towards its stated end of establishing "strategic guidelines related to the use and development of the Internet in the world", NETmundial sought contributions from stakeholders around the world on two topics: (1) Set of Internet governance principles; (2) Roadmaps for the further evolution of the Internet governance system.
Report from India: Relicensing books under CC
My name is Subhashish Panigrahi. I am an educator currently working in the community and communication front at The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), an India-based catalyst program to grow Indic language communities for Wikipedia and its sister projects. Prior to my work at CIS, I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program, a predecessor to the current CIS-A2K project.
South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013
As the rapid spread of technology in developing countries allows exponentially increasing availability of and access to personal data through automatic data processing, governments are beginning to recognize the necessity to evolve policies addressing data security and privacy concerns.
Multimedia Storytellers: Panel Discussion
This post brings three storytellers together to find points of intersection between their methods. The format will be that of a panel discussion and it features: Arjun Srivathsa from Pocket Science India, Ameen Haque from the Storywallahs, and Ajay Dasgupta from The Kahani Project. They discuss technology, interpretation and action in storytelling.
CIS Signs MoU with Mysore University
CIS-A2K signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the University of Mysore for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU.
Privacy Law in India: A Muddled Field - I
The absence of a statute expressing the legislative will of a democracy to forge a common understanding of privacy is a matter of concern, says BHAIRAV ACHARYA in the first of a two part series.
Exploring the Digital Landscape: An Overview
One component of the Digital Humanities mapping exercise was a series of six research projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore over November 2013-March 2014. These studies attempted to chart various aspects of the digital landscape in India today, with a focus on emerging forms of humanistic enquiry engendered by the Internet and new digital technologies. This blog post presents a broad overview of some of the key learnings from these projects.
Very Big Brother
The Centre for Internet and Society, the organization I work for, currently serves on a committee established by the Government of India's Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology in January 2013. The committee has been charged with preparing a report on the draft Human DNA Profiling Bill.
Odisha Dibasa 2014: 14 Books Re-released under CC License
Odisha became a separate state in British India on April 1, 1936. Odia, a 2,500 year old language recently gained the status of an Indian classical language. The Odia Wikimedia community celebrated these two occasions on March 29 in Bhubaneswar with a gathering of 70 people.
The Machinistic Paradigm Collapse
Looking at the example of the scientific practices surrounding protein folding study, this blog explores the modern relevance of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm. This blog posits that because of the heavy reliance on computational technology and simulation, the philosophical basis of Kuhnian scientific paradigm has ceased to exist and hence science, along with the Digital Humanities has moved into a post structuralist age.
Bridging the Information Divide - Political Quotient
On this post, we will unpack 'information poverty'- a problem lying at the very foundation of the crises that inspired this project and a barrier impacting political action. We interview Surabhi HR, the founder director of the political consulting firm Political Quotient, an initiative that seeks to change how youth interacts with politics in India
‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India
A core concern of Digital Humanities research has been that of method. The existing discourse around the field of DH assumes a move away from traditional humanities and social sciences research methods to more open, collaborative and iterative forms of scholarship spanning some conventional and other not so conventional practices and spaces. In this guest blog post, Sujatha Subramanian reflects upon her experience of undertaking a research study on online feminist activism in India and its various challenges.
Animating the Archive – A Survey of Printed Digitized Materials in Bengali and their Use in Higher Education
With the advent of digital technologies and the internet, archival practice has seen much change in its imagination and function, such as to extend its scope beyond preservation to a collaborative, open source model which facilitates new modes of knowledge production. In this blog post, Saidul Haque reflects upon his research project on a survey of digitized materials in Bengali, and some of the impediments to their use in higher education and research.
Confession in the Digital Age
The pervasive influence of digital technology, particularly the Internet in our lives today seems to have blurred the boundaries between the real and virtual, public and private. The perceived condition of anonymity made available by the digital sphere brings forth questions about identity and the self, and more importantly the conditions that have come together in creating a new notion of the private sphere. In this guest post Rimi Nandy reflects upon her research study on the trend of Facebook confessions in India, and its implications for questions of identity and self-representation.
Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy vs. The Leaked 2014 Privacy Bill
Following our previous post comparing the leaked 2014 Privacy Bill with the leaked 2011 Privacy Bill, this post will compare the recommendations provided in the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy by the Justice AP Shah Committee to the text of the leaked 2014 Privacy Bill. Below is an analysis of recommendations from the Report that are incorporated in the text of the Bill, and recommendations in the Report that are not incorporated in the text of the Bill.
Net Neutrality, Free Speech and the Indian Constitution - I
In this post, I will explore net neutrality in the context of Indian law and the Indian Constitution.
App Developers Series: Products-Services Dichotomy & IP (Part I)
Recently, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) held a series of interviews in attempts to better understand the ecosystem in which India's mobile app industry is emerging, how it is governed by India's current laws, and how mobile app developers are affected as a result. The following written series maps out the given responses and presents our findings from these interviews and accompanying conversations.
Online Survey for Indian Mobile App Developer Startups & Enterprises
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) recently released an online survey for mobile app developers to respond on their legal practices within their work, as well as their business models and familiarity with India's laws. Through this research initiative, CIS hopes to better understand the dynamics of India's mobile app ecosystem amongst stakeholders, and how developers are directly or indirectly affected by the laws in place governing this ecosystem.
ଓଡ଼ିଅା ଭାଷାର ବିକାଶ ଓ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର
This article was published in Odia magazine "The Kadambini". It covers a brief history of the book digitization initiatives in Odia language, problems with access available content in ISCII standard, scope of Unicode content and Open Access, Odia Wikipedia's further use for public and contribution.
Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature
The blog post throws light on providing access to Vachana Sanchaya, a eleventh century Kannada literature.
