Pathways to Higher Education

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T18:12:49Z

In response to our call for contributions and reflections on ‘Decolonising the Internet’s Languages’ in August, we are delighted to announce that we received 50 submissions, in over 38 languages! We are so overwhelmed and grateful for the interest and support of our many communities around the world; it demonstrates how critical this effort is for all of us. From all these extraordinary offerings, we have selected nine that we will invite and support the contributors to expand further.

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Call for Contributions and Reflections: URL

Thank you to all of you who wrote in: we would publish every one of your contributions if we could! Each of you highlighted unique aspects of the problem and possibility of the multilingual internet, and it was extremely difficult to select a few to include in the ‘State of the Internet’s Languages Report’. Whether your submission was selected or not, we hope you will continue to be part of this work with us, and that the report will reflect your thoughtful concerns and interests in a multi-lingual internet.

The nine selected contributions will be a significant aspect of the openly licensed State of the Internet’s Languages report to be published mid-2020. In different formats and languages, they span many kinds of language contexts across the world, from many different communities and perspectives. They will form part of a broader narrative combining data and experience, highlighting how limited the current language capacities of the internet are, and how much opportunity there is for making our knowledges available in our many languages.

A special thank you to the final contributors – we’ll be in touch shortly with more details. We’re looking forward to working with you as you develop your contributions and share your experiences!

The selected contributions are from:

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

As part of a broader movement to increase inclusion and diversity in emojis, Aboriginal people in Central Australia are creating Indigemoji, the first set of Australian Indigenous emojis delivered via a free app. Caddie, Joel, Leigh and Graham aim to describe how to reflect Aboriginal experiences online, to increase the accessibility of Arrernte language in the broader Australian lexicon, to position Arrernte knowledge on digital platforms for future generations of Arrentre speakers and learners, and to contribute more broadly to the decolonisation of the internet.
Claudia Soria

Claudia will describe “The Digital Language Diversity Project” funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme. The project has surveyed the digital use and usability of four European minority languages: Basque, Breton, Karelian and Sardinian. It has also developed a number of instruments that can help speakers’ communities drive the digital life of their languages, in the form of a methodology named “digital language planning”.
Donald Flywell Malanga

Donald will share his experiences conducting two panel discussions with elderly and ten young Ndali People in Chisitu Village based in Misuku Hills, Malawi. He aims to hear their stories and make sense of them relating to how Chindali could be spoken/expressed online, examine the barriers they face in sharing/expressing their language online, and unearth possible solutions to address such barriers.
Emna Mizouni

Emna will interview African and Arab content creators and consumers to share their experiences in posting content in their own language and expose their cultures. She will reach out to different ethnicities from Africa to gather data on the reasons they use the “colonial languages” on the internet and the burdens they face, whether technical such as internet connectivity and accessibility, lack of devices, social or cultural barriers, etc.
Ishan Chakraborty

Ishan will explore the experiences of individuals who identify themselves as both disabled and queer, and who are not visible online in Bengali. Online research papers and academic works in Bengali are significantly limited, and even more so in the case of works on marginalities and intersections. One of the most effective ways of making online material accessible to persons with visual disability is through audio material, and Ishan will explore some of these possibilities.
Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Joaquin will be describing the free software, open technology initiatives and the sharing philosophy of “compartencia” in his community of Mixe and Zapotec peoples in Mexico. He will explore initiatives such as Xhidza Penguin School, an app to learn the language online, and learning workshops to look at new methodologies for sharing and using the language. It is not only a means of communication but it also encompasses a different way of understanding the world.
Kelly Foster

Kelly will draw attention to the work being done to revitalise indigenous languages and the struggles to represent the Nation Languages of the Caribbean and its diasporas in structured data and on Wikipedia. She aims to have the native names of the islands, locations and indigenous peoples on Wikidata, labelled with their own language so she can generate a map of the Caribbean with as many native names as possible. But the language of the Taino people of the islands that are now called Jamaican, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti has been labelled as extinct, as are the people, by European researchers. Though a victim of the first European genocide of the Caribbean, they live on in the tongues and blood of people who are more often racialised as Black and Latinx.
Paska Darmawan

As a first-generation college student who did not understand English, Paska had difficulties in finding educational, inspiring content about LGBTQIA issues in their native language, let alone positive content about the local LGBTQIA community. They plan to share a mapping of available Indonesian digital LGBTQIA content, whether it be in the form of Wikipedia articles, websites, social media accounts, or any other online media.
Uda Deshpriya

Uda will explore the lack of feminist content on the internet in Sinhala and Tamil. Mainstream human rights discussions take place in English and leaves out the majority of Sri Lankans. Women’s rights discourse remains even more centralized. Despite the fact that all primary criminal and civil courts work in local languages, statutes and decided cases are not available in Sinhala and Tamil, including Sri Lanka’s Constitution and its amendments. This extends to content creation through both text and art, with significant barriers of keyboard and input methods.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-selected-contributions

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Simiran Lalvani — 2020-05-19T06:25:54Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Simiran Lalvani is the first among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 4, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

Anthropologists have studied the role of kinship relations at the workplace in terms of how employers (De Neve, 2008) and workers use them (Parry, 2001). By contrast, digital labour scholars focus more on economic wellbeing and questions of fair work. But we know from the work of Mauss, Hart (Hart, 2000; Mauss, 2002) and others that all economic exchanges are also social relations. Additionally, economic and moral logics are different manifestations of the same ‘kernel of human relationships’ (Kofti, 2016). In the context of app-based food delivery work in Mumbai, workers’ actions and decisions were guided by them putting themselves in another’s shoes. Such moral acts of understanding and having understood were, as I will demonstrate, instances of Max Weber’s conception of verstehen or interpretative understanding which was important to understanding individuals’ participation in social relationships. This led me to explore gig-workers’ kinship relations at work, and their role in the existence and reproduction of these workers and this ‘new’ work.

This essay unpacks the values and expectations from the kinship term bhai (brother) in order to understand the morality invoked through its usage by app-based food delivery workers in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers the implications of such kinship sedimentations on the experience of workers in the gig economy, their negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and the experience of women workers who operate out of these kinship ties. I was compelled to notice the figure of the bhai – a male friend or acquaintance who would not only recruit but also provide various kinds of support on the job, helping app-based platforms maintain their workforce. I also interviewed female delivery workers in Mumbai and noticed that this brotherhood did not extend to them in the same way.

Bhai is a Hindi word for ‘brother’ but in Bambaiyya Hindi (a non-canonical form of Hindi spoken in Mumbai) it signifies an influential or respected male figure who offers support and is trustworthy due to relatedness. Bhai and variations like bhaiyya lubricate daily transactions between auto-rickshaw drivers, grocers, watchmen or any unrelated man and woman with a sociality of kinship.

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Acts of brotherly help and disciplining reveal that material actions are intertwined with an ethic of care, thereby illustrating the role of kinship as central to the economic work in the gig economy. Historically, the informal work of food delivery in Mumbai has been organised along the lines of caste, region (Quien, 1997) and familial networks. Within gig work, belonging to the city is a requirement as bhais recruit, advice and protect new joinees from their neighbourhood or communities as older brothers. Team leaders who occupy a position between the worker and the middle management at these companies are bhais that discipline, control and maintain the workforce for the company.

Prior to joining, newbies would ask friends about their experience and even make deliveries with their friends to understand the work. Bhais offer support by riding pillion, arriving at ‘unsafe’ delivery locations at night or assisting a worker if the customer was drunk or unwilling to pay for their order.

Like other gig work communities that network to produce tacit knowledge about work (Gray, Suri, Ali, & Kulkarni, 2016) the relationships of brotherhood in food delivery help workers gain knowledge about the rules of the company, while also helping them find a way around the rules. A bhai might offer to make an ID on behalf of those who were unable to do so due to lack of documents or offer an existing ID to those who may have been disabled or blocked by the company.

Bhais, on the basis of relatedness due to experience of gig work, understand the needs of other gig workers. I suggest that this is verstehen and not simply a reflexive understanding since they, much like sociologists, also understood the nature of the situation (Tucker, 1965) that creates this relationship of relatedness and the importance of such a relationship in sustaining their future in this work as well as the future of this work.

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Companies push a narrative of how working-class, male food delivery workers are safe to interact with because this work leads to working class men now arriving at the doorstep of the protected middle-class domestic sphere. Discourses of safety and trustworthiness are crucial to companies due to the middle-class, Indian anxiety around the separation of working-class men, considered dangerous and potential perpetrators of crime, from middle-class women, the victims of such crimes (Phadke, 2007).

In India, leaving one’s footwear outside before entering ‘sacred’ spaces like homes and temples is considered respectful. A notice outside an Uber Dost office in suburban Mumbai reads jootey-chhapal baahar nikaley or please leave your footwear outside – revealing an extension of the sacredness associated with familial spaces to the work place. (Image credit: author)

Since working class men are considered dangerous occupants of public space, how do workers feel safe and carefree in the everyday? The bhai who understands offers material support, protects and guides workers but is also understood as enabling a carefreeness in workers that makes this work and working-class men’s navigation of the public possible. Consider the case of Adarsh, an 18-year-old app-based worker who makes deliveries using a bicycle. Workers started helping him by offering to drop him to the delivery location on their motorcycles if they were headed in the same direction. As he described to me, he felt at ease knowing someone had his back: Abhi ye log support ke liye rehte hai toh apne ko tension nahi rehta hai chalo bhai support ke liye apne peeche khada hai. (One does not feel tense if one knows that there is a brother backing one up).

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

One married woman worker expressed her discomfort with male riders referring to women workers as bacchi (Bambaiyya slang for younger brother) since it collapsed a sense of formality and familiarity that could be acceptable to young, unmarried girls. Women workers were aware that women have a high attrition in food delivery. They cannot afford to reject kinship constructions because such relations make work possible and tolerable in the everyday so they modulate the correct amount of kinship ties with a ‘respectable distance.’

The brotherhood of workers is not uniform or homogeneous since men’s ability to participate in this fictive kinship can be constrained either due to their identities or inability to support strikes.

Brotherhood absorbs risks for workers and allows workers to be bindaas, presenting an opportunity for tactical resistance. Leveraging brotherhood as a platform (Gillespie Tarleton, 2010), workers would strike and companies having understood the role of brotherhood too, would offer the position of 'team leader' to leaders of such strikes. Most bhais chose moral and affective bonds of brotherhood over such a 'promotion.'

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities, however there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. Such a display of verstehen by the delivery workers is a response to engaging with a world of work that continuously measures one’s credibility and ties it to material rewards. It can be read as an attempt to secure an income and guard one’s sense of self.

References

De Neve, G. (2008). ‘We are all sondukarar (relatives)!’: Kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 42(1), 211–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X

Gillespie Tarleton. (2010). Politics of Platforms. New Media and Society, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738

Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’16, 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942

Hart, K. (2000). Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 176–193). University of Oxford.

Kofti, D. (2016). Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538

Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Parry, J. P. (2001). Ankalu’s Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh. Modern Asian Studies, 35(4), 783–820. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024

Phadke, S. (2007). Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1510–1518.

Quien, A. (1997). Mumbai’s Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(13), 637–640.

Tucker, W. T. (1965). Max Weber’s Verstehen. The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

sneha-pp — 2019-03-13T01:01:27Z

Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. This project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.

Download the book: Epub and PDF

Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.

The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today—as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?

The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.

Website: siliconplateau.info

Contributors

Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail

Editors

Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

Publisher

Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8

Book and Cover Design

Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton

Copyediting

Aditya Pandya

Supported by

Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; and the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Cross-posted from Institute of Network Cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:56:36Z

This book marks the beginning of an interdisciplinary artistic project, Silicon Plateau, the scope of which is to observe how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Silicon Plateau is a collaboration between T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Volume 1 has been developed in collaboration with or-bits.com.

For us this series has a two-fold core. One the one side, there is the city of Bangalore, the trigger for various reflections about the way in which technology (old or emerging, as a service or as infrastructure) informs the socio-cultural and political environment; a city that is fascinating to us not just because we are located here but also for its characteristic fast-paced development shaped by the IT-boom and related industries. On the other side, there are the arts and creative thinking, for us the languages, lenses and methods to be used for interpreting technological developments and discussing their role and impact in the present time.

Our hope is that of building a series based on tangible accounts revolving around the unresolved complexities inherent to the intermingling of the arts, technology and society, and in the context of local histories and occurrences rather than of global narratives and mass media constructs. Stories that for our audience, we hope, will be those of the encounters—fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient—that a wide variety of contributors will have had with this fascinating city.

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1

Sequoia India’s Designathon 2016

sumandro — 2016-09-17T13:39:12Z

Along with their annual hackathon, Sequoia India organised a designathon in Bangalore on September 10-11, 2016. The participants picked one of three tracks - gamification, information visualisation, and smart acceleration - and developed an interface design or clickable prototype or a demo video. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited to participate as a mentor for the information visualisation track.

URL: http://www.sequoiahack.com/sequoia-design/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sequoia-india-designathon-2016

September 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-11-25T01:55:25Z

We are happy to share with you the ninth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (September 2015). It has been a significant month for public debates on the digital future of governance, citizenship, and economy in India, led by conversations around the draft National Encryption Policy, the Aadhaar number as a basis for provision of welfare services, the investigation of Google for potential abuse of market dominance by the Competition Commission of India, and the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions released by the Indian Patents Office. We were busy engaging with these issues, and more.

The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India
With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

Highlights

CIS sent an Open Letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his US visit, requesting him to urge USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty. During the month, NVDA team organized training programmes for the visually impaired at Kullu, Bangalore and Ranchi. Nehaa Chaudhari in a blog post laid out a series of research questions, potentially seeking to apply actor-network theory as a research methodology. Recently, the Indian Patents Office released the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (“2015 Guidelines/ Guidelines”) in an attempt to clarify examination of software related patents in India. Anubha Sinha analysed the 2015 Guidelines. Read on to understand how the new guidelines will potentially lead to an increase in software patenting activity by expanding the scope of patentable subject matter – in negation of the legislative intent of section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970. As a part of its content donation initiative, CIS has brought Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence. CIS-A2K has received 74 issues as of now from the Telugu Jaati foundation. Sunil Abraham’s article titled Hits and Misses with the Draft Encryption Policy was published in The Wire on September 26, 2015. Vidushi Marda in a blog post titled Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India analysed the data flow within the UID scheme and highlighted the vulnerabilities at each stage. Vanya Rakesh in a blog post titled Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill has analysed the Human DNA Profiling Bill introduced in 2012 with the provisions of the 2015 Bill. CIS sought information from ICANN on their revenue streams by sending them a second request under their Documentary Information Disclosure Policy. This request and their response have been described in a blog post by Aditya Garg. CIS has submitted a joint proposal with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing the development of "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." CIS made its submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations to ICANN's CCWG-Accountability. Pranesh Prakash, on behalf of CIS, submitted comments to the Department of Telecom Panel’s report on net neutrality via MyGov. Prakash states that the report displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides. Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column titled More on Those Dropped Calls was published by Business Standard.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Updates

September 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; September 30, 2015).

Event Reports

Training in the use of eSpeak Hindi with NVDA (Organized by CIS and Lakshay for the Differently Abled; September 29 – 30, 2015; Ranchi). The event was conducted online by Dr. Homiyar over skype, with local support from Mritunjay Kumar and Zainab.
5 day TOT for Training in Use of eSpeak Kannada with NVDA (Organized by CIS, Mithra Jyoti, Enable India and NFB, Bangalore; September 21 – 25, 2015; Bangalore).
eSpeak Training in Hindi Language (Organized by CIS and National Association for the Blind; Kullu; September 3 – 4, 2015).
Training in eSpeak Marathi (Organized by CIS; Atmadepam Society; August 22 – 23, 2015). The report was published in the month of September.

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) 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.

Pervasive Technologies

Blog Entries

Pervasive Technologies: Working Document Series - Research Questions and a Literature Review on the Actor-Network Theory (Nehaa Chaudhari; September 5, 2015).
FAQ: CIS Proposal for Compulsory Licensing of Critical Mobile Technologies (Rohini Lakshané; September 25, 2015).

Other (Copyright and Patent)

Submission

Comments on the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs) (Anubha Sinha; September 21, 2015).

Blog Entries

Open Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September 2015 (Pranesh Prakash and Nehaa Chaudhari; September 23, 2015).

Participation in Events

National Conference: WTO, FTAs and Investment Treaties: Implications for development policy space (Organized by Focus on the Global South, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Madhyam, MSF Access Campaign, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO (NWGPL), Public Services International (PSI) – South Asia, South Solidarity Initiative – ActionAid, Third Word Network (TWN), and Forum against FTAs; September 22 – 23, 2015; Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari made a presentation on Copyright: Access to Knowledge in Free Trade Agreements?
IPEX 2015 (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.

Media Coverage

Open letter from CIS to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on his Visit to US (Apoorva Mandhani; LiveLaw; September 23, 2015).

Wikipedia

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

CIS brings Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence (Tanveer Hasan; September 2, 2015).
OCR and OER – update (Subhashish Panigrahi; Open Education Working Group; September 25, 2015).
As Odia Wikipedia turns 13, what happens next? (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015). This was originally published on the Wikimedia Blog on August 21. The post was shared on Wikipedia's official Facebook page, and on Twitter handles [1 and 2].
Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015).
Wikimedia contributor shares his Linux story (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 27, 2015). This article is part of a series called My Linux Story. To participate and share your Linux story, contact us at: open@opensource.com. Read the original published by Opensource.com on September 3, 2015.

Events Co-organized

Annamaya Library edit-a-thon (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada).
International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 – 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

Unable to read Odia on your android device? Don’t fret! (Ruby Nanda; Odisha Sun Times; September 28, 2015).

Openness

The advent of the Internet has radically redefined 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. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Open Data

Submission

As one of the general stewards of the process, CIS was invited to take part in the final drafting meeting of the International Open Data Charter held before Con Datos 2015 in Santiago, Chile, but we could not take part in it. Apart from organising two public consultations on the draft Charter in Bengaluru and Delhi, we also submitted our detailed comments on the document. The final version of the Charter document has been launched at the United Nation General Assembly meeting, on September 27.

Free Software

Blog Entry

Software Freedom Pledge (Pranesh Prakash; September 25, 2015).

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 International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

Privacy

Article

Hits and Misses With the Draft Encryption Policy (Sunil Abraham; The Wire; September 26, 2015).

Blog Entries

Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India (Vidushi Marda; September 3, 2015).
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill (Vanya Rakesh; September 6, 2015).
Open Governance and Privacy in a Post-Snowden World: Webinar (Vanya Rakesh; September 26, 2015).

Participation in Event

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend the Young Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.

Free Speech and Expression

Submission

CIS Submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations (Pranesh Prakash; September 13, 2015).

Blog Entries

DIDP Request #11: NETmundial Principles (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
DIDP Request #12: Revenues (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
Peering behind the veil of ICANN’s DIDP (Padmini Baruah; September 21, 2015).

Participation in Event

Asian Regional Consultation on the WSIS+10 Review (Organized by The Internet Democracy Project, Bytes for All, APNIC, the Association for Progressive Communications, ISOC, Global Partners Digital and ICT Watch; September 3 – 5, 2015). Jyoti Panday attended the event.

IGF

The tenth annual IGF meeting will be held in João Pessoa, Brazil, on November 10 - 13, 2015. IGF's MAG has decided to retain the title “Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development” as the overarching theme. Sunil Abraham will be a panelist for the following workshops:

Understanding and Mitigating Online Hate Speech and Youth Radicalisation (Organized by Council of Europe, Oxford University, OHCHR, Google and ISOC; November 2015).
Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in Multi-stakeholder Cooperation (Organized by the United Nations; November 2015).

Cyber Security

Event Organized

Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham gave a talk at this event.

Miscellaneous

Sustainable Smart Cities India Conference 2015, Bangalore (Vanya Rakesh; September 21, 2015).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Submission

Comments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov (Pranesh Prakash; September 26, 2015).

Op-ed

More on those Dropped Calls (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; September 2, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; September 3, 2015).

Researchers at Work

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

Submission

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 30, 2015). The text of the proposal was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Blog Entries

The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (Divij Joshi; September 9, 2015).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; September 21, 2015).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Does this click with you? (Parshathy J. Nath; The Hindu; September 1, 2015).
Government may tieup with global police, Interpol to fight child pornography (Surabhi Agarwal; September 3, 2015).
Hiding behind rules on naming sites it banned, govt reveals fears (Harjeet Inder Singh Sahi; September 3, 2015).
Outrage before sharing (Nikhil Verma; The Hindu; September 9, 2015).
Faking a stand (Shweta T. Nanda; The Week; September 20, 2015).
Some Key Words Are Missing (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; September 21, 2015).
Open sesame (The Hindu; September 22, 2015).
India encryption policy draft faces backlash (Moulishree Srivastava; September 22, 2015)
Online outcry forces government to withdraw draft encryption policy (Naina Khedekar; First Post; September 23, 2015).
Encryption policy would have affected emails, operating systems, WiFi (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; September 23, 2015).
Govt presses 'undo' button on draft encryption policy (Business Standard; September 23; 2015).
Huge outcry forces India to backtrack on social media data proposal (Today; September 24, 2015).
Facebook’s Free Internet Access Program in Developing Countries Provokes Backlash (Newley Purnell and Resty Woro Uniar; The Wall Street Journal; September 24, 2015).
Ahead of hosting Modi, Facebook rebrands internet.org as Free Basics (Business Standard; September 26, 2015).
‘By weakening our security, govt is putting us at risk of espionage’ (S. Raghotham and Mayukh Mukherjee; Asian Age; September 27, 2015).
ভারতে পাঁচশোরও বেশি স্টেশনে ফ্রি ওয়াই-ফাই চালু হবে (BBC; September 28, 2015).
Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes (Kieren McCarthy; The Register; September 29, 2015).
Indian PM Narendra Modi’s digital dream gets bad reception (Amanda Hodge; September 29, 2015).
What Bengaluru Thinks of the Big Tech Announcements in Silicon Valley (Maya Sharma; NDTV; September 29, 2015).

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 diverse abilities, 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 mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

CIS - Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Access to Knowledge - Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Access to Knowledge - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: a2k@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - E-Mail: raw@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - Mailing List: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2015-bulletin

September 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-10-24T06:48:33Z

Our newsletter for the month of September 2013 can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the ninth issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. During this month we signed an MoU with the Goa University to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language, submitted a report on Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for persons with disabilities to the National Disaster Management Authority, published an updated version of the Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 based on feedback collected from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24, and published an analysis of the Crucifixion Protests in Paraguay. Further, updates on our upcoming events and media coverage are brought in this newsletter.

Our policies on Ethical Research Guidelines, Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunities, Privacy, Terms of Website Use, and Travel can be accessed here.

Accessibility

As part of our project on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India with the Hans Foundation, we bring you a new draft chapter on the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 21 states and 4 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for this chapter:

National Resource Kit Chapter

The Andaman and Nicobar Chapter (by CLPR, September 30, 2013).

Reports

Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for Persons with Disabilities (by Deepti Samant Raja and Nirmita Narasimhan, September 17, 2013). It was submitted to the National Disaster Management Authority of India (NDMA) on September 17 for their action.
The ICT Opportunity for a Disability-Inclusive Development Framework (by leading international organisations such as G3ict, ITU, Microsoft, UNESCO, et.al.) was released on September 24. CIS gave its inputs to this report.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Access to Knowledge team at CIS is working on expanding the Indic language Wikipedia in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation . As part this project, we held seven Wikipedia workshops. Our project on Pervasive Technologies examines the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property and we have produced a column in EuroScientist as part of our efforts of promoting openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software:

Open Access
Column

Open Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe (by Subbiah Arunachalam, Euro Scientist, September 25, 2013).

Blog Entries

e - DIRAP Google+ Hangout: Open Government (by Christine Apikul, September 18, 2013).
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research Adopts an Open Access Policy (by Nehaa Chaudhari, September 30, 2013).

Wikipedia
Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programmes, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications here.

Announcements

CIS Signs MoU with Goa University: The A2K team at CIS has signed an MoU with the Goa University to digitize the “Konkani Vishwakosh” under the Creative Commons license and build a digital knowledge partnership to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language. See here for more details.

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project: The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the University of Goa invites you to a two-month project on digitization of Konkani Vishwakosh. Please send in your applications by October 5, 2013.

Video

Wikipedians Speak: Piotr Konieczny: This episode brings you a conversation with Piotr Konieczny, a veteran Wikipedian from Poland. He has contributed to over 514 DYK articles on Wikipedia.

Columns and Blog Entries

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Startup Goa Blog, September 9, 2013).
ଅବସର ପରର ଦ୍ବିତୀୟ ଜୀବନ, ଅବସର ପରେ ସକ୍ରିୟ ଭାବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖାଲେଖି ଜାରୀ ରଖିଥିବା ଜଣେ ଡାକ୍ତରଙ୍କ ସ‌ହ ଭାବାଲୋଚନା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odiapua, September 10, 2013).
Selection of Programme Officer — Pilot Projects, CIS-A2K (by Nitika Tandon, September 10, 2013).
Wikipedia reaches Classrooms in Hyderabad (by Syed Muzammiluddin, September 20, 2013).

Events Organised

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mysore (University of Mysore, August 6, 2013): This is a report of the workshop conducted last month. Dr. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Goa, September 28, 2013). Nitika Tandon conducted this workshop. The details will be posted soon.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Training Workshop in Bangalore (organised by CIS-A2K, Bangalore, October 3 – 6, 2013).

Events Co-organised

Digital Resources in Telugu: A Workshop for Research Scholars (co-organised by CIS-A2K and the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, September 13, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan participated in this event.
Re-releasing Konkani Vishwakosh & Building Konkani Wikipedia (organised by CIS-A2K and the University of Goa, Conference Hall, Goa University, Taleigao, September 26, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (co-organised by CIS-A2K and wikipedians John Noronha and Supriya Kankumbikar, September 27, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop.
Odisha: Wikipedia workshop at IIMC, Dhenkanal (co-organised by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia community, September 30, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi coordinated the entire event along with members of Odia Wikipedia, Dr Subas Chandra Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar and Sasanka Sekhar Das. This was covered by Odisha Diary (http://bit.ly/1bna9zd), and eOdisha Samachar (http://bit.ly/1aNJvv4).

Events Participated In

Workshop on e-Content Development (organised by Centre for Staff Training and Development, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad, September 4 – 6, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan gave a guest lecture on Open Source to Open Knowledge, Building Knowledge Bases and Platforms via Mass Collaboration on the Internet, e-Content in Indian languages – History, Challenges and Opportunities, Wikipedia Users to Wikipedia Authors – Exploring Wikipedia as an OER Tool, and e-Content, e-Student, e-Faculty – Reimagining classroom in the digital Age.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, SDM College, Ujire, September 15, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in this workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (organised by St. Aloysius College, AIMIT, St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Beeri, Mangalore, September 13, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in this.

Media Coverage

'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation' (Deccan Herald, September 13, 2013): The article talks about the relative lack of content in Konkani Wikipedia. “To get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for Wikipedia,” Dr. Pavanaja was quoted as having said.
Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow (The Hindu, September 26, 2013). A coverage of the re-release of the Konkani encyclopaedia under Creative Commons license.
Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26 (The Times of India, September 24, 2013): Goa University and CIS-A2K re-released the four volume 3632 page Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopaedia) in Goa.
Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia (Navhind Times, September 27, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months (The Times of India, September 27, 2013): Goa University becomes the first varsity in India to allow data produced and copyrighted by an Indian university to be used by internet users. Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help with the project for which training will be provided, says Vishnu Vardhan.
Konkani Wikipedia in the making (by Prakash Kamat, The Hindu, September 29, 2013): Goa University re-launched a four-volume Konkani encyclopaedia and will upload it on Wikipedia. The process will be completed in six months times, says Vishnu Vardhan.
For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, September 29, 2013): Konkani has 24 lakh speakers as per the Census Department of India 2001 but online documentation is limited. CIS-A2K wants to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia, says Nitika Tandon.
Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months (by Jagran Josh, September 30, 2013).
Goa University Partners CIS India to Build Konkani Wikipedia (by Apurva Chaudhary, Medianama, September 30, 2013).

Access to Knowledge (Copyright and Pervasive Technologies)

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Event Participated In

The Law and Economics of Copyright Users Rights (organised by the American University Washington College of Law, Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC, September 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham presented the Pervasive Technologies project.

Internet Governance

We are doing a project on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS) with Privacy International and IDRC. So far we have organised six privacy round tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you the latest version of the Privacy (Protection) Bill and an analysis of the six privacy round tables. We are also doing a project on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and IDRC. We did an interview with Lawrence Liang on privacy and free speech:

SAFEGUARDS Project
Bill

Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013: Updated Third Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): CIS has been researching privacy in India since 2010 with the objective of raising public awareness around privacy, completing in depth research, and driving a privacy legislation in India. As part of this work, we drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013. This is the latest version with changes based on feedback from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24.

Event Reports

A Privacy Meeting with the Federal Trade Commission (co-organised by CIS and the Federal Trade Commission, Imperial Hotel, Janpath, New Delhi, September 20, 2013). Elonnai Hickok participated in this meeting.
The National Privacy Roundtable Meetings (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013). Bhairav provides an analysis of the six round table meetings held in the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Interview

An Interview with Suresh Ramasubramanian (by Elonnai Hickok, September 6, 2013): Suresh Ramasubramanian from IBM speaks about cyber security and issues in the cloud.

Articles and Blog Entries

India: Privacy in Peril (by Bhairav Acharya, Frontline, July 12, 2013). The article was published in Frontline in July but was mirrored only recently on our website.
Privacy Law Must Fit the Bill (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 9, 2013).
Transparency Reports — A Glance on What Google and Facebook Tell about Government Data Requests (by Prachi Arya, September 12, 2013).
The National Cyber Security Policy: Not a Real Policy (by Bhairav Acharya, Observer Research Foundation's Cyber Security Monitor Vol. I, Issue.1, August 2013).
The Central Monitoring System: Some Questions to be Raised in Parliament (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013).
CIS and International Coalition Calls upon Governments to Protect Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, September 25, 2013).
An Analysis of the Cases Filed under Section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 for Adjudication in the State of Maharashtra (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): This is a brief review of some of the cases related to privacy filed under section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 seeking adjudication for alleged contraventions of the Act in the State of Maharashtra.

Media Coverage

Gmail ban looms for Indian gov't workers (by Beatrice Thomas, Arabian Business.com, September 1, 2013): The article says that government would ban Gmail for official communication in light of cyber spying by the US. Sunil Abraham agrees with the ban.
Indien: Regierung will Nutzung von US-Mailprovidern in Verwaltungen verbieten (Netzpolitik, September 3, 2013). Sunil Abraham was quoted in this German newspaper.
A dangerous trend: social media adds fire to Muzaffarnagar clashes (by Zia Haq, The Hindustan Times, September 9, 2013). The article speaks about censorship in wake of publication of malicious content. In such cases the government has a legitimate reason to censor speech, says Sunil Abraham.
Three Years Later, IPaidABribe.com Pays Off (by Jessica McKenzie, TechPresident, September 23, 2013): The article talks about IPaidABribe.com, an online portal focusing on civic engagement and improving governance. But the real problem in India is “high ticket bribes...at the top of the pyramid,” Sunil Abraham was quoted as having said.
Indian biometric ID plan faces court hurdle (by John Ribeiro, Computer World, September 25, 2013): The article talks about Aadhar (India’s biometric system). The Aadhaar number now allows different agencies including private organizations to collect and exchange data between them, says Pranesh Prakash.

Upcoming Event

Privacy Round Table, New Delhi (co-organised by FICCI, DSCI and CIS, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, October 19, 2013).

Event Organised

Public Law and Jurisprudential Issues of Privacy (CIS, Bangalore, September 27, 2013): Abhayraj Naik, a graduate from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and the Yale Law School gave a talk on public law and jurisprudential issues related to privacy.

Events Participated In

Young Scholar Tutorials (organised by Communication Policy Research South, September 3-4, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event.
Privacy and Surveillance in India (organised by the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, September 18, 2013). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.
Syllabus: “Policy and regulation conducive to rapid ICT sector growth in Myanmar: An introductory course” (organised by LIRNEasia in collaboration with Myanmar ICT Development Organization, and with support from the Open Society Foundation and the International Development Research Centre of Canada, September 28 – October 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is supporting Prof. Samarajiva on the last optional day of this course in Yangon.
Congress on Privacy and Surveillance (organised by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, September 30, 2013). Maria Xynou participated in this event.

Cyber Security Project
Video Interview

Part 10: Interview with Lawrence Liang (September 10, 2013): In the ecology of online communication it is crucial for us to look at right to privacy and right to free speech as inseparable.

Forthcoming Events

11th India Knowledge Summit 2013 (organised by ASSOCHAM India, Hotel Shangri-La, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). CIS is one of the organisations supporting this event.
CYFY 2013: India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance (organised by Observer Research Foundation and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). Sunil Abraham will participate in this event as a speaker.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at www.internet-institute.in.

Modules

International Telecommunication Union (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).

Telecom

Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

Newspaper Column

Regrouping for Growth - Interest Rates – III (originally published in the Business Standard on September 4, 2013 and mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot on September 6, 2013).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:
Event Report

Bangalore + Sustainability Summit (organized by Ashoka India, Green Lungi and IDEX, September 21, 2013, CIS, Bangalore): Denisse Albornoz has summarised the happenings in this report.

Media Coverage

Youths brainstorm at social summit (The Times of India, September 21, 2013): A coverage of the Bangalore + Sustainability Summit hosted at CIS.

Blog Entry + Video

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay (by Denisse Albornoz, September 20, 2013): Denisse provides an analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway?.

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Interview

Thinking Digital Beyond Tools: Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah (by Noopur Raval, HASTAC, September 10, 2013): Nishant speaks about his interest in digital studies, the future of humanities, and his HASTAC experience.

Event Participated In

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium (organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine, September 26-27, 2013): Nishant Shah participated in this event as a panelist.

About CIS
The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k

Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge

E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

Support Us
Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2013-bulletin

Second Maps for Making Change Workshop: Using Geographical Mapping Techniques to Support Struggles for Social Justice in India

anja — 2015-10-05T15:09:51Z

The second workshop of the Maps for Making Change project will take place at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, from 1 until 3 February 2010. The workshop will allow a select group of activists and supporters of social movements and campaigns in India to start developing digital maps that they can use in their advocacy work, under the expert guidance of international digital mapping rights activists, Indian mapping experts, design professionals and techies with an interest in activism. The workshop is organised by the Centre for Internet and Society and Tactical Tech, in cooperation with MediaShala at NID.

The aims of the workshop are to:

explore in depth tools and techniques for mapping
assist participants in starting to develop their own maps in the context of the projects that they have suggested
help participants identify important design concerns and elements of their project that require attention at an early stage if they are to communicate effectively

By the end of the workshop, the participants will be able to:

identify which mapping tools best suit their project
identify additional data required to complete their mapping project
make informed choices about issues relating to privacy, licensing, etc
independently continue to develop their own maps using the tools they have explored during the workshop
apply core concerns of information design to their mapping project to maximise its effectiveness and impact

The provisional programme of the workshop is as follows:

Monday 1 February

Time	Session
8.00–10.00	Breakfast and registration at NID
10.00–10.45	Welcome and introductions (icebreaker) - Anja Kovacs & Kate Morioka
10.45–11.30	Opening plenary - Lars Bromley: “Mapping the truth: how geo-technologies are uncovering human rights violations and injustice”
11.30 – 1.00	Morning Session - MediaShala team: “Information Design: the art of making campaigning messages visually compelling”
1.00 – 2.15	Lunch
2.15 – 3.15	Project Time - All: revising project scope based on morning sessions (audience, purpose, objectives)
3.15 – 4.30	Afternoon 'Lab' Sessions (choose ONE) Elective 1. Using Google Maps for Social Activism - Henry Addo Elective 2. Mapping with Open Layers- Alagesa Pandian
4.30 – 5.00	Break
5.00 – 6.15	Elective 1. Advanced GIS- Lars Bromley Elective 2. GPS Basics - Hardeep Singh Rai, with Arky and Sajjad
6.15-6.30	Evening Circle - Anja Kovacs
6.30 – 7.30	Free Time / Knowledge Sharing @ Speakers' Green
7.30 – 9.00 (open invite)	Film screening: “10 Tactics: Turning Information into Action” - Kate Morioka. This film produced by Tactical Tech explores how rights advocates around the world have used information and digital technologies to create change.
9.00 – 10.00	Dinner

Tuesday 2 February

Time

Session

7.30 – 9.00

Breakfast (Hotel)

9.00-9.30

Morning Circle - Anja Kovacs

9.30 – 11.30

Guest Speakers

“The experiences of Ushahidi” - Henry Addo

“An Introduction to Open Street Maps for Activism” - Mikel Maron (online)

11.30 – 1.00

Participatory mapping process and techniques - Kate Morioka

1.00 – 2.15

Lunch

2.15 – 4.00

Project Time - All:

identifying methodology and technical implementation of participants' mapping projects

4.00 – 5.00

Break/ Knowledge Sharing @ Speakers' Green

5.00-6.15

Elective 1. Google Earth for Advocacy - Henry Addo

Elective 2. An Introduction to Open Street Maps - Hardeep Singh Rai

6.15-6.30

Evening Circle - Anja Kovacs

6.30 – 7.30

Free time

7.30 – 9.00

Exploring the Ahmedabad Markets

9.00 – 10.30

Dinner at Vishala

Wednesday 3 February

Time

Session

7.30 – 9.00

Breakfast (Hotel)

9.00-9.30

Morning Circle - Anja Kovacs

9.30 – 11.15

Panel Discussion

“To Map or Not to Map: Issues of privacy, licensing and other rights-related concerns”

Followed by a group discussion

11.15 – 11.45

Break

11.45 – 1.00

Introduction to GIS and remote sensing for human rights advocacy - Lars Bromley

1.00 – 2.15

Lunch

2.15 – 3.45

Project Time - All

time to work on individual projects and obtain feedback from fellow participants and facilitators

3.45-4.15

Break

4.15 – 4.45

Closing Plenary - Pratyush Shankar

“Reflection”

4.45 – 5.30

Evaluation - Madhuresh Kumar

Briefing on the next workshop - Anja Kovacs

Close - Anja Kovacs and Kate Morioka

Assistant Facilitators: Arky Ambati and Sajjad Anwar

Technical Assistance: Kiran (Jace) Jonnalagadda

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/second-maps-for-making-change-workshop-using-geographical-mapping-techniques-to-support-struggles-for-social-justice-in-india

Science, Technology and Society International Conference – Some Afterthoughts

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:22:08Z

An international conference on Science, Technology and Society was held at the Indore Christian College on March 12 and 13. It was sponsored by the Madhya Pradesh Council of Science and Technology, Bhopal and organized by the Indore Christian College. Samuel Tettner, Digital Natives Coordinator from the Centre for Internet and Society attended this conference and is sharing his experience about the workshop.

This past weekend I attended the “Science, Technology and Society International Conference”. The experience was one of learning, more so on the idiosyncrasies and social particularities of academic research than on the subject matters presented at the conference.

I arrived in Indore late on Friday night; my plan was to just check into the hotel and watch some Tom and Jerry before falling asleep. Then I met the conference organizer, the head of the Department of Sociology at the Indore Christian College, who informed me that I would be one of the key-note speakers the next day and that I had around 40 minutes of speaking time. My presentation at that time was around 20 minutes, so there was less Tom and Jerry than expected. This was the first indication of the interesting cultural experience I was about to have.

As I navigated the rather austere streets of Indore, I realized that this was really a modest city. Not in population of course, because Indian cities are huge compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world, but in its aspirations. I quickly noticed I was the only white person on the streets. “I made the conference international”, I thought, but I was wrong: There was one more white person, a middle aged man from Hungary named Laszlo who had come to present his research on population. And so as the first day of the conference rolled on, Laszlo and I got a taste of some bizarre reverence that continued throughout the two days. I can’t say for sure if it’s the result of some colonial baggage, the Indian tradition of treating guests like gods, may be a combination of both, the truth is that we got treated with way too much respect and an uncanny humility that was at times a bit embarrassing. Laszlo and I got to sit on the stage, next to the former Indian ambassador to Fiji, the head of the college, and other conference organizers.

The influence of Hinduism in more rural areas is very visible, on the stage next to the podium was a huge representation of Saraswati (goddess of wisdom) and there was a constant puja being offered to her. I thought of the academia, the temple of rationality, the house of reason, surely cannot co-exist with the world of religion. It can, if anyone in the world can make it happen, it’s the Indians. There were floral offerings, and introductions, and dedications. It seemed the organizers were very concerned with decorum and pomp and circumstance, pleasing local government officials (I recognized them because they were fat and everyone smiled at them awkwardly) and maintaining a tradition I got the feeling they didn’t understand properly. This whole exercise was ironic to me, as the building was almost in ruins, there was no proper ventilation, and the restrooms were a complete mess with no proper running water, and so on.

Finally I got to speak. I only got 15 minutes because one local man (maybe a friend of one of the local politicians) took his sweet time delivering his speech. This was definitely not my crowd. I was presenting a small paper I wrote called “iCare: Emergent Forms of Technology-mediated Activism” which was basically a summary of two of the findings of “Digital Natives with a Cause?”: One was a concept of activism which moves away from one time campaigns and looks at the practice of activism as an every-day activity, which can be valued without the need of an issue nor a community. The other was an observation about the language of activism and how it relates to different communities, through the use of voice, terminology, literary devices, and context. These were not the topics most attendees were familiar with, for example at the beginning of the talk I asked how many people in the audience used Facebook, and about 15 of out 150 people raised their hands. Relating to the issues of people who use technology incessantly was difficult for this crowd, who were not familiar with terms like “Slacktivism” and “Digital Native”, and who generally held the view that modern society and its overuse of technology were chipping away at traditional Hindu family values.

I tried my best in those 15 minutes, to illuminate some of the basic conceptual bases of the kind of work we’re doing with “Digital Natives with a Cause?”. They enjoyed the presentation, or at least I gathered that from several people who came up to me afterwards and told me so. Many people came up to me and asked me where I was from, and I started saying “USA” after a while, because “Venezuela” does exist in their mind, and “South America” just means the south of the United States.

I got to learn a lot about academic life in more rural traditional social spaces. I am generally completely ignorant of rural life, as I was born in the capital of Venezuela, and have in general lived in very cosmopolitan and metropolitan cities all my life. However what little slices of rural life I had encountered while backpacking through India, were concentrated in the work around the house and the fields. I was under the impression that research, that academic pursuit, and that critical thinking, were activities reserved for the urban, the middle class, the English speaking. Attending this conference opened my view a bit in this respect. People in rural areas have their own academic culture, with their own research interests, views and perspectives, and in most cases, reliable data backing them. Granted, in many cases these cultures are reflections or copies of what comes out of the cities, (and the west to a certain extend) but many times they are not, and getting to experience the complexity of it was a great experience. For example, there were many papers presented which dealt with the politics of caste, which is a concept I have barely come in contact with while being in Bangalore. A lot of people also talked about sustainable development, the impact of technology on agriculture, how new chemical fertilizers are changing the lives of farmers, and one teacher talked about the exiting potential uses for the novel technology called the podcast.

It was then that it dawned on me: “Science, Technology and Society” meant a completely different thing to my audience than it did to me. My presentation about how people conversing on Facebook can be viewed as activism must have seemed so alien and disconnected to them. I left the place very pensive about the whole experience. After taking pictures with some children, I went to a mall, and stood in front of a McDonalds and wondered how globalization is allowing for encounters like this one: A Venezuelan young man speaking at a local college in Indore, in the cultural and geographical centre of India. I’d like to think I was breaking barriers, participating in inter-cultural dialogue, exemplifying the exchange of intellectual and cultural capital that I hope takes places in the following years after our markets have gone global. Then again, I might not have been, I might have confirmed their perception of the well-dressed Westerner, who gracefully does them the favour of speaking at their college, and then talks in an accent about some random and obscure topic no one has any idea about. I’m still trying to decipher what happened. Eventually I went back to my hotel and experienced possibly the one and only truly cross-cultural and global thing in today’s world: Tom and Jerry.

See the agenda here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/science-technology-and-society-conference-in-indore-march-12-13

Sarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

Sarah Zia — 2020-05-19T06:35:21Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Sarah Zia is the second among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 18, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

Ride-hailing [1] platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system?

When algorithms make us not know

Algorithmic interactions form the core of the technology in ride-hailing apps through which service seekers and providers interact. As Lee et al. (2015) describe, “Algorithmic management allows companies to oversee myriads of workers in an optimized manner at a large scale, but its impact on human workers and work practices has been largely unexplored… Algorithmic management is one of the core innovations that enables these (cab-riding) services.”

Algorithms are procedural logics that produce different effects depending on the data they receive and the outputs they are optimized for (Wilson, 2016). Moreover, platform companies are not transparent about how their business logics contribute to these “optimizations”, which makes it difficult for all the stakeholders (passengers, drivers, police personnel, etc.) to make an accurate assessment of their functioning. This essay, then, explores how the lack of transparency around algorithmic structures not only prohibits drivers from knowing completely and surely about their work (“why did I get this ride?”, “why did my ratings drop?”) but also how they build tactics of coping and earning from a place of unknowing. Algorithms act as a regulator of work and their inherent structure constrains drivers from knowing fully about their work. Unknowing thus has two aspects: first, drivers do not have access or means to gather information; second, it is difficult to be sure of the existence of the said information in the first place.

In my research on ridehailing in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), there were three things that I asked drivers about which led to ambiguous and inconsistent replies: how rides were allocated, how fares were determined and how ratings worked. While some drivers told me upfront they did not know how these systems worked, others offered explanations that they had devised or heard from somewhere else. For instance, not knowing what they will make per trip means that drivers plan their day in terms of target earnings instead of number of trips. Nearly all drivers I spoke to said they aimed to make Rs 1500-2000 (approx USD 20-25) per day in order to break even, irrespective of whether that goal requires 10 or 15 trips in a day. Yet not knowing what the next trip will earn them means they can’t refuse rides easily. Many drivers expressed discomfort about this fact, especially when compared to other means such as auto-rickshaws and traditional cabs where drop destination is known beforehand and fares can also be pre-negotiated, Unlike ride-hailing drivers, auto rickshaw drivers have the right to refuse passengers.

Many drivers now call passengers after accepting their booking to find out the destination. According to some drivers, this call also helped them understand the kind of passengers they were about to get and sometimes even allowed re-negotiation of the drop location to a mutually convenient spot if it was originally in a congested area. They also felt that assessing passengers before a trip was important so that they could act as mediators in the information gatekeeping process, because the passengers would have seen the fare already. For a driver, the lack of information added many layers of constant negotiation in a single trip—starting from the call to find out the destination to conversations during the trip to gauge potential earnings to finally suggesting alternative drop locations if there are any constraints in accessing the original destination—before they can claim their rightful earnings.

Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. Photo by Noopur Raval.

Knowing the terms of work—such as when work ends and begins, how the good jobs are being allocated and to whom, and an explanation of one’s income—is a foundation of formal and informal work. Such information is crucial because it allows us to separate our work and personal lives. Knowledge of these obviously quantifiable parameters can help drivers plan their earnings and investments and, crucially, when they can take a break based on much more or less work they have to do in order to meet their income targets.

Furthermore, as drivers showed me, ride-hailing companies spontaneously change the revenue model for “driver-partners” (as they are called) by sending them an SMS right before the change happens, thereby altering trip and mileage targets frequently to keep a degree of unknowability in drivers’ work. This unknowability disincentivizes drivers from going off the road as per their will and helps maintain a steady supply of cabs on the road. As Alex Rosenblat has demonstrated in her study of US Uber and Lyft drivers, they are compelled to accept rides without knowing their profitability. While the app design gives them an option to “choose” to accept or reject a ride, drivers are constrained by lack of adequate information pertaining to the trip as well as the rider in making this choice. The ‘information asymmetry’, as Rosenblat calls it, also feeds into drivers’ mistrust of the companies and their policies (Rosenblat, 2018). Moreover, these feelings and the uncertainty fed by unknowing were not limited to drivers. Passengers also noticed that a ride between two points could cost different prices at different times of day and they were not sure why or how this cost was calculated.

Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping

As I observed in my interactions with drivers online and offline, new drivers often struggled with the degree of uncertainty and unknowability while more experienced drivers had accepted ‘not knowing’ and the opacity of the system as features of their work.

Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. Photo by author.

Similar to what Rosenblat, Gray et al. and others have observed in the US, in India drivers were constantly engaged in meaning-making through communicative labor, i.e., sharing their experiences with other local drivers online and offline. Agreeing, reassuring, and repeating that drivers actually do not know enough through these discussions also gave them shared confidence in their own abilities and how they were approaching work despite being firmly rooted in unknowing. For instance, when I asked one Uber driver about how ratings worked, they said that all 5-star drivers were matched with 5-star passengers. Another Uber driver said that the higher a passenger’s ratings, the less time they would have to wait for pick-up.

Other forms in which this kind of unknowing manifested was the lack of a fare chart or any minimum or uniform rating system, leaving drivers to offer their own interpretations and coping strategies. For instance, a driver pointed out how very few rides are likely to be available in a specific suburb during hot afternoons and therefore he avoided dropping passengers to that location after 2PM.

How, then, does one learn to cope with such unknowable systems as a worker? And what values does such a pedagogy of coping with algorithmic opacity imbibe? In my fieldwork, apart from answering my questions, drivers were extremely interested in talking about the companies, including news about companies’ stock value, their futures, profits, etc. A persistent rumour in the field was that Reliance, the country’s largest telecom provider, was soon coming up with a competitor ride-hailing app, suggesting that there could be an incentive boom again. In online Facebook groups, drivers often discussed company CEOs’ salaries, comparing them to their own. On the flipside, when videos of ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers getting beaten up or arrested or cheated surfaced, drivers would comment with advice on how to safeguard oneself, how to deal with errant customers and so on. I interpret these practices of making sense of long and short-term work, framed as responses to constant ambiguity and uncertainty, as the development of an “algorithmic gut”.

This gut responds to the anxieties produced by platform infrastructure through a keen awareness of the shifts, the tweaks, the changes and the errors. And it orients how drivers approach and cope with their work by acknowledging that there is a lot unknown (and unknowable) in this kind of daily work. It also guides how drivers focus on the short-term (daily) goal of making profit, such as by tuning into peer groups both online and offline where grievances are discussed, collective action planned, and floating rumours assessed. This gut is an affective, sensorial attunement to how platforms are allocating and shifting power among drivers and plays a generative role in guiding drivers’ work decisions.

Conclusion

Uncertainty is an embedded part of a ride-hailing cab’s model of service delivery. For ride-hailing drivers, this ambiguity translates into less control over everyday negotiation of work as well as planning of financial assets for the future.

In my interactions, I discovered that drivers are certain that they will never know more than the company. What this has led to is a driver who is cynical but not entirely pessimistic. Drivers acknowledge that while companies and their structures may be problematic, what will keep them employed is passengers’ appetite for a service like this. They would like to imagine the future of their work but are cognizant of the dual challenge of the present: making money while struggling for self-preservation in order to perform immediate activities. Drivers are cognizant of an ambiguous future and even hesitant to engage in long-term planning. For now, they would prefer better earnings and greater control over how they perform labour. Hence, their focus is on devising specific strategies for known, short-term challenges instead of running after an unknown future.

Endnotes

[1] Uber and homegrown Ola both started operations in India as ride-hailing services with the sharing options being added in 2015. Hence, the term ride-hailing has been used to describe these services which also includes ride sharing.

References

Davis, Jenny L. 2014. “Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era.” Symbolic Interaction 37 (4): 500-523.

Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. 2005. “Codes of life: identification codes and the machine-readable world.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005 (23): 851-881

Gray, Mary L., et al. 2016. “The Crowd is a Collaborative Network.” Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2016.

Kitchin, Rob. 2017. “Thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 14-29.

Lee, Min Kyung, et al. 2015. “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Rosenblat, Alex & Stark, Luke. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758–3784.

Ruckenstein, Minna and Mika Pantzar. 2017. “Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm.” New Media & Society 19(3): 401-418.

Willson, Michele. 2016. “Algorithms (and the) everyday”. Information, Communication & Society 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1200645

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi

Sameet Panda - Data Systems in Welfare: Impact of the JAM Trinity on Pension & PDS in Odisha during COVID-19

Sameet Panda — 2021-02-26T07:36:10Z

This study by Sameet Panda tries to understand the integration of data and digital systems in welfare delivery in Odisha. It brings out the impact of welfare digitalisation on beneficiaries through primary data collected in November 2020. The researcher is thankful to community members for sharing their lived experiences during course of the study. Fieldwork was undertaken in three panchayats of Bhawanipatna block of Kalahandi district, Odisha. Additional research support was provided by Apurv Vivek and Vipul Kumar, and editorial contributions were made by Ambika Tandon (Senior Researcher, CIS). This study was conducted as part of a project on gender, welfare, and surveillance, supported by Privacy International, UK.

Report: Download (PDF)

Extract from the Report

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated flaws in social institutions as never before - threatening food security, public health systems, and livelihood in the informal sector. At the time of writing this report, India is the second-worst affected country in the world with over 9.8 million confirmed cases and more than 1.4 hundred thousand deaths. Unemployment has been increasing at an alarming rate, from 6.67 to 7 percent in October...

Following the national lockdown, many families belonging to low-income groups and daily wage earners found themselves stranded without money, food or credit from their employers. During the strict lockdown of the economy between March to June 2020 lakhs of migrants faced starvation in cities and walked back home. The government responded with some urgent measures, although inadequate. To cope with the food and economic crisis the Government of India and state governments initiated several social protection schemes. In Odisha, The central government provided two kinds of support, cash transfer through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) MGNREGS, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUJ), advance release of pension in cash to existing beneficiaries and cash support of Rs. 1000. The Odisha government provided cash support of Rs. 1000 to ration card holding families. Beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System also received free-of-cost food grain under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana...

Over the last couple of years, along with making the Aadhaar mandatory, the government has also been working towards linking mobile numbers and bank accounts of beneficiaries. An increasing number of schemes are shifting to Direct Benefit Transfer from in-kind or cash benefits - 324 schemes under 51 ministries of the Government of India. Such schemes are relying on the linkage of Jan Dhan accounts, the Aadhaar, and mobile numbers (the “JAM trinity”) to facilitate access to Direct Benefit Transfers. The Economic Survey 2015-16 has pointed out that without improving mobile penetration and rural banking infrastructure making the JAM trinity mandatory would continue to lead to exclusions. The issues with each of the components of the JAM trinity worsened during the COVID-19 crisis with restrictions on physical movement, difficulties in topping up mobile phone accounts, and enrolling for the Aadhaar or addressing other technical issues.

This report assesses the role of the data system in welfare delivery. It focuses on the impact of the three components of the JAM trinity - Jan Dhan Account, mobile numbers and the Aadhaar on Direct Benefit Transfer, social security pension and the Public Distribution System. The objective of this study is to understand the challenges faced by beneficiaries in accessing PDS and pension as a result of digitisation processes. This includes failures in Direct Benefit Transfers and exclusions from databases, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on gender as a key component shaping the impact of digitisation on beneficiaries. The sample includes both men and women beneficiaries in order to identify such gendered differences. It will also identify infrastructural constraints in Odisha that impact the implementation of digital systems in welfare. Also, it will analyse policy frameworks at central and state levels, to compare their discourse with the impact on the ground.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sameet-panda-jam-trinity-pension-pds-odisha-covid-19

Roundtable on India’s Gig-work Economy

Noopur Raval, Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia, and Simiran Lalvani — 2020-05-19T06:36:34Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This roundtable discussion marks the end of our series on 'India’s Gig-work Economy' published by the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). In this discussion, the researchers reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the topic. Listen to the audio track below or read the transcript for the full discussion.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on September 5, 2019.

Full transcript of the roundtable in English.

Excerpts from the roundtable

Part 1: On continuities between traditional and newer forms of work in cab-driving

Anushree (researcher, taxi-driving in Mumbai): “Something that came out during field work was the flow of workers from traditional services to app-based services which kind of happened in phases and all these platforms have played a different function in the history of this. While the radio taxis were more important in teaching workers to become professionals in the service economy the new platforms have given them a larger customer base and hired access to audience.”

Sarah (researcher, taxi-driving in Delhi): “Prior to Ola and Uber there were radio cabs, but they were not the same phenomenon obviously. They used to work in specific pockets better, such as the airport route.”

Part 2: Regulation of platform companies and platform-work

The State’s response to disruptive technologies in India has always accounted for worker groups as electoral constituents as well. This means that there are no neat divisions between older black and yellow cabs and the newer ride-hailing app-based cabs. To pacify the threatened black and yellow cab drivers, they were accorded a special category on hailing apps as well:

Anushree: So there were a lot of issues around the emergence of the app-based platforms and services and how they were disrupting the existing arrangements so in a bid to pacify the yellow and black cab drivers who are already operating in the city, these platform companies decided to go ahead and provide access to traditional taxi services as well. But also the related development that happened there is at the Maharashtra state government also provided another app to the black and yellow Cab drivers and as far as I found out during my fieldwork there hasn’t been any resolution on that front and most black and yellow cab drivers also use the State government made app but they also log into apps and every time I tried to book a black and yellow cab using Ola and Uber I could not get one.

Part 3: On motivations and perceptions of gig-work

Simiran (researcher, food-delivery work in Mumbai): “So, I felt that these non app-based workers had difficulty joining apps because they lack domicile proof to prove they live in the city. There is also a perception that one needs to be English speaking. I am not implying that app-based workers have no rural roots or are all English speaking or educated but this is the perception that was held by non-app workers that was interesting.”

Rajendra (researcher, food-delivery work in Delhi): “In case of the food-delivery workers in Delhi, they push them to deliver orders on time. This pressure makes them violate traffic rules, they ride on pavements, they break traffic signals. This also disrupts the social understanding of how to move in the city.”

Part 4: On studying the gig-economy in India: how did you recruit, why?

Noopur: Why not order and recruit because so many people seem to be taking this pathway to approach gig-economy workers?

Simiran: “…One thing is that I have never ordered food online so I wanted to keep it a bit blind that way but also the other thing is that I did not want my first interaction with the worker to be as a consumer or in a consumer-provider relationship. So, I was searching on Youtube, looking for city names and looking for search terms such as strikes or protests. Looking for videos about these things and their views on the companies…This was very interesting because there were also people from non-metro cities, from small towns doing this work who were also very eager to speak to me. They were expressive already and wanting to speak…”

Anushree: “Apart from them fleet owners and union members were very eager to talk to us. They saw the study as a way to put their voice out. I had to establish my identity as well as a researcher. I used Telegram and facebook groups extensively…I think I relied on Telegram the most. It was also surprising that such a diverse set of people were on that platform. I had never used Telegram before this project but the comfort levels of all the people using it was really surprising. Drivers in the union members group was sort of surprising to me, they were posting images from the road, they were posting audio notes, they were moderating conversations in the group. Telegram was my major source of responses and I also got to know what was happening on the ground.”

Sarah: “So, when you identify as a researcher and ask them these questions there is a certain expectation of allyship. So, I started asking them what they think is a good customer. That was a good entry point to assuring them that I was on their side. Some of them were still very cautious. We were talking about things like drunk women and they would be quick to tell me that not all women are bad. Or not all customers are bad. But discussing customers and their behavior was generally a good way to connect with them…”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/india-gig-work-economy-roundtable

Revisiting Techno-euphoria

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:53:49Z

In my last post, I talked about techno-euphoria as a condition that seems to mark much of our discourse around digital technologies and the promise of the future. The euphoria, as I had suggested, manifests itself either as a utopian view of how digital technologies are going to change the future that we inhabit, or woes of despair about how the overdetermination of the digital is killing the very fibre of our social fabric.

Published in DML Central on July 5, 2012

A way out of it, for some of us working with young people and their relationships with (as opposed to usage of) technologies, is to think of digital technologies as a paradigm through which everyday life is reconfigured, or as contexts within which we evolve new relationships of power and negotiation. Or to put it plainly, it has forced us to think of digital technologies not in terms of tools and gadgets, infrastructure and logistics (though those are also important) but as embodied experiences that reshape the very ways in which we conceptualize our everyday life.

When we talk of digital natives in India, the immediate spaces that they inhabit conjure up images of big crowded IT cities that are transforming into hubs of international outsourcing industries and IT development. We presume that digital natives would be found in the 12% of the Indian sub-continent where broadband access is available. We often narrow our focus to look at urban, middle class, affluent, English speaking, educated youth who occupy extremely privileged positions in their social, cultural and economic practice.

However, the story* I want to share with you today comes from an unusual location in India – from the village of Banni in the desert region of Kutch, located at the North-Western borders of India and Pakistan. In this small village that is about 80 kilometers from the biggest town with amenities like hospitals and schools, almost every household has a smart phone with access to the internet. In the absence of more popular forms like radio, which are disallowed because of the proximity to the turbulent India-Pakistan borders, the Chinese-made smart phones become the de facto interface of communication and cultural production. The phones become not only the life-line in times of crises, but also everyday objects through which the villages stay connected with the world of cultural production and entertainment. The internet services on the phones allow them to access Bollywood songs and movies, images and games, popular television programming and other popular cultural products in the country. In many ways, Banni is probably more digitally connected than many parts of the larger cities in the country.

However, the strong influence of Islam in this fairly homogenized community means differential access for the people who live in it. Women, according to the village doctrines, are not allowed access to technologies for fear of corruption. Hence the smart phones are all exclusively owned by men who have complete access to the information highway whereas the women do not have immediate ownership of such interfaces. And yet, the women in the village are quite updated about the latest news, gossip, politics, information about the weather, and cultural productions like TV soaps and Bollywood movies. This discrepancy between lack of access to digital technologies on the one hand, and a fairly comprehensive access to information of their choice is perplexing at first. Till you turn your attention to the children, who, in their pre-pubertal space, are not segregated so clearly into the technology publics and privates, and hence can navigate the spaces which are otherwise so gender exclusive.

These children would not usually be recognized as digital natives because they are not particularly tech savvy and they do not have direct and unlimited access to the digital devices or connectivity. However, they become interfaces through which the information consumed by the male population permeates and travels to the female population in the village. The children become embodied interfaces, who imbibe the information from these digital devices and re-enact it for the women in their own private spaces. The village now has its own child-stars who not only pass on the local news and information, but also re-enact, on a daily basis, scenes, songs, and story-lines from the soaps and movies that are popular with the women in the village.

While the gendered politics of technology access and the creative ways in which children are able to work as embodied interfaces is interesting – and perhaps needs more space than is afforded here – what remains interesting to me is how this story disrupts the regular narratives of techno-euphoria. It cannot be explained away merely in terms of usage. It cannot be used to claim radical social change in community and gendered relationships. It is difficult to make a technology-empowerment argument though this. What is perhaps most interesting is that it shows how we need to start thinking about digital technologies as producing new ecosystems that reconfigure our understanding of who we are and the roles we play in developing social relationality. The digital natives in these stories are not merely the children – though their embodied interface produces startling insights into how personal relationships with technologies are produced. The men who have access to the phones and have mastered digital literacy in navigating through these phones, the women who become the last-mile consumers who have found creative ways of staying connected despite their lack of access, and the children who become the nodes in this technology-information infrastructure, are all digital natives of a certain kind. They might not have claimed that identity and indeed might never want to. And yet, the very conditions of everyday life, as they are mediated by the presence of digital technologies in Banni, help us understand the social structures and information relationships in ways which are more complex than theorized by our techno-euphoric attention to network visualizations which are heavily determined by usage and action.

This story from Banni is layered and needs unpacking at many different levels. However, it shall always remain, for me, a catalyst to re-think the focus and framework of our technology discourse, and talk about digitally mediated identities (digital natives or otherwise) in a vocabulary that moves beyond usage, infrastructure and access. It emphasizes, for me, the idea that the gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital -- which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.

Read Nishant's last post here
Link to the picture here

* I am greatly thankful to my friend Rita Kothari at the Indian Institute of Technologies, Gandhinagar, for first introducing me to this context and its peculiar technology ecosystem.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:51:56Z

An analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway? The blog post looks at the physical and symbolic spaces in which narratives of change were conceived and the extent to which information circulating within activates citizen action.

“What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved?” These are the questions with which Nishant Shah opens the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway’, a series of reflections and provocations exploring the future of citizen action and digital technologies in emerging information societies. The project, in collaboration with the HIVOS Knowledge Program, begins a process of unlearning conventional understandings of ‘change’ and redefining it in the light of less visible narratives of political, social and cultural transformation. Three pivots of analysis are at the backbone of this piece. First, it locates change by looking at the historicity and stressing the role of invisible crises that lead to digital activism. Second, it moves on to unpack our definition of change and the language framing activism as system-overhaul practices rather reformative experiments. Third, it looks at the outcomes of change proposing a redefinition of failure that enables us to recognize instances of change outside of what is dubbed ‘successful’ citizen action. All in all, the piece is reflective rather than conclusive and when paired up with contemporary events of political and social change, it serves as a framework to challenge existing paradigms and overlooked narratives.

This was precisely my experience when at the end of August I came across the Paraguayan crucifix protest in the BBC News website: the story of eight bus drivers who led by union leader Juan Villalba, crucified themselves onto wooden crosses to protest against labour exploitation in Asuncion.[1] In spite of its international media coverage, the protest has to this day failed to mobilize digitally fluent Paraguayan and global netizens into joining the ranks[2] of their plea, keeping protesters at the fringes of the online sphere. This is surprising compared to other publicized Paraguayan protests, such as Pro-Ache Tribe campaigns back in 2011[3] and the anti-corruption protests earlier this year,[4] which featured politically active students mobilizing through technology to influence public policy in Paraguay.


				Video of crucifixion protest

Before jumping into deeming the crucifix protest a success or a failure, I would like to refer back to the first axis of analysis in Shah’s work and discuss the history, context and structures in which the intent for change was crafted. I will follow Anat-Ben David´s framework based on her research on the geopolitics of digital spaces, and look at how “hybrid geographical and digital spaces” intertwine with “situated knowledges and practices” in order to localize change (2011). I will first focus on the political and social context of Paraguay and how it framed two online campaigns: the Aché Tribe campaign in 2011 and the anti-corruption campaign in June 2013. Then, I will move on to the symbolic and knowledge context in Paraguay and how it determined the outcome of the offline crucifix protest in August 2013. The objective is to identify the factors that drove the first two issues into the online sphere vis-a-vis those that impeded the latter from making that transition. This will be instrumental to understand what —and what not— activates youth mobilization and citizen action in Paraguay and how their vision of change aligns with their experience in crises.

Political and social context of Paraguay

Landlocked, Catholic and mestizo, Paraguay was under a 30 year oppressive dictatorship that finally came to an end in 1989. Since then, the succeeding thirteen years of democracy have been characterized by citizen upheavals, as younger generations are breaking the silence and conformity of older times (Zavala, 2011). Among the most pressing issues addressed by coup attempts, strikes and protests,[5] corruption remains the standing evil in the Paraguayan political system. Seventy-eight per cent of its citizens perceive the government as ineffective at fighting corruption,[6] and with good reason. Paraguay is ranked as the second most corrupt country in Latin America and 24th in the world, according to Transparency International.[7] The Paraguayan head of Seeds for Democracy, Marta Ferrara commented on corruption being absolute in the public sector due to the legacy of dictatorship, and hence called civil society groups to exert more pressure on the government to fight it.[8] This sentiment is consistent with the loss of faith in democracy in Latin America to which research has attributed the rise of the left and a growing desire for social change (Barret et al, 2008).

Another important contextual question to consider on a par is how relevant are digital technologies in Paraguay to mobilize change. The country has one of the lowest rates of internet penetration in the continent at 27.1 per cent, [9] suggesting that the remaining 70 per cent is comprised of disconnected Guarani voices whose stories remain untold. This is in a country with a 52.4 Gini coefficient, where 40 per cent of citizens live below the poverty line and 56 per cent of the income is controlled by the upper 20 per cent.[10]

Delving deeper into this divide, we can infer that the success behind the digitally enabled protests comes as a result of socioeconomic inequality and an alignment of the interests of this privileged class and the issues behind their actions. Based on this profile, my follow up questions are a) what is the common thread joining the online campaigns that is absent from the crucifix protest and b) how this digital class is defining these priorities.

The anti-corruption discourse
The legacy of the dictatorship and the anti-corruption discourse is a strong response to the first question. While the concept of corruption is severely stigmatized in society, it is also very loosely defined (Harrison, 2006), making it a versatile stimuli for change. Harrison states that in developing countries, the focus remains on the perception of the relationship between the state and those they are meant to be serving (2006), while for Haller and Shore it also refers to money transactions within power relationships that stratify and exclude in any structure (2005). In this way, the concept remains all-encompassing, perception-based and relevant to the democracy crisis in Paraguay. Hence, protesting against it is locally appropriate, and fits in the moral project Sampson dubbed the global anti-corruption industry (2010). He argues that condemning corruption is now a global trend grounded on uncontested ‘good governance´ and integrity values. Its rhetoric has been mainstreamed and infused with a “feel good character” that turns it into an appealing campaign, easy to identify with, simple to embark on and consistently present in the human-rights discourse both in the online and offline sphere.

The anti-corruption protest in June and the Pro-Aché mobilization in 2011 fit this criterion. In the first case, 3000 Paraguayans took to the streets inspired by neighbouring Brazil´s anti-corruption protests[11] to condemn a new retirement law project for parliamentarians that allowed them to retire after only ten years of public service. Framed as an indicator of state inefficiency, the online campaign PorUnParaguayMejor [For a better Paraguay] went viral compelling students to mobilize against the project in Asuncion.[12] The event was reported immediately by international media publicizing Paraguayan youth as revolutionary agents of change.[13]


	Above: "[Parlamentarians] are retiring in 10 years and demanding full pension (100% of their salaries). Paraguay, take the streets and denounce them", (pictured by Global Voices online: http://bit.ly/1aXGzA7)

The second case was also based on state inefficiency experienced by a specific community: the Aché indigenous tribe. The dispute was a consequence of the Ministry of Environment dishonouring an agreement and not granting property titles of the land Finca 470 to the tribe. As a result, a group of young Paraguayans created social media accounts to organize food and clothes drives, mobilize protests, attract further attention from the press and communicate horizontally with government authorities. Due to their extensive lobbying, the authorities acceded to declare the land an indigenous reserve for the Aché, making it another hailed example of successful technology usage by youth (Zavala, 2011).[14]

Above: Members of the Aché tribe take to the streets in Paraguay (photo courtesy Sulekha: http://bit.ly/1aPxeXv).

In both cases, the vaguely defined corruption was at the core of citizens’ claims. In the first one, the general outrage and dutifulness drove citizens into the anti-corruption discourse both on the online and offline spheres. Based on Shah’s conceptualization of the technologies of the state (2013), the issue of corruption was perceived as a threat to the survival of the citizen and its rights, and created a generalized sense of precariousness among the populace. Ergo, they intervened to secure their future and as put by Sampson, to convey the message that they ‘were doing something’ about it regardless of whether that ‘something’ would have a long-term structural impact.

On the other hand, the second online protest had a more altruistic tone. The members of the digitally privileged 30 per cent, in spite of not being directly implicated in the conflict, took the disconnected group’s plea and mobilized support networks on their behalf. Although the Aché did not request this intervention, nor intend to utilize technology during their camped protests, the digital group’s strategy was largely more effective at bringing the issues to the attention of media and the government. The successful mainstreaming of the Aché’s story upon being digitalized questions the extent to which staged protests will remain appropriate in information societies vis-à-vis online campaigning.

These developments show how the anti-corruption discourse not only mobilizes citizens in Paraguay but also their power and resources. Therefore, if corruption is the common thread we are looking for, to what extent is it applicable to other social conflicts? Will good governance values always trump individual pursuits of assurance? In the following section I will return to the crucifix protests in the light of the aforementioned and address non-geographical spaces of knowledge and practices, as recommended by Ben-Davis. This will shed light on this question and on the spectrum of citizen motivations framing how digital actors articulate change.

Knowledge, Symbolisms and Visibility

Yochai Benkler describes our networked society as an economy centered on information, cultural production and the manipulation of symbols (2006). These contain and pertain to different ways of understanding the world. In the optimistic view of Benkler, digital technologies enable these views to circulate freely in our network; amplifying all voices, however, as seen in the case of Paraguay, information is being produced by one sector of society that determines and constrains the visibility of other worldviews; reproducing socioeconomic inequalities in the digital sphere. In this section I will look at how different articulations of the present and the conflict between spaces of knowledge and symbolisms derive into different ways of telling the same story, in the light of the extremely visual crucifix protest.

The protest had a very different impact in the national scene, as opposed to its portrayal in international media. This is because crucifixes had already been staged in the past by people of indigenous descent[15] or union workers[16] to call for the attention of the Paraguayan state. Being a predominantly Catholic country, utilizing the charged image of the crucifixion of Jesus is the equivalent of cultural bandwagoning on its symbols of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Eric Tyler reflecting on activism martyrs in the light of the role Khalid Saed in the Arab Spring, called them “catalysts with a profound amplifying impact when combined with the viral force of technology”.[17] Amy Sample Ward added another lesson from Egypt, noting that you do not need a high penetration rate in order for massive impact to occur, “as long as the community is connected”.[18] If the digital class had taken on the bus drivers case in the same way they supported the Aché, mobilization would have been likely. However, the cause did not resonate with the Paraguayan digital public. This lack of connection did not derive from the digital divide, but instead from the long-standing conflict between the transport sector and the citizens.

There are several points to be made about this case of citizen inaction. First, the citizen-market crisis played a large role in creating apathy around the crucifix protest. Shah states that technologies of the market must “assure us of the future in terms of material resources and infrastructures upon which happiness depend” (2013), which was not being delivered by the CETRAPAM (Transport Companies of the Metropolitan Area) in the eyes of the citizen. The CETRAPAM director is perceived as corrupt and inefficient[19] and earlier that month a transportation strike left 700,000 immobilized.[20] These incidents resulted in a citizen online campaign demanding a reliable and transparent service from the companies[21] having anti-corruption, once again, at the core of their claims.

This background determined how national media reproduced the crucifix protest story. ABC, one of the largest news corporations in the country, covered the story portraying drivers as ‘aichinjaranga’s” (‘poor little thing’ in Guaraní), who were appealing to “wake people up through pity and pressure, not resources.[22] On the other hand, the most popular entry on the topic in Crónicas Ciudadanas (ABC’s citizen journalism forum) reads: “We [Luque citizens] are tired. These drivers waste our time and we are sick of it.”[23] The digital class, having the power and resources to mobilize, chose to remain idle in order to disempower a group that has been causing precariousness in their present and future establishing a hierarchy of citizen priorities. By withdrawing their support, the drivers are now left with offline strategies and conventional protest tools to address their demands with only the support of their immediate community.[24] It is unclear whether this will represent a disadvantage for their ability to create structural change, but it does show that internal citizen crises leads to inequality of strategies and resources for mobilization.

Second, this case also highlights the dark side of Benkler’s argument in favour of citizen information production. He claims that citizen journalism curbs the power away from mass media and hands it over to autonomous citizens who can now exchange information, making them less susceptible to manipulation by the owners of communications infrastructure and media (2006). In the case of Paraguay, this power has been handed over to the digitally fluent who are only putting forward causes aligned with their interests and value scheme.Issues of access and digital inclusion come afloat, as the disconnected status of the crucifix protesters keeps them out of social spaces of debate and political conversation. This deems social status a determining factor between “statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity” (Benkler, 2006) and a serious constraint for the fulfillment of the drivers’ capabilities and freedoms.

Third, the use of symbols is effective depending on the audience, as shown by the narrative of international news corporations. The use of crucifixes came across as an ancient and peculiar tool protest for western media — especially in the digital era— earning them a space in the global public’s interest eighteen days into the protest. As commented by Al Jazeera’s opinion columnist Courtney Martin, in the light of the Tibetan self-immolations in February,[25]“in a world that tends to shine new power [on] online activism only”, other people need to resort to “attention-getting schemes on the hopes of calling attention to issues that remain unresolved”.[26]

The highly visual crucifixes caught the attention of the international media, yet the focus remained on the props instead of the underlying issues around union workers’ rights. This was evident on the picture included by the CNN, showing the workers lined up on their crosses lying next to a coffin claiming that this will become their "final resting place" if their demands were not met;[27] adding to the thriller effect of what is in fact a social justice crisis.


Crucified bus drivers in Paraguay (pictured by CNN International), http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs

In regards to the audience’s response, I would dare to speculate that the absence of the “language of revolution” that surrounds hyped narratives around digital activism (such as the June anti-corruption campaign accounts) played a role in the inactivity from international human-rights activism communities. Being a global audience “engaged with a spectacle of the rise of the citizen” (Shah, 2013), information circulating through mass media is either discarding or othering the less attractive, under-the-radar citizen struggles that do not fit this sale pitch. If a show must be staged in order to attain global attention, it is only natural to wonder if this plot will require a dramatic twist to become viral, one of the key ingredients for effective information dissemination according to Mary Joyce (2010). Having the protesters reach “the end” in order to achieve attention and support, is evidence of some of the morbid criterion steering our motivations for change.

Conclusion

This analysis localized some of the invisible conflicts underpinning action for change in Paraguay. Rather than focusing on a specific cause, such as workers’ rights; through a particular method, say crucifixions; I have looked at the structures framing the understandings around citizen action. It attempted to go beyond the spectacle of digital mobilization and instead look at two spaces: the geopolitical context of Paraguay and the symbolic knowledge framing the development of the crucifix protest in Asuncion, and how the bus drivers envisioned their future before and after the protest.

The Paraguayan political and social imaginary and their understanding of change are infused with the historicity of corruption. As explored in the first section, campaigning against corruption in Paraguay has risen as a convenient check-and-balance, citizen-led strategy to demand transparency and accountability from state and market actors. It fosters values of responsible citizenship and is endorsed by the national and international community. The prevalence of this discourse, even if it worked against the crucifix protest, is an indicator that ‘making change’ is not necessarily understood as a practice of material transformation in Paraguay, but that is has been legitimized at the stage of awareness and political engagement without tying citizens into long-term advocacy efforts.

The actions and reactions around the crucifix protest varied in the online and the offline sphere. In the online realm, the story was orchestrated by the group with access to information and communication technologies. The bus drivers, having remained at the fringes of digital production, had no control whatsoever of how their narrative was shaped by citizen journalists, national or international media. This was reflected in the offline sphere, where the lack of support to the protesters was a result of market-citizen conflicts and the inability of the crucifix symbolisms to speak to an urban population. These factors also show how socioeconomic divides at the political and knowledge levels were digitalized, determining information production, dissemination and reproduction as well as responses to the protesters’ narratives in the long-run.

In conclusion, this analysis has offered a broader view of how change is understood, in terms of the socioeconomic and information constraints in the making of change in Paraguay. Altruistic activism is only possible when the cause being fought for does not jeopardize the interests and assurances of a powerful class who is in control of the resources for online mobilization, in spite of the social justice nature of the claim. Some questions remain unresolved, particularly in regards to how digital activity is overshadowing offline initiatives in a spectacle driven environment. An interesting research avenue relevant to the larger project of ‘Whose Change is it Anyway?’ would be to collect narratives and stories of change that gauge the relevance of offline protests, to understand if they can remain relevant and appropriate in information societies and whether we, as an audience and potential supporters, are only defining change and citizen action in light of its digital possibilities.

[1]. “Sacked Paraguay bus drivers stage crucifixion protest” BBC News Latin America & Caribbean. August 28, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://bbc.in/17n5NSm.

[2]. “Choferes de la linea 30 en huelga” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed September 6^th, 2013, http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3.

[3]. “Indígenas Ache Acampan frente a SEAM y piden transferencia tierras ancestrales” Ultima Hora. March 14th, 2011. Accessed September 18th, http://bit.ly/15aszv5.

[4]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, Caracol Radio Colombia. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn.

[5]. BBC Timeline: Paraguay. Last modified July 3^rd, 2012, http://bbc.in/B6UFV.

[6]. Alexander E.M. Hess and Michael Sauter. “The Most Corrupt Countries in the World”, 24/7: Wall Street: Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. & Global Equity Investors. July 11, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/16jVxrE.

[7]. Corruption Perceptions Index 2012”, http://bit.ly/TBjshd.

[8]. “Paraguay’s Cartes: The man to lead anti-corruption efforts?” Thomson Reuters Foundation, May 3^rd, 2013. Accessed: September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aXTd28.

[9]. "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012", International Telecommunications Union (Geneva), June 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2013/Individuals_Internet_2000-2012.xls.

[10].The World Bank “Poverty Gap at the Poverty Line” Catalogue Sources: World Development Indicators. Accessed September 10, 2013 http://bit.ly/14oMRDI.

[11]. RT Actualidad, “La ola de protestas de Brasil ‘rompe fronteras’ y ya salpica a Paraguay” RT Noticias, June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, http://bit.ly/1aBAqqj.

[12]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, Caracol Radio Colombia. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn.

[13]. Gabriela Galilea “The Brazil Effect: Thousands Protest for a Better Change” Global Voices English June 26, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/15FKwAW.

[14]. For further information on the Pro-Aché online campaign, refer to Maria del Mar Zavala’s essay: Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force.

[15]. Protesters in Paraguay staged a public crucifixion in the past calling for a jailed former army general General Lino Oviedo to be set free. “Paraguay man crucified in public” BBC News November 30, 2006. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bbc.in/1aPI7Zq. Also see "Homeless in Paraguay protest with Crucifixion” Cleveland News. August 6^th, 2009. Accessed September 20, 2013, http://bit.ly/1gGyZHk.

[16]. A bus driver crucified himself for more than 10 hours demanding the recognition of his labor union. “Se crucifico para lograr el reconocimiento sindical” ABC Color, July 6, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1buNKiL.

[17]. Mary Joyce, January 27, 2012 comment on Arab Spring: “The Meta-Activism Community Reflects” Meta-Activism Blog, http://bit.ly/wfXhiW.

[18]. Mary Joyce, comment on Arab Spring.

[19]. 40 companies went on strike demanding further subsidies from the government, paralyzing public transport in Asuncion and leaving almost 700,000 immobilized. As a result, citizens organized a mobilization through Facebook to denounce corruption in the CETRPAM and demand an efficient transportation system, http://bit.ly/15I7Mnl.

[20]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay” Global Voices English. Translated by Victoria Robertson. August 8, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1bdllum.

[21]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay”.

[22]. “Huelguistas quieren despertar lástima según gerente de Línea 30” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3.

[23]. ABC Color “Choferes de la linea 30 en Huelga”.

[24]. “Sindicalistas de Paraguay fueron recibidos por el presidente tras jornadas de protestas” Telesur, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013. http://bit.ly/14kntkF.

[25]. “The 100^th Self-Immolation in Tibet – A case for the world to answer” Central Tibetan Administration, February 14, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/X65jvA.

[26]. Courtney E Martin “Building a slower, longer fire among the digital flares” Al Jazeera English, February 4, 2013. Accessed on August 30, 2013, http://aje.me/X9YNDj.

[27]. Rafael Romo “Fired Paraguayan bus drivers crucify themselves in protest” CNN International. August 31, 2013. Accessed August 31, 2013, http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs.

Sources

Ben-David, Anat “Digital Natives and the return of the local cause” Digital AlterNatives with a Cause – Book One: To Be. (2011) 10 -22.
Barrett, P. S., Chavez, D., & Garavito, C. A. R. The new Latin American left: utopia reborn. Pluto Press, 2008.
Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.
Harrison, Elizabeth. "Unpacking the anti-corruption agenda: dilemmas for anthropologists." Oxford Development Studies 34, no. 1 (2006): 15-29.
Haller, C. & Shore, C. (Eds) Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives London: Pluto Press (2005).
Joyce, Mary C., ed. Digital activism decoded: the new mechanics of change. IDEA, 2010.
Sampson, Steven. "The anti-corruption industry: from movement to institution."Global Crime 11, no. 2 (2010): 261-278.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Zavala, Maria del Mar “Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force” Digital AlterNatives with a Cause- Book Three: To Act (2011) 46-53.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/revealing-protesters-on-the-fringe

Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:54:21Z

This research project, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s history for what has in recent years come to be known as the ‘last mile’ problem. The term itself comes from communication theory, with in turn an ancestry in social anthropology, and concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. Exploring the intersection of government policy, technology intervention and the users' expectations, with a specific focus on Internet Technologies and their space in the good governance protocols in India, the project aims at revisiting the last mile problem as one of cultural practices and political contexts in India.

THE CULTURAL LAST MILE

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

The Argument:

Mapped onto developmental-democratic language since at least Independence, this concept, further mapping concrete benefits with the delivery of the message, has come to define the classic model by which the Indian state attempts to ensure that policy designed for local implementation actually reaches its intended beneficiaries without distortion. The immense link between communication theory and democracy thereby defines not only the Indian state’s historic dependence on technologies of communication – radio, terrestrial and satellite. It goes further, as the technological apparatus – and its variants of the classic ‘broadcast’ model of single sender-multiple receiver – comes to underpin the very definition of democratic development.

One consequence is an evolutionary definition of technology, with the last mile defined as a means of eternal purification of the message, combining content ‘corruption’ with socio-economic corruption, as newer generations of technology tirelessly eliminate distortion in both. This could well be the history of Indian state policy, from radio broadcasts representing the ‘voice of the State’ to the era of e-Governance. Such an authority is somewhat graphically in evidence in recent years in the deployment of ‘neutral’ technology such as computers within e-governance initiatives, which have, when successful , seen computer-illiterate farmers make wide use of ICT services where they ‘do not feel that there is a barrier to their obtaining information’, a ‘tribute to the grassroots staff and their training’, but also to ‘faith in the technology’ (Shaik, Jhamtani and Rao 2004: 9). The attribution of such ‘neutrality’ to modern ‘scientific’ technology has been in evidence from late nineteenth-century still photography to the use of technologies such as ‘First In–First Out (FIFO)’, a way that prevents queue-jumping, biometrics and double screens for users to view typed in matter, including touch screens (Parthasarathy 2005, VIII: 9).

The Research Project

This project assumes that, given the chronic historic failure in bridging the last mile, whether in communication theory or in the standard functioning of development projects (a key component of the relatively new discipline of disaster management) – a failure stemming from difficulties in both naming and accessing intended beneficiaries – it becomes necessary to reinvestigate the model itself, along with its historic failures.

The project is split into three parts:
(1) The conceptual argument: a historical trace of the theoretical origins of the concept ‘Last mile’ (even if not named as such), and key technical locations of its deployment: the telegraph, the ‘film trains’ in the 1920s, the radio (extended to transistorization in the 1960s), and the first experiments with terrestrial and satellite technology.
(2) It will then take three specific examples (perhaps but may be changed),(a) the SITE experiment of the 1970s with specific new field work on the well known Kheda experiment; (b) the Cable Television movements in India in the 1980s, and (c) Experiments with WLL in IIT Chennai in the 1990s.
(3) The concluding section will address locations where the last mile has in fact been bridged successfully, in the review’s estimation, and will inquire into how it came to be functional. It is at this point speculated that it worked mainly because (a) the original model was either tampered with or used contrary to stated intentions, and (b) when it worked, this happened with the connivance of the state. The project will therefore perhaps conclude with the following investigations: that historically significant occasions when alternative definitions were thrown up for the last mile worked mainly because they were dependent on error and accident (rather than seeing these as interruptions or distortions to the signal), and that they functioned more on both peer-to-peer and reverse broadcasting than on the single-sender-multiple-recipients model.

References:

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1990), ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 19 (May): 33–52.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1999), ‘The Judgement: Re-Forming the Public’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 32–33 (April)

N. Meera Shaik, Anita Jhamtani and D.U.M. Rao, ‘Information and Communication Technology in Agricultural Development: A Comparative Analysis of Three Projects from India’, Agricultural Research and Extension Network (AGREN), 2004.

Balaji Parthasarathy et al (ed), ‘Information and Communications Technologies for Development: A Comparative Analysis of Impacts and Costs from India’, Bangalore: International Institute of Information Technology, 2005.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1

Pathways to Higher Education

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

Claudia Soria

Donald Flywell Malanga

Emna Mizouni

Ishan Chakraborty

Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Kelly Foster

Paska Darmawan

Uda Deshpriya

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

References

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

Download the book: Epub and PDF

Contributors

Editors

Publisher

Book and Cover Design

Copyediting

Supported by

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

Sequoia India’s Designathon 2016

URL: http://www.sequoiahack.com/sequoia-design/

September 2015 Bulletin

Highlights

NVDA and eSpeak

Pervasive Technologies

Other (Copyright and Patent)

Wikipedia

Open Data

Free Software

Privacy

Free Speech and Expression

IGF

Cyber Security

Miscellaneous

September 2013 Bulletin

Accessibility

Access to Knowledge and Openness

Access to Knowledge (Copyright and Pervasive Technologies)

Internet Governance

Telecom

Digital Natives

Digital Humanities

Second Maps for Making Change Workshop: Using Geographical Mapping Techniques to Support Struggles for Social Justice in India

Science, Technology and Society International Conference – Some Afterthoughts

Sarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

When algorithms make us not know

Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. Photo by Noopur Raval.

Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping

Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. Photo by author.

Conclusion

Endnotes

References

Sameet Panda - Data Systems in Welfare: Impact of the JAM Trinity on Pension & PDS in Odisha during COVID-19

Report: Download (PDF)

Extract from the Report

Roundtable on India’s Gig-work Economy

Full transcript of the roundtable in English.

Excerpts from the roundtable

Part 1: On continuities between traditional and newer forms of work in cab-driving

Part 2: Regulation of platform companies and platform-work

Part 3: On motivations and perceptions of gig-work

Part 4: On studying the gig-economy in India: how did you recruit, why?

Revisiting Techno-euphoria

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay

Political and social context of Paraguay