We are anonymous, we are legion

Sense and censorship

sunil — 2012-03-21T10:15:15Z

Sunil Abraham examines Google's crusade against censorship in China in wake of the attacks on its servers in this article published in the Indian Express.

Some believe that Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin’s memories as a six-year-old in the former Soviet Union has inspired Google’s crusade against censorship in China. However, as Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of upcoming book The Googlisation of Everything, notes in a recent blog post — this “isn’t a case of Google standing up for free speech....but about Google standing up against the attacks.”

He was referring to the attacks on Google’s servers that originated from China mid-December last year. Anyone running a multi-billion dollar enterprise online would be well attuned to the security threats posed by anarchists, crackers, spammers and phishers on a daily basis. So what made the recent Google attacks so special? According to Google, intellectual property was stolen and two human-right activists accounts were compromised during the attack. So which was the straw that broke the camel’s back — intellectual property or human rights? Google could have spoken out against censorship years ago — after all it still censors search results in more than 20 countries, including India. Although there is no official channel or protocol guiding censorship practices in India, Google is regularly contacted by government officials and continues to delete web content deemed sensitive according to various ethnic, political and religious groups. Human rights activists note that Google offers some token resistance and then usually complies with the state’s demands. Google’s deputy general counsel, Nicole Wong, justifies her cooperation with the authorities citing the Indian way of torching buses during riots. Therefore it is odd that the US government endorses Google’s selective idealism in China. One week after the attacks, Hillary Clinton decided to lecture the world on Internet freedom. Then, Google and the National Security Agency announced a collaboration to deal with future cyber-attacks. This was followed by Google honouring female bloggers in Iran, forcing cyber-ethnographer, Maximilian Forte to wonder on Twitter, “Is it just me, or is Google consistently joining the causes of the US State Department?” How is Google’s move, and recent White House support for a “free web”, to be understood? How is Google’s move consistent with the Obama administration’s goal of protecting US business interests across the globe? Such questions may tell us why Google is picking a fight with China rather than Saudi Arabia or Burma. The recent privacy disaster incited by the release of Google’s new social networking application Buzz became yet another occasion when many began to doubt Google’s high rhetoric about freedom of expression. When Buzz first made the social connections of Gmail users public without their consent, blogger Evgeny Morozov questioned the company’s logic in protecting the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists (ie, when they are happy to tell the rest of the world who those activists are talking to). According to Morozov, Google has only managed to capture 30 per cent of the Chinese search market, and he believes that Google was willing to sacrifice this market for some much need needed positive PR given after a storm of bad press after projects like Buzz and Wave.

It is clear that Google will have to fight such pressures towards greater control of the internet across the globe, China being no great exception. This week, Google and Yahoo have come out strongly in opposition to Australia’s plan to implement a mandatory ISP filter. Sometimes, a particular form of censorship serves a useful and necessary purpose — for example, Google and Microsoft were forced by the Indian Supreme Court in September 2008 to stop serving advertisements for do-it-yourself foetus sex determination kits. Given our daughter deficit, I would not have it any other way. However, in Thailand, such filtering takes the form of overly expansive lèse majesté laws which force ISPs to reveal details of individuals posting content deemed insulting to the monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej — this practice leading to self-censorship and over-moderation on forums and mailing lists in Thailand.

Also, soon as traffic was redirected from Google.cn to Google.com.hk, Google advised its enterprise customers in China to use VPN (virtual private networking), SSH (secure shell) tunneling, or a proxy server to access Google Apps. These are circumvention technologies of choice for many Chinese cyber-activists, says Rebecca McKinnion, founder of Global Voices Online. In her recent congressional submission, she also points out that in China, online defiance has a very different history, perhaps best illustrated by the Mud Grass Horse Internet meme which was an obscene pun on a government media campaign aimed at national unity and harmony. In China, aesthetics rather than technology is the primary tool for subversive political speech. Also like in Burma and Saudi Arabia, offline piracy and pirated satellite television ensures that most citizens are able to access censored content. And the average Chinese netizen cannot tell the difference between Google censoring its own results and the Great Firewall censoring Google. Google’s recent actions has very little real impact on the state of censorship in China.

For original article in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sense-and-censorship

Indians Get Particular about Online Marriage

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T06:48:58Z

The article quotes Nishant Shah's views on online behaviour of people seen elsewhere in the world.

From the overweight and transsexuals to people with HIV and those supposedly afflicted by negative planetary positions, the Internet dating game in India increasingly has a website for everyone.

And with Valentine's Day on Sunday, the specialist sites are seeing a rise in hits.

"There's always an increase in activity around this time of year," said Megha Singhal, who with her sister runs a portal for larger lonely hearts -- www.overweightshaadi.com.

"Valentine's Day is still a big deal here. Everyone wants a date," the 21-year-old economics student told AFP from New Delhi.

Marriage -- or "shaadi" in Hindi -- remains a cornerstone of society in conservative India, with hundreds of matchmaking sites concentrating on finding their members suitable life partners rather than casual dates.

Long-established portals like www.shaadi.com, www.bharatmatrimony.com and www.jeevansathi.com offer general searches. Would-be brides and grooms can be selected by age, caste, religion, language or where they live.

But Singhal and others say that niche matrimonial sites can often be more effective.

Yazdi Tantra, a computer consultant in Mumbai, runs www.theparsimatch.com, one of a number of websites for the dwindling community of followers of the ancient Zoroastrian faith.

"Essentially, Parsis like to marry within the community. It saves time rather than trawling through other multicultural sites to get a profile," he said.

Sanjeev Pahwa, head of the New Delhi-based firm Strikeone Advertising, said targeting niche groups made business sense as he realised smaller start-ups like his couldn't compete with the major players.

The result was www.bposhaadi.com, for call centre workers working unsociable hours, and www.govtshaadi.com, targeting state sector employees looking for love.

Another came about from the belief in Indian astrology that a Manglik -- a person born when Mars was in an inauspicious position in the skies -- is a bad match for marriage but that two Mangliks can cancel out its negative effects.

Now, www.manglikshaadi.com has more than 14,000 members, he said.

Since starting five years ago, Pahwa has introduced more sites, including for people with disabilities and the over 30s, who have preferred to further their careers before getting married.

Elsewhere, there are sites for hijras -- transsexuals and transvestites commonly known in India as eunuchs -- people with HIV and those who shun the officially banned, but still widely practised, dowry system.

Satya Naresh, who set up www.idontwantdowry.com, said the site is helping to break down traditional attitudes and a practice that can place an intolerable financial strain on families.

"We've been very successful in changing the mindset of people and hope it continues," he said from the southern city of Hyderabad.

For these Internet entrepreneurs, web access in India -- although still small at about 14 percent for broadband connections -- is good news for those looking for love.

"The Internet does make the access to a pool of suitable people much easier than matrimony in other times," said Singhal.

Nishant Shah, director of research at the Centre for Internet and Society, based in the IT hub of Bangalore, said the phenomenon reflected online behaviour already seen elsewhere in the world.

"As more and more people are going online they're going to replicate tight and personalised communities which are very local and bound by existing structures at the same time as trying to look more globally," he explained.

"The matrimonial sites are fairly indicative of that. We find people not going on to general websites but very narrow ones.

"It's not just matrimonial sites. Facebook, for example, looks like a very large community of users but when you look at friend networks you realise people connect in small and specialist networks.

"It reflects the old idea of 'birds of a feather stick together'."

For link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indians-online-marriage

Community Informatics: Successfully Applying Information and Communications Technologies as a Support to Local Economic and Social Development

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:13:17Z

Dr. Gurstein will present a talk on the current state of development in Community Informatics and facilitate a broader discussion on community based ICTs for local development and community empowerment as are currently applied in India and worldwide.

Community Informatics (CI), also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging field of investigation concerned with principles and practices related to information and communication technology (ICT) as it applies to enabling or empowering communities or groups. It draws on insights on community development from social sciences disciplines and applies these in the areas of Information Studies and Information Systems. It is a cross- or interdisciplinary approach interested in the utilization of ICTs for different forms of community action, as distinct from pure academic study or research about ICT effects.

Community Informatics is very closely linked to broader strategies for ICT for Development that is the use of information and communications technologies as a support to economic and social development among and within less developed countries, regions and marginalized populations.

Dr. Gurstein will give a brief introduction to the current state of development in Community Informatics and facilitate a broader discussion on community based ICTs for local development and community empowerment as they are currently being applied in India and internationally.

The Speaker

Dr. Gurstein is currently Executive Director of the Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (CCIRDT) in Vancouver, Canada; Research Professor in the School of Management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark); Research Professor in the Faculty of Management at the University of Quebec (Ouatouais); and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. The CCIRDT has an affiliated organization based in Cape Town, South Africa, and Memorandums of Agreement with Izandla Zethu (Pretoria, SA) and currently being finalized with the the Bangladesh Institute of ICT in Development (BIID) and with IT for Change (IT4C) an NGO based in Bangalore, India.

He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Community Informatics and Foundation Chair of the Community Informatics Research Network. He currently has a continuing Advisory relationship with the (Canadian) Northern Indigenous Communities Satellite Network in the creation of its Research Consortium and is an Advisor to the EU funded N4C project looking at telecommunications services for underserved and indigenous people in Northern and Central Europe. He has consulted to the governments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Nepal and Jordan; to the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the UN Development Program, and the European Union; and to Nortel, Mitel, Bell Canada, and Intel among others.

Date and Time

February 25th, 2010, 05.00 pm to 07.00 pm.

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 71

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/community-informatics-information

De facebook

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:41:13Z

Facebook used to be our playground but privacy concerns are now souring that fantasy. Why do we trust a clutch of new corporations with such phenomenal amounts of personal data?

The age of privacy is over, Facebook’s fresh-faced founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared a couple of months back. Social norms have shifted. We are now used to living out loud. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’” he said.

That paranoid past is behind us, claimed Zuckerberg, justifying Facebook’s controversial new decision to fling open the curtains and make maximum visibility the new normal. “In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and (there are) just all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.

In other words, get over the stage fright. Everyone else is out there over-sharing, arguing, preening, and generally acting out online.

In June last year, Facebook sneaked in a feature called the Everyone update. This makes it much like Twitter, and also allows it to share with and sell information to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. “Facebook’s privacy changes are relevant as it tries to compete with real-time search on platforms like Twitter. It does give you an option to work around that though I am certain the whole process of setting privacy preferences could be a lot more intuitive,” says Sidharth Rao, digital industry watcher and CEO of internet marketing firm Webchutney.

On the surface, the new Facebook settings are better and much more malleable, if you can figure out how to work them — you can now choose, per post, what you want different sets of people to see. They have eliminated regional networks which would unwittingly expose you to an entire city sometimes (meaning that not everyone who is on the Delhi network, say, has automatic access to your information if you are in Delhi). But on the other hand, the default setting that Facebook recommends is deeply problematic. You, your profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of are all “publicly available information”. Earlier, you could make sure only your friends saw the rest of your friends — now, that option no longer exists as a setting.

Wasn’t privacy once a Facebook fundamental? Unlike the seedier environments of Orkut or Myspace, Facebook grew out of a small Harvard community, expanded to cover other East Coast schools, then conquered companies and countries. In September 2006, Facebook opened registration to anyone with an email address. But it was extremely cautious about how it engineered interaction. In essence, you were meant to socialise with people you already knew.

“It felt safer. It wasn’t about random people sending you scraps and stalking you, like on Orkut or whatever. Facebook reflected my real world. It kept you loosely, comfortably connected to so many people”, says Nomita Sawhney, a young Delhi-based architect. Unlike the threat of cyberstalking, intimidation, and impersonation that stalk less selective networks, Facebook remained clear of what media scholar Danah Boyd calls ‘stranger danger’. Only two years back, Zuckerberg told tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick that privacy “is the vector around which Facebook operates”.

I Like To Watch

Why are these changes such a big deal? Zuckerberg’s claim about privacy rings true for most unself-conscious Facebookers. After all, only recently, bra colour status updates were the big buzz on Facebook, ostensibly in support of breast cancer awareness. Now, it’s doppelganger week, where you tell the world what celebrity you most resemble. You can take dippy quizzes, remember birthdays, discuss the news, giggle over pictures. Grim warnings about corporate avarice and government spying sound faintly ridiculous in this pleasant context.

Social networks and blogs have certainly reconfigured privacy. Anyone who’s spent time on Facebook knows the impulse to meander through the pages and pictures of people in that amorphous category called ‘friends of friends’. In just a few years, we have got used to the thought that our lives are externalised and sprawled out for near-strangers to see.

In fact, Facebook is now the largest photo site in the world. When you join Facebook, under its Terms of Service, you give it a “license” (that is, legal permission) to use your content “on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” It takes some effort to realise how recent all this is, that it’s still a great unfolding experiment, and that we are granting these companies fabulous power.
In his recent book, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki describes the digital glasshouse: “Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos — posted online — of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining.”

Web 2.0 was the clunky name for a whole range of liberating personal expression platforms — from Flickr and Youtube to Livejournal and Facebook. These companies provide the space and you bring the party. They encourage you to feel right at home and treat these platforms like your lounge, confessional or salon. Meanwhile, they also collect and refine data about you, and often wield it without your awareness.
In its over-eagerness, Facebook has blundered into several privacy minefields before this—when it first introduced Newsfeed, pushing a steady stream of your friends’ status updates at you, it embarrassed and annoyed many. Boyd compared it to the experience of shouting to be heard at a party, when the music abruptly stops and everyone else can suddenly hear your careless small talk. Of course, it turns out Zuckerberg was right when he told users to “calm down and breathe”, and Newsfeed has been naturalised into the Facebook experience. Another, more scarring experience was Beacon — its attempt to track what users in the US bought on partner sites — and tell on them to their friends. After an avalanche of protests, Facebook backed down and modified the ad platform. It even employs a chief privacy officer to address our fears.

In the early days, Facebook generated awkwardness because it didn’t respect context — the fact that you wear and cast off selves depending on who you’re interacting with, your crazy roommate or your conservative grand-aunt who decided to befriend you online. “It is the problem that arises when worlds collide, when norms get caught in the crossfire between communities, when walls that separate social situations come crashing down,” writes Chris Peterson of the University of Massachusetts, who has studied Facebook’s privacy architecture.

But now you can tweak settings and set up differential access. People have figured out how to work Facebook and not get burnt. “Profile pictures flatter, tagged pictures shatter,” says Priya Singh, a twenty-something law student, with a laugh. “You never know what someone’s going to put up and who’s going to see what. I don’t want everyone to see drunken party pictures, and so I’ve just learnt to place family on a new level of privacy settings.” And that’s the general pattern on Facebook: most people have learnt to adjust to the public glare, after some initial blinking and bemusement.

Privacy from Whom?

You can segment your social world as minutely as you like, but that doesn’t mean your life is any more private. It’s not just the fact that potential employers can scan and dismiss you, or current employers keep tabs — though such stories abound. For instance, MIT’s Gaydar research project discovered that you can identify a person’s sexual preferences by studying who their friends are on Facebook, even if they have avoided sharing that information in their profile.

But perhaps we have been gulled into thinking that the whole privacy fuss is about each other. “It’s very clever of Facebook to foreground this aspect of control. Your other friends, pictures, the games you play — that’s something we regularly give out anyway”, says Nishant Shah, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “But Facebook is not a single entity — it is a collection of third party apps (applications) that we have no control over. A simple birthday calendar can harvest all your data, all your online traces and you grant it access without knowing it,” he says. So Facebook makes a big show of protecting you from your acquaintances, even as it sells your information continuously.

This becomes a much bigger possibility when it comes to search engine integration, which allows the open flow on Facebook to be harnessed for perfect reach and recall.

To get a clearer sense of what’s at stake with these influential corporations, take a more powerful example: Google.com. Every day, we confide our trivial confusions, our deep doubts to one willing ear. And these billions of broken questions can add up to an eerily accurate picture of the world. But do you search Google or does Google search you? “Google can track you across applications: email, search, blogs, pictures and books read. That means they can profile you in a very detailed, exhaustive way, and they do,’ says Rahul Matthan. “They never delete information, and they’re getting progressively more intelligent about you, as they make search more relevant with features like Google Suggest.” As technology scholar Siva Vaidyanathan puts it, “we have to realise that we are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We are what Google sells to advertisers.” These behaviourially targeted ads are the most perfect, evolved form of advertising so far and in concept, the least annoying, because they are customised to you. Google has promised that its information is utterly secure and that search logs are anonymised after a certain period.

It provides limited disclosure of outside ads, lets users manage the categories that Google has assigned to them and tinker with it for a more accurate picture and also provides an opt-out option. But Search 2.0 is a scary beast — it can also facilitate social control and surveillance. Your online activities are not scattered across applications any more, Google can hear what you tell Facebook.

While selling us stuff more efficiently is probably a good thing, what happens when this intimate knowledge shades into active surveillance? Even if we live in countries where rights are respected, “we give out enough personal information in an innocuous way to a single repository. They are sitting on top of a very valuable resource, and all this information can easily be reverse-engineered to reveal specifics about you,” says Rahul Matthan, technology lawyer and founder-partner of Trilegal.

In India, we are even more oblivious to such stealthy watching. “Privacy concerns here are lesser than in the West, where they’re so dependent on digital ID. There, if someone impersonates you or overdraws credit limits, it could affect your house, your job,” says Matthan.

Privacy legislation doesn’t really exist in India — the right to keep personal information confidential has only been articulated as protection against state action. “There’s no easy legal recourse to being thoroughly spied on by a company,” says Matthan (Europe has enforced data protection directives since 1984 — you can control what information is gathered about you, and how it is used. While the US has somewhat diluted laws, personal information is still strongly guarded). While it’s tempting to think that you have nothing to hide, you are acceding to a set-up where outliers can be identified and dealt with. Privacy matters, no matter how unexceptionable your own life. So what’s to be done? “Holding Facebook and other companies to account is crucial. We must set up legislations by which people can look back, ask exactly what about their activity is being tracked. They have to treat consumers as peers,” says Shah. “If Facebook can gaze at us, we must be given the right to gaze back at its functioning — it has to be a peer-to-peer relationship.”

So far, Facebook and the Googleverse and Twitter are still our friends and enablers. But as they amass more and more power, it is better to see them as fallible companies rather than confidantes, and to make sure that they account for our information.

For original article on the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/de-facebook

Report on the Fourth Internet Governance Forum for Commonwealth IGF

pranesh — 2012-02-29T05:42:27Z

This report by Pranesh Prakash reflects on the question of how useful the IGF is in the light of meetings on the themes of intellectual property, freedom of speech and privacy.

The first Internet Governance Forum was held in Athens in 2006, as a follow on to the 2005 Tunis World Summit on the Information Society, and to fulfil the principles drawn up at there. Its explicit objective is to “promote and assess, on an ongoing basis the embodiment of WSIS principles in Internet governance processes”. Those principles still form the basis of the talks that happen at the IGF, and are frequently referred to by the various groups that attend the IGF as the basis for their positions and claims. Sometimes, some of the values promoted by the principles are claimed by opposing groups (child safety vs. freedom of expression). Thus, in a way the negotiation of those principles were what really set the tone for the IGF, which in and of itself is a process by which those principles could be furthered. The one question that formed part of people’s conversations through the fourth Internet Governance Forum (IGF) at Sharm el Sheik, as it had in third IGF at Hyderabad, and no doubt ever since the first edition, was “How
useful is the IGF?” This report shall reflect on that question, particularly based on the workshops and meetings that happened around the themes of intellectual property, freedom of speech, and privacy.

There are not many meetings of the nature of the IGF. It is not a governmental meeting, though it is sponsored by the United Nations. It is not a meeting of civil society groups, nor of academics nor industry. It is a bit like the Internet: large and unwieldy, allowing for participation of all while privileging those with certain advantages (rich, English-speaking), and a place where a variety of interests (government, civil society, academia and industry) clash, and where no one really has the final word. While the transformational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web have been felt by a great many, the potential of the Internet Governance Forum is still to be felt. This report, in part, seeks to present an apology of the IGF process, though it is the belief of this reporter that it could do with a few modifications.

DAY 0 (Saturday, November 14, 2009)

This reporter arrived with his colleagues at Sharm el Sheik late in the afternoon on Saturday, November 14, 2009, with the IGF set to begin the next day. Though we had been advised to register that evening itself, the fatigue of travel (in the case of my colleagues) and the requirement of purchasing new clothes to replace those in the suitcase that had been lost (in my case) kept us from doing so.

DAY 0 (Sunday, November 15, 2009)

The IGF began on Sunday, November 15, 2009, with a large delay. The registration desks seemed to have a bit of difficulty handling the number of people who were pouring in for registration that morning. By the time this reporter was done with registration, the first set of workshops were already under way, and nearing completion, leaving not much time before the commencement of Workshop 361 (Open Standards: A Rights-Based Framework), which was being organized by this reporter.

That workshop had as speakers Sir Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Renu Budhiraja (Department of IT, Government of India), Steve Mutkoski (Microsoft), Rishab Ghosh (UNU-MERIT), and Sunil Abraham (Centre for Internet and Society), with Aslam Raffee (Sun Microsystems, formerly with the Government of South Africa) chairing the session thus representing government, industry, civil society, and academia. The theme of the workshop (rights-based framework for open standards) was explored in greatest depth by Tim Berners-Lee, Sunil Abraham, and Rishab Ghosh, while Renu Budhiraja and Steve Mutkoski decided to explore the fault-lines, and the practicalities of ensuring open standards (as well as the interoperability, e-governance, and other promises of open standards). Rishab Ghosh pointed out that while a government could not make it a requirement that your car be a Ford to be granted access to the parking lot of the municipality, it often made such arbitrary requirements when it came to software and electronic access to the government.

Open standards, most of the panellists agreed, had to be royalty-free, and built openly with free participation by anyone who wished to. This model, Sir Tim pointed out, was what made the World Wide Web the success that it is today. This would ensure that different software manufacturers could ensure interoperability which would encourage competition amongst them; that all governments -- even the less developed ones -- would have equal access to digital infrastructure; that citizen-government and intragovernment interaction would be made much more equitable and efficient; and that present-day electronic information would be future-proofed and safeguard against software obsolescence.

Renu Budhiraja in a very useful and practically-grounded presentation pointed out some of the difficulties that governments faced when deciding upon definitions of “open standards”, as well as the limited conditions under which governments may justify using proprietary standards. She spoke of the importance of governments not following the path laid out by market forces, but rather working to lead the market in the direction of openness. Governments, she reminded the audience, are amongst the foremost consumers of software and standards, and have to safeguard the interests of their citizens while making such decisions. Steve Mutkoski challenged the audience to not only think about the importance of open standards, but also think of the role it plays in ensuring efficient e-governance. Standards, he contended, are but one part of e-governance, and that often the reason that e-governance models fail are not because of standards but because of other organizational practices and policies. Pointing to academic studies, he showed that open standards by themselves were not sufficient to ensure

Sunil Abraham pointed out examples of citizens’ rights being affected by lack of open standards, and pointed out the concerns made public by ‘right to information’ activists in India on the need they perceived for open standards. He also pointed out an example from South Africa where citizens wishing to make full use of the Election Commission’s website were required to use a particular browser, since it was made with non-standard proprietary elements that only company’s browser could understand. Since that browser was not a cross-platform browser like Firefox, users also had to use a particular operating system to interact with the government. The session ended with a healthy interaction with the audience.

The importance of having this discussion at the IGF was underscored by Rishab Ghosh who noted that issues of defining and choosing technical standards are often left to technical experts, while they have ramifications much further than that field. That, he opined, is the reason that discussing open standards at a forum like the IGF is important. A more complete report of this workshop may be found at <http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/dcos-workshop-09>.

Post the workshop was the opening ceremony which had Mr. Sha Zukang, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, Tarek Kamel, the Egyptian Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Ahmed Nazif, the Prime Minister of Egypt, Tim Berners-Lee, and Jerry Yang. The theme of this year’s IGF was the rather unwieldy “access, diversity, openness, security, and critical Internet resources”. The spread of the Internet, as noted by Sha Zukang, is also quite revealing: In 2005, more than 50% of the people in developed regions were using the Internet, compared to 9% in developing regions, and only 1% in least developed countries. By the year 2009, the number of people connecting in developing countries had expanded by an impressive 475 million to 17.5%, and by 4 million in LDCs to 1.5%, while Internet penetration in developed regions increased to 64%. All in all (Jerry Yang pointed out), around 1.6 billion people, or about 25 per cent of the world, is online. Mr. Kamel noted that “the IGF has
proved only over four years that it is not just another isolated parallel process but it has rather managed to bring on board all the relevant stakeholders and key players”.

Of importance in many of the speeches were the accountability structures of the Internet due to the Affirmation of Commitment that the U.S. Department of Commerce signed with ICANN, and the growing internationalisation of the World Wide Web due to ICANN’s decision to allow for domain names in multiple languages. Tim Berners-Lee again pointed out the need to keep the Web universal, and in particular highlighted the role that royalty-free open standards play in building the foundations of the World Wide Web. Other than small remarks, privacy and freedom of expression did not really figure greatly in the opening ceremony. Jerry Yang, through his talk of the Global Net Initiative, was the one who most forcefully pointed out the need for both online. The Prime Minister of Egypt, in passing, pointed out the need to safeguard intellectual property rights online, but that note was (in a sense) countered by Sir Tim’s warning about the limiting effect of strong intellectual property would have on the very foundations of the World Wide Web and the Internet.

DAY 2 (Monday, November 16, 2009)

On the second day was begun by attending the Commonwealth IGF Open Forum. This open forum was most enlightening as in it one truly got to see Southern perspectives on display. Speakers (both on the dais as well as from the audience) were truly representative of the diversity of the Commonwealth, which presently includes 54 states and around 2.1 billion people (including 1.1 billion from India). Issues of concern included things such as the lack of voice of whole regions like East and West Africa in the international IG policy-making arena. Some of the participants noted that issues such as music piracy, which is a favourite topic of conversation in the West, is of no relevance to most in Africa where the pressing copyright- related issues those of education, translation rights, etc. One participant noted that “Intellectual property issues need developing countries to speak in one voice at international fora; the Commonwealth IGF might allow that.”

A number of people also brought up the issue of youth, and pointing towards children as both the present and the future of the Internet. This attitude also showed up in the session that was held later that day at Workshop 277 (IGF: Activating and Listening to the Voice of Tweens) in which not only were youth and IG issues discussed, but the discussion was also by youth. The formation of the new Dynamic Coalition on Youth and Internet Governance with Rafik Dammak as the coordinator also underlines the importance of this issue which came up at the CIGF open forum.

Other concerns were that of sharing ICT best practices and examples, and the need to urgently bridge the rural-urban divide that information and communication technologies often highlight, and sometimes end up precipitating. This divide is, in many ways, similar to the divide between developing and developed nations, and this point was also highlighted by many of the participants. One strength that the CIGF has as a platform, which the IGF possibly lacks, is the commonality of the legal systems of most of the Commonwealth countries, and hence the possibility that arises of joint policy-making. It was heartening to see that British Parliamentarians, apart from bureaucrats from many countries, were in attendance. This strong focus on developing countries and Southern perspective is, this reporter believes, one of the strengths of the CIGF, which needs to be pushed into the global IGF.

The next workshop attended was Workshop 92: A Legal Survey of Internet Censorship and Filtering, which was organized by UNESCO. A large number of very interesting people presented here, and panellists included IFLA/Bibliotheca Alexandrina (whose Sohair Washtawi was surprisingly critical of the Egyptian government), UNESCO (Mogens Schmidt), Freedom House (Robert Guerra), and Frank La Rue, U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression. What came of this workshop was the need to engage with to study the online state of freedom of expression as fully as “offline” state of press freedoms are studied, as an interesting fact that came out of this workshop was that there are currently more online journalists behind bars around the world than traditional journalists. A critique of the Freedom House’s online freedom report, which was not sufficiently voiced at the workshop itself, is that it represents a very Western, state-centric idea of freedom of speech and expression, and often looks at the more direct forms of censorship (state censorship) rather than private censorship (via advertising revenue, copyright law, and “manufactured consent”) and self-censorship. This reporter also intervened from the audience to point out that copyright is often a way of curbing freedom of speech (as was the case with the newspaper scholarly reprints of Nazi-era newspapers in Germany recently, or with the Church of Scientology wishing
to silence its critics). The panellists, including Mogens Schmidt and Frank La Rue agreed, and responded by noting that this dimension of copyright requires greater reflection by those groups involved in promoting and safeguarding freedom of speech and expression both online and offline.

The time before the meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards was spent listening to Bruce Schneier, Marc Rotenberg, Frank La Rue, Namita Malhotra, and others at the Openness, Security and Privacy Session. Bruce Schneier, one of the most astute and insightful thinkers on issues of security and privacy, focussed on a topic that anyone who reads his blog/newsletters would be familiar with: that openness, security and privacy are not really, contrary to popular perception, values that are inimical to each other. Mr. Schneier instead sees them as values that complement each other, and argued that one cannot ensure security by invading privacy of citizens and users. He noted that “privacy, security, liberty, these aren’t salient. And usually whenever you have these sort of non-salient features, the way you get them in society is through legislation.” On the same note, he held the view that privacy should not be a saleable commodity, but an inalienable fundamental right of all human beings (a position that Frank La Rue agreed with).

Apart from the traditional focus area of states, there was also a lot of focus on corporations and their accountability to their users. On the issue of corporations versus states, Frank La Rue made it clear that he believed the model that some corporations were advocating of first introducing technologies into particular markets, expanding, and then using that to push for human rights, was not a viable model. Human rights, he reiterated, were not alienable, and stated: “You [internet companies] strengthen democracy and democratic principles and then you bring up the technology. Otherwise, it will never work, and it is a self defeating point.”

The meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards was next. This meeting served as a ground to build a formal declaration from Sharm el Sheik for DCOS. The meeting was held in the room Luxor, the seating in which was rectangular, promoting a vibrant discussion rather than making some people “presenters” and the rest “audience”. Many of the members of the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability were in attendance, seeing common purpose with the work carried out by DCOS. There was spirited discussion on how best to move from a formulation of open standards as “principles” to more citizen- centric “rights”. This shift, pointed out as an important one because they allow for claims to be made in a way that principles and concessions do not. One of the participants helped re-draft the entire statement, based on suggestions that came from him and the rest of the participants. This was, in a sense, the IGF’s multi-stakeholderism (to coin a phrase) at its best.

Because of the late ending to the DCOS meeting, this reporter arrived late for the Commonwealth IGF follow-up meeting. It seemed that the meeting took its time in finding its raison d’être. It was, for a long while, unclear what direction the meeting was headed in because the suggestions from the audience members were of different types: programmatic actionable items, general thematic focus area suggestions, as well as general wishlists. However, in the end, this came together and became productive thanks to the focus that the chairperson and the rapporteur brought to the discussion. Furthermore, it was a great opportunity to connect with the various young people who had been brought together from various backgrounds to attend the IGF by the CIGF travel bursary. It will be interesting to see the shape that CIGF’s future work takes.

Day 3 (Tuesday, November 17, 2009)

The first session attended on the third day was the meeting on “Balancing the Need of Security with the Concerns for Civil Liberties”. The speakers included Alejandro Pisanty (Workshop Chair), Wolfgang Benedek, Steve Purser, Simon Davies, and Bruce Schneier. Once again, the one point that everyone agreed on is that those pitting security against privacy are creating a false dichotomy, and that for security to exist, privacy must be safeguarded. Steve Purser pointed out that common sense takes a long while to develop and that we, as a human collective, have not yet developed “electronic common sense”. Simon Davies’ main point was that accountability must necessarily be appended to all breaches of privacy in the name of security. Indeed, he lamented that oftentimes the situation is such that people have to justify their invocation of privacy, though the state’s invocation of security to trample privacy does not require any such justification. Security, he pointed out, is not something that is justified by the government, judged by the people, and to which the government is held accountable for its breaches of civil liberties.

Bruce Schneier, as usual, was quite brunt about things. He noted that only identity-based security have anything to do with privacy, and that there are a great many ways of ensuring security (metal detectors in a building, locks in a hotel room) that do not affect privacy. At the meeting, this reporter made a comment noting that a lot of debate is happening at a theoretical level, and that while a lot of good ideas are coming out of that discussion, those ideas have to be translated into good systems of governance in countries like India. Some organizations internationally are trying to make human readable privacy signs such as the human readable copyright licences used by Creative Commons. Concerning citizens’ privacy, a lot of systems (such as key escrow) that have been discredited by knowledgeable people (such as Bruce Schneier) are still being considered or adopted by many countries such as India (where this blew up because of a perceived security threat due to RIM BlackBerry’s encryption). National ID schemes are also being considered in many countries, without their privacy implications being explored. In the name of combatting terrorism, unregistered open wireless networks are being made illegal in India. While there have been informed debates on these issues at places like the IGF, these debates need to find actual recognition in the governance systems. That translation is very important.

The next session this reporter attended was the meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Freedom of Expression of the Media on the Internet. Amongst the other items of discussion during the session, the site Global Voices Online was showcased, and many of the speakers gave their opinions on whether freedom of speech online required a new formulation of the rights, or just new applications of existing rights. The consensus seemed to be that tying up with the Internet Rights and Principles DC would be useful, but that the project need not be one of reformulation of existing rights, since the existing formulations (as found in a variety of international treaties, including the UDHR) were sufficient. One of the participants stressed though that it was important to extend freedom of press guarantees to online journalists (in matters such as defamation, or copyright violation, where news organizations might be granted protection over and above that which an ordinary citizen would receive). Citizen-led initiatives for circumventing censorship were also discussed.

Two very important points were raised during the Openness main session on Day 2 when someone noted that the freedom of expression was not only an individual right but it also a collective right: the right of peoples to express not only ideas but to express their cultures, their traditions, their language and to reproduce those cultures and languages and traditions without any limitation or censorship. This aspect of the freedom of expression finds much resonance in many Southern countries where collective and cultural rights are regarded as being as important as individual and civil-political rights. Secondly, Frank La Rue pointed out that freedom of speech and expression went beyond just giving out information and opinion: it extended to the right to receive information and opinion. Excessively harsh copyright regimes harm this delicate balance, and impinge on the free speech.

One of the issues that was not explored sufficiently was that of the changes wrought by the Internet on the issues raised by the participants. For instance, while there was much talk about defamation laws in many countries and their grave faults (criminal penalties, defamation of ideas and not just persons), there was no talk of issues such as forum-shopping that arises due to online defamation being viewable around the world with equal ease. Thankfully, the coordinators of the Dynamic Coalition urged people to register on the DC’s Ning site (http://dcexpression.ning.com) and keep the conversation alive there and on the DC’s mailing list.

The session held on Research on Access to Knowledge and Development, organized by the A2K Global Academy was most informative. It brought together many recent surveys of copyright law systems from around the world and their provisions for access to knowledge, including the Africa Copyright and Access to Knowledge project with which this reporter is very familiar. The three main focus areas of discussion were Access to Education (A2E), Open Source Software (OSS) and Access to Medicines (A2M). The best presentation of the day was that made by Carlos Affonso of FGV (Brazil) who made an impassioned case for access to knowledge in the developing world, showcasing many practical examples from Brazil. He noted that many of the examples he was showing were plainly illegal under Brazilian laws, which had very limiting limitations and exceptions. He showcased the usage of Creative Commons licensing, Technobrega music, usage of common ICT infrastructure (such as cybercafes), which are often only semi-legal, and the general acceptance of commons-based peer production. The conclusion of the Egyptian study was that more work is needed to expand access to educational materials, including expansion of the limitations and
exceptions to copyright law for educational purposes. The overall consensus of all the various studies was that open source software was playing a very useful and crucial role in promotion of access to knowledge, but pointed out that the main barrier that open source software was facing was that of anti-competitive practices and not something related to copyright law.

Day 4 (Wednesday, November 18, 2009)

On the last day, this reporter was a presenter in a workshop on the “Global State of Copyright and Access to Knowledge”. This session had the following panellists: Tobias Schonwetter, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town; Bassem Awad, Chief Judge at the Egyptian Ministry of Justice and IP Expert; Perihan Abou Zeid, Faculty of Legal Studies and International Relations, Pharos University; Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet and Society; Jeremy Malcolm, Project Coordinator, Consumers International; and Lea Shaver, Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.

This workshop was the result of the merger of workshops proposed by the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge project, and by Consumers International (to showcase their IP Watch List). Lea Shaver noted that the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creativity and the diffusion of creative works, and not as an industrial subsidy. If copyright law gets in the way of creativity and access to knowledge, then it is in fact going against its purpose. She asserted that copyright law should be assessed by touchstones of access, affordability and participation. “Copyright shapes affordability and access because as the scope of rights expands, the more control is centralised and the less competition. It also shapes participation, because under current law the amateur who wants to build upon existing works is at a disadvantage, and risks running afoul of others’ rights.” Rent-seeking behaviour is what is driving the expansion that we see globally in the coverage of copyright law, and not the costs of production and distribution (which are ever becoming cheaper).

Dr. Abou Zeid noted that technology grants copyright holders (and even non-holders) great control over knowledge, and that strong safeguards are required against this control in the form of limitations to technological protection methods (TPMs). Further, copyright law must take advantage of the benefits offered by technology, such as distance education, granting access to the disabled, and must extend present day E&L to cover these as well. Tobias Schonwetter presented the findings of the ACA2K project, and noted that most countries granted greater protection to rights holders than international law required. Amongst the survey countries, none dealt with distance and e-learning, and only one (Uganda) dealt with the needs of the disabled. He hoped that the extended dissemination phase would assist other projects to build on ACA2K’s work. Thus, “legal systems worldwide are not meeting consumers’ needs for access to knowledge. A better legal system, the research suggests, would support non-commercial sharing and reuse of material, which in turn would drive down costs and increase sales of licensed material, and could also increase consumers’ respect for the law overall.”

The present reporter started by asking why this abstract phrase “access to knowledge” is so important. A2K actually effects almost all areas of concern to citizens and consumers: education, industry, food security, health, amongst many more areas. Mark Getty notes that “IP is the oil of the 21st century”. By creating barriers through IP, there is less scope for expansion and utilization of knowledge, and this most affect “IP poor” nations of the South. In India, there is a new copyright amendment that will introduce DRMs, even though India is not bound by international law to do so. There is also a very worrisome movement to pass state-level criminal statutes that class video pirates in the same category as “slum lords, drug peddlers and goonda”, which includes measures for preventative detention without warrant.

One tool to help change the mindsets of the public is the Consumers International IP Watch List, which can help policy makers and academics and advocates compare the best and worst practices of various countries. At an earlier session, Carlos Affonso of FGV had used the Watch List to demonstrate the weakness of Brazil’s copyright law on the educational front. Copyright is often characterised as a striking of balance between the interests of creators and consumers, but this rhetoric might be misplaced. In fact creators often benefit from freer sharing by users. Knowledge is an input into creation of works, not just an output from it. Given this, it is important to counter IP expansionism by using laws promoting freedom of speech, competition law, consumer law, privacy law, while framing them within the context of development (as appropriate in various countries), to eventually produce a change in mindsets of people.

Stock-Taking

As Jeremy Malcolm of Consumers International notes in his response to the formal stock-taking process, “the IGF is yet to develop from a simple discussion forum into a body that helps to develop public policy in tangible ways.” This reporter, writing for the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards, also voted for the continuation of the IGF, “in order to ensure that the WSIS Declaration of Principles, specifically in the important area of open standards, be realised through a multi-stakeholder process.” The IGF is, in a sense, the least bureaucratic of the UN’s endeavours. But certain rules, evolved in inter-governmental settings, might require careful reconsiderations to suit the multi-stakeholder approach that the IGF embodies. The IGF also needs to reach out from being a conference for a few to becoming a place/process for the many.

General Reflections

While this year there were more remote participation hubs (13) than last (11), and the Remote Participation Working Group seems to have done much work and some serious reflection on that work, individual experiences sometimes did not match up with what was perceived as the collective experience (via RPWG’s feedback survey). As a workshop organizer, this reporter was not provided any information about the remote participation tools, nor was there any screening of remote participants’ comments. With the shift from a single (open-source) product DimDim, to two products, WebEx (sponsored by Cisco) and Elluminate, much confusion was created even amongst those in the know since there were two separate tools being used. It is this reporter’s perception that live captioning from the main sessions has been a great success, and will have to be used much more extensively, especially if places where the bandwidth to download streaming video does not exist. Further, they help create very useful quasi-official records of the various workshops and open fora that are held at the IGF. That apart, the suggestions offered by the
RPWG (live video feedback from the remote hubs, dedicated remote participation chair in each workshop,
etc.) should be worked upon this year to enable those who cannot travel to Vilnius to participate more effectively.

All the sessions that happened around intellectual property rights were highly critical of the present state of IP laws around the world, and were calling for a reversal of the IP expansionism we see from various perspectives (access to knowledge, competition law, etc.) However, it was often felt by this reporter that these workshops were cases of the choir being preached to. Of course, many new people were being introduced to these ideas, but generally there was appreciation but not as much opposition as one is used to hearing outside the IGF. An exception (in the IP arena) was the workshop on open standards, in which there was much heat as well as illumination. Perhaps, a greater effort could be made to engage with people who are critical of the Access to Knowledge movement, those who are critical of privacy being regarded as a fundamental right, and those who believe that cultural relativism (for instance) must find a central place while talking about the right to free speech. After all, when one leaves the IGF, these voices
are heard. Those voices must be engaged with at the IGF itself, and a way forward (in terms of concrete policy recommendations, whether at the local level or the international level) must be found. Of course, the problem with the above suggestion is that many of these values are embedded in the WSIS principles, and are taken as a granted. But, still, if such debate is not had at the IGF, it might become something much worse than a ‘talking shop’: a forum where not much meaningful talk happens.

Appendix I: Tweets and Dents During the IGF

This is list of some posts made by the reporter on the microblogging sites Twitter
(http://twitter.com/pranesh_prakash) and Identi.ca (http://identi.ca/pranesh) during the IGF.
# @leashaver: Recording of yesterday’s session by the Access to Knowledge ♺ Global Academy:
http://trunc.it/3dldl #a2kga #IGF09 #yaleisp 8:55 PM Nov 18th, 2009
# “Great possibilities of #foss, but a disabling, anti-competitive environment has stunted growth of
open source software in #Egypt.” #igf09 6:47 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Excellent set of resources on Access to Knowledge, from @YaleISP: http://tr.im/F8At #igf09 6:37 PM
Nov 17th, 2009
# “Tecno brega in Brazil can only be bought from street vendors: good relationship between artists
and street vendors.” #igf09 6:30 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# “There is not even a private copying exception in Brazil”, but is still part of “axis of IP evil” for
rightsholders #igf09 6:26 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Tobias: “Even though s/w patents are not allowed by SA law, some large MNC s/w comps found
ways of bypassing that & getting patents” #igf09 6:19 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Case studies from SA: CommonSense project, Freedom to Innovate SA, OOXML v. ODF struggle #igf09
6:18 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# 2 new studies on #a2k from Brazil (http://tr.im/F8tI)and SA (http://tr.im/F8uJ). Also see ACA2K’s
outputs: http://tr.im/F8uQ #igf09 6:13 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# ♺ @sunil_abraham: RT @mathieuweill: #igf09 Dardailler : Internet standards are open standards
and that makes a difference! 3:57 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Oops. Wrong URL. It should be: http://threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/ #igf09 3:46 PM Nov 17th,
2009
# Mogens Schmidt of UNESCO praises Global Voices Online. Says defamation & libel laws should not
be *criminal* offences. #igf09 3:40 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# http://threatened.globalvoices.org/ helps report on FoE issues with bloggers through crowdsourcing.
#igf09 3:24 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# “Along with the right to give out information and opinion is the right to receive information and
opinion”: Frank La Reu #a2k #igf09 3:13 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Schneier: “Before we die, we will have a US President who’ll send a lolcat to the Russian PM” #igf09
2:06 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# Privacy vs. security is a false dichotomy. But any privacy that is taken away in name of security
must be turned into accountability. #igf09 1:50 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# All wireless networks now have to be registered in India, and we talk of privacy? @schneier #igf09
1:47 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# RT @rmack Free Expression Online dynamic coalition meeting at 11:30am Egypt time in Siwa Room.
http://dcexpression.ning.com #igf09 1:36 PM Nov 17th, 2009
# @OWD: E Daniel, (http://bit.ly/3oFYqu), takes on the myth of the Digital Native, ♺ reveals the shallowness
of their native knowledge. #igf09 12:05 AM Nov 17th, 2009
# Commonwealth IGF’s follow-up meeting took time to find out its raison d’etre, but ended on a productive
note. #igf09 11:34 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# #schneierfact : Bruce Schneier actually exists! I can see him! 6:53 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# @timdavies: You might then be interested at a report by @cis_india on a different take at DNs:
http://tr.im/F3tk 3:29 PM Nov 16th, 2009 from Gwibber in reply to timdavies
# Estonia & Georgia DDoS are famous, but individual NGOs are also being targetted by DoSes. #igf09
3:08 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# Now more online journalists are behind bars than offline ones. #freespeech #igf09 3:07 PM Nov 16th,
2009
# ♺ @aslam: if you get an email from nigeria people will block it because they think that it is spam -
reputation #fail #igf09 2:14 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# Many are saying: listen to children; document and share best ICT practices and examples; bridge
rural-urban divide as also devel’d-devel’g. 1:57 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# Several British Parliamentarians in the room at the Commonwealth IGF event #igf09 1:56 PM Nov
16th, 2009
# CIGF should look at gaps at IGF and speak to them. Our common legal systems allow for focus on legislations
(ie, on data protection) #igf09 1:36 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# “We need to get to a point where access to the Internet is seen as a human right” #igf09 1:27 PM
Nov 16th, 2009
# “Intellectual property issues need developing countries to speak in one voice at intl fora. Commonwealth
IGF might allow that.” #igf09 1:24 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# “Music aspects of the Internet debates, which gets so much focus, doesn’t have as much relevance
in W. Africa as education & health.” #igf09 1:21 PM Nov 16th, 2009
# Commonwealth covers more than 2 billion people. Some whole regions, like E. & W. Africa “have no
voice in Geneva & global IGF” #igf09 1:18 PM Nov 16th, 2009

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-fourth-IGF

IGF 2009 - Main Session: Emerging Issues: Social Networks

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:46:50Z

Current laws don't seem to scale well to handle Web 2.0 issues

Session description: Discussion was centered on the development of social media (social networks, user-generated content sites, micro-blogging, collaboration tools, etc.) in order to explore whether these developments require to new or modified policy approaches. Key issues explored include privacy and data protection, rules applicable to user-generated content and copyrighted material, and freedom of expression and illegal content. The session also addressed the importance of the “terms of service” of large platforms, how they are developed and their relationship with emerging business models that are based on behavioral analysis.

Participants in the discussion included: Sunil Abraham, director of policy, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore; Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of the Global Network Initiative; Grace Bomu, manager, Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya; Sergio Suiama, prosecutor, State of São Paulo, Brazil; Rachel O'Connell, VP of people networks and chief safety officer, Bebo.

November 18, 2009 - Sunil Abraham, an Internet policy expert from Bangalore, was a key panelist in this session who introduced the primary concerns tied to social networks today.

"I'm going to raise nine emerging issues about social media," he began, "and I categorize them into four categories: Intellectual property rights, morality laundering, the hegemony of the connected and the hegemony of text."

He noted that intellectual property law is completely outdated and cannot be applied in today's communications environment, saying it is "irrelevant." He added, "To take some examples, the right of the consumer to review, the right of the consumer to privacy, the right of the entrepreneur or enthusiast to make interoperable, complementary or competing products. All these rights used to be protected under the right to reverse-engineer. Issue 2 under IPR: On some corporate-mediated social media platforms, copyright takedown notices from one political party are acted on much more swiftly when compared to similar takedown notices from an opposing party. Issue 3, under IPR: Some rights holders, and in particular news organizations, use copyright takedown notices selectively to purge social media Web sites of content that opposes their editorial viewpoint. Issue 4 under intellectual property rights: The increased use of automated enforcement of copyright by rights holders is seriously undermining freedom of expression on the Internet, as in the case of the baby dancing to Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy.'"

He explained "morality laundering" - saying that, like policy laundering, it is "trying to impose a globally homogenized morality regime." He cited the example of breast-feeding photos on a social network being deleted because they were considered obscene. "Breast-feeding, I may remind you, is still a public activity in many southern countries," he said. "Photographs of public life on a beach in a country where nudism is the norm becomes child pornography in another country."

He said that religious traditions can sometime be reduced to a monoculture on community-managed social media platforms that "depend on editors to determine the truth," adding "That is because upper-crust and upper-class populations have greater access to the Internet. Literate communities will try to maintain their hegemony on the Internet. Community-managed social media platforms that depend on textual citation often ignore the knowledge of the oral communities of the global south."

Session moderator Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, asked Abraham if automated enforcement of social network policies should be outlawed. "I don't think it is possible for us to completely take out machine involvement in moderating content online," Abraham said, "whether it is from a freedom-of-speech perspective or a hate-speech perspective or from an intellectual-property-rights perspective. But I think the process has to become more transparent, so that the public will know what happened and why it happened and that there is due process and the possibility of appeal."

Davies had kicked off the session with a plea that participants try to think ahead in this discussion of social networks. "Our role today in this panel is to look to the future, and our mentors at the UN and at IGF have urged me to motivate, as much as possible, an imagining of the future," he said. "Our role, as we can see on the program, is to look at social networks and social spaces such as micro-blogging and Web 2.0, as we move through to the next - what are the issues that we're likely to confront. So our two goals, if I can suggest a focus, is: What have we brought out of this last few days that tells us something about the way the future will go? Particularly in terms of social interaction. And second, imagine that future."

Sergio Siuama, prosecutor for the State of São Paulo, Brazil, was asked to describe the privacy problem that developed there on Google's social network Orkut. "Social networks are the fourth most popular online activity, ahead of personal e-mail," he said. "Eighty percent of Brazilian Intenet users interact through social network sites. In Brazil as well in India and Pakistan, the most popular social networking service is Google's Orkut. More than 30% of Brazilian users access regularly use Orkut and about 25% of them are children and teenagers." He said many social networks accessed by people globally are transnational. "The most-accessed services in Brazil are provided by companies physically located in the United States," he said.

In 2005 Google set up a branch in São Paulo, but it was not enough to handle the business of 30 million users. Since 2004 Brazilian authorities have been receiving reports of cyberbullying, drug dealing, child pornogrphy and other human rights violations in Orkut's space. In 2006 the federal attorney's office started a collective lawsuit against Google. Google responded with a proactive plan. After two years of litigation, in July 2008, the parties settled on a collective agreement in which Google agreed, among other obligations, to comply with Brazilian legislation, to store traffic data for at least six months, to take down child-abuse images, to develop a proactive system of child-abuse images detection, removal and report to law enforcement, and to establish a customer-service office able to quickly respond to all users' complaints. Some of these obligations were adopted as standards for the whole of Latin America in a document - the memorandum of Montevideo.

Siuama raised several governance issues that arise from this case: Which criteria should be used to define the ability of a country to legislate over and sanction conducts committed on the Internet? Is it legitimate to enforce rules at a local company's office regarding a service operated from another country? What are the basic standards we should expect from ISPs to help cope with human rights violations on the Internet? Is any national law enforcement agency equipped to cope with crimes committed on social networking sites? Will it be necessary to ensure minimum levels of transparency and social accountability of networking services?

Panel member Rachel O'Connell, vice president of people networks and chief safety officer for Bebo, chaired the European Union's Safer Social Networking Cross-Industry Task Force - an effort by 18 social networking companies, including Facebook and Google, working with the European Commission and civil liberties, child welfare, law enforcement and parenting groups.

"We came up with seven principles that relate to education and ensuring that we have prominent and easily accessible safety messages and also addressing reporting abuse and providing people with the technologies and capabilities so they can use the Internet safely," she said. "We are doing a lot of filtering on the back end. We have moderation teams in place. We have very strong links with law enforcement. We look at the legal issues in each of the countries and the markets in which we operate and see how that ties up with being a US-based company. We're also aware of treaties like the multinational legal assistance treaty, in terms of working with law enforcement and investigators."

O'Connell said the industry has probably not been clear enough about how these procedures are implemented. She expects that the principles set out by the task force will make things more clear. "The number of signatories was 18 and now it's up to 23, and part of my role is to encourage companies to become signatories," she said. "It means you need to self-declare how you have implemented the principles and each of the substantive recommendations. These self-declarations are being reviewed by independent researchers, and their report will be released to coincide with Safer Internet Day in February."

She added that U.S. attorneys general have asked social networking companies to begin being more transparent and accountable. "Facebook has an internal auditor to ensure that they are meeting the requirements outlined by the attorneys general, and similarly MySpace has an agreement, so there is an incredible amount of work going on," she said. "That said, there is still a log of work to do, as there always will be. For example, AOL has been working closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and are diligent about working with law enforcement in other countries to ensure we can facilitate the investigative process. We also have a filtering process we run on the back end."

Grace Bomu, manager for Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya, was on hand to talk about the positive influence of social networks. Her creative troupe uses them to do marketing, research and concept development. "From our Facebook page," she explained, "we're able to tell which issues the youth in Kenya are facing, and from those issues, we are able to develop a concept and sell our plays. On our Facebook page, people propose lines, other people propose they be actors, and this has really changed the way we do business. It's the actors who write the script, and our friends help us in writing the script.

"Another way the Internet helps us is using the mobile money payment systems. Our management uses a mobile phone to update the page, to make comments and so on. Friends came up with the idea that they could pay to attend plays using mobile money payment systems."

She said there are some negatives. Anonymous respondents and competitors write negative comments on the troupe's page, politicians sometimes try to use the page to advance their goals, "and we have had problem of balancing what some people call abusive language with what others say is artistic expression."

"We'd say that these tools have really helped news opening up culture, in growth of urban language and also in the contribution of topical issues," she concluded. "Tools are helping us to expand freedom of expression rather than caging it. So what we have done as a company is that we are coming up with - slowly, we are coming up with a code within us that we shall follow in balancing the competing interests."

Rebecca MacKinnon, Open Society Institute fellow and co-founder of the Global Network Initiative, noted that throughout the sessions of IGF-2009 people have been speaking out about the power of social networks as spaces where individual citizens can speak truth to power. "Spaces that help to make governments and other institutions more accountable to individuals," she said. "This is happening all over the world, across a range of political systems. But there are trends that are counteracting the potential of social networks to be a force that can truly help citizens participate in public life. This may be contributing to social networks acting as more opaque extensions of incumbent power in some situations, rather than as transparent conduits between citizens and institutions."

MacKinnon raised four key points. The first is the level of liability governments place on social networking services in regard to user-generated content.

While it is part of the groundrules for IGF that participants are encouraged to avoid singling out people or nations when meting out criticism, it was clear that she was referring to China when she said, "In some jurisdictions, international social networking sites end up being blocked because the sovereign government is not happy with some of the content being posted on the sites. And in some of those jurisdictions, what then ends up happening is that a robust set of domestic social networking sites evolve. And the social networking sites that are hosted domestically are held liable for all the content that their users are posting on the site. And so in order to comply with government requirements and the particular government's definition of what constitutes legal speech, these social networking sites end up having to develop large departments of people whose job it is to police content. international social networking sites that want to act - want to operate in certain jurisdictions have to make a choice, either to be blocked to users in that country because users may post things that the local government objects to, or agree to develop a locally hosted site in the local language which would then be subject to greater local jurisdiction and agree to police it. And there have been some cases where certain - and I have again been asked not to name and shame - but where certain companies have chosen to host locally and comply with government requests for political censorship in that regard. And so this is one challenge that social networking companies around the world are facing, is how to deal with this."

Other points she outlined were:

- Social network users are often not allowed to be anonymous. "There's at least one country where now anybody who uses a social networking site or Web service over a certain size has to register with their national ID number," she explained, "and many human rights groups have expressed concerns about some users who have been traced for political speech. At least one international social networking service decided to disable the local uploading of videos and comments onto its service, so people in that country have to use the international version of the service rather than the local service - so that this particular social networking site would not be in the position of handing people over for speech that might arguably be political."

- Administrators of social networking sites will sometimes perceive that something is going against the terms of service when the content has a much different intent. "There are political activists from a range of countries who found their Facebook accounts frozen because their pattern of activity resembled spamming," she said, "and this had an impact on their ability to conduct political activities. And there have been situations where activists in various countries post images of abuse by authorities against citizens and these are quite graphic and are deemed to be against terms of service. And the people concerned feel that 'if these sites do not let me speak truth to power, then were can I go?' So that's another sort of human-rights issue."

- A new multistakeholder group, the Global Network Initiative, is being co-founded by MacKinnon and others to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in ICTs. "Our approach recognizes that a lot of these issues are difficult to legislate for because they involve very nuanced contextual situations that differ greatly," she said. "Companies do feel there is a need to have some kind of assistance in doing the right thing. How can social networks fulfill their potential and serve their users so they feel they can use these services without becoming victims of oppression in various ways? The Global Network Initiative combines companies who have signed on as well as human rights groups, socially responsible investment funds and some academics to help companies proactively figure out how to anticipate free-expression issues in order to avoid problems and assist in making choices about how to structure businesses."

Pavan Duggal spoke from the floor of the session about the formation of a dynamic coalition on social networks, which came together after a session on legal issues and social media earlier in the day. "These issues not only relate to data protection and privacy," he said. "They also relate to the issue of jurisdiction and ownership, storage, retention and transmission of user-generated content. Do we have the right to be anonymous? Do we have a right to oblivion? Can there be a right to delete in the context of social media? Is there a right of purging children-generated content? Can there be a right to forget and to forgive in the context of information? We also discussed how the deadly cocktail mix of social media and cloud computing is venturing us into a wild, wild west as far as jurisprudential rules and principles are concerned. Which country, what data, which server, which law would apply, which would be effective remedy, which would be the relevant court and how would the ultimate adjudication be done?"

He said it is expected that national governments will try to legislate in this area. "While the Internet has made geography history, the fact still remains that national governments will try to legislate," he said. "It is time that respective stakeholders must come together, not just the players, the users, but also the industry, the government, the lawmakers, law enforcement."

For the UN video, click here

For the UN transcript, click here

For the original article, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/emerging-issues-social-networks

When Whistle Blowers Unite

sunil — 2012-03-21T10:17:48Z

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest through popular Web service providers is risky but Wikileaks.org is one option that you could try out.

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest in the age of Satyam has new challenges. You couldn't just upload it to a blog, social networking website or even a document management system like Google documents. Google, Yahoo and most other Web service providers nearly always comply with the national law and cooperate with enforcement agencies. In India there have been several arrests in connection with alleged illegal email messages and content on social networking websites. It did not take court order – just a request from the local police station. Furthermore, you would have to undertake additional risky activity online to draw media attention to your documents. Also those who stand to lose from the leak can send a couple of copyright take down notices which will lead to deletion. So your only real option is Wikileaks.org, where they boast: Every source protected. No documents censored. All legal attacks defeated.

Launched in December 2006, Wikileaks.org stands alone on the Internet as the last refuge for the truth. Even though the promoters are European and US academic organisations, journalists and NGOs – a near neutral point of view is realised by sparing no one across the political and ideological spectrum. It is the archive of the whistle-blowers of the world and it is ugly: login information and private emails of a holocaust denier, secret documents from the Church of Scientology, Internet block-lists from Thailand and standard operating procedures for US guards at Guantanamo Bay, et cetera. One could safely assume that these guys have very few friends. Unlike Wikipedia.org whose technology it employs, Wikileaks does not have an open and participatory editorial policy. It accepts documents through a trusted journalist–source system.

Leaking controversial documents can result in loss of job, limb and life, so extreme caution is always advised. Remember that India still does not have laws protecting whistle blowers, in spite of a bill being introduced in 2006. What follows is only a very rough guide to digital whistle blowing, so please get expert advice before you try these at home:

Download and install military grade encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy. Generate a pair of keys – a public and a private one. Use your private key in combination to a journalist's public key to send him or her, a 'for your eyes only message' email. Only the journalist will be able to decrypt the message using your public key and his private key. Note however, that an Indian court under the 2008 amendment of the IT Act can ask you to disclose your key-pair.
Step outside. Working from home is a bad idea since DOT mandates that all ISPs retain logs for all users and for all services utilized for an indeterminate time-period. Office is still worse as your network administrator might be also logging your activities.
Find an anonymous public access point. Cyber-cafes, especially in New Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are asking users to provide identity cards and record contact details and in some cases web-cam photographs as well. Using your laptop in a coffee shop may work but DOT is considering cracking down on open wifi networks.
Use an anonymizing service so that the chain of digital evidence leading up to Wikileaks is obliterated. TOR is the anonymizing solution of choice. Several TOR servers that provide private tunnels across the Internet work in unison, to form a cloud of anonymity.

If you were leaking large amounts of data, uploading it may be too risky. Burn the data on DVDs and mail them to Wikileaks. However, do ensure that all digital files have been purged of personal information. For word files this can be done by converting to PDF. Also you may not want to leave any finger-prints on the package. India will soon have a database of finger prints thanks to the National Unique Identity (NUID) project. We know this thanks to the leaked NUID project document on Wikileaks.org, days before the consultation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/whistle-blowers-unite

Drawing maps for change

radha — 2011-04-04T06:49:53Z

Digital maps can hold immense academic value – an article by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, 3rd Jan, 2010.

BANGALORE: The mash-up story is an old but compelling one, particularly when used for advocacy as in Tunisia where exile Sami Ben Gharbiais used a GoogleMaps mash-up to paint a different kind of landscape.
So random net surfers were startled to find the Tunisian map dotted with a string of prisoner’s names, their biographies, and videos of their family members telling the story of the human rights situation in the country.
Closer home, rights activist K. Ramnarayan is trying to do something similar. Using GPS and simple mapping technologies, Mr. Ramnarayan maps the location and extent of damage that will be created by proposed hydro-electric projects in Uttarakhand.

“We knew that many projects were announced. But it was only when we began mapping, we found that the 550-odd projects were concentrated in three valleys, and could potentially ruin all the State’s rivers,” he says.

Detailed perspectives

Mr. Ramnarayan believes that mapping technology can provide detailed perspectives, enable analysis — GPS devices are easy to use and collated data can be simply added as layers to existing maps — and create better awareness by sharing data online. Using the more accurate GIS mapping can also hold immense academic value.

It is this potential that “Maps for Change,” a collaborative project hosted by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Tactical Tech, endeavours to tap into. Anja Kovacs, a CIS fellow, believes maps are powerful, as they provide the larger picture. For instance, she says, news reports lead one to believe that protests against SEZs are isolated today. Now, put all those protests on a map, and you get the real picture! “Maps for Change” participants are involved in a slew of fascinating projects such as mapping land acquisition patterns in Bangalore, tribal displacement issues and dissident sexualities in Delhi.

Layer of information

So mapping is not a complex cartographer’s job anymore. With cheaper and more efficient GPS devices, in the market and on your cellphones, anybody can map. Pradeep B.V. of MapUnity.org, a site that lets you create your own map, says that ‘neogeographers’ are redefining online maps.

Neogeographers use available online maps such as Google MyMaps or Open Street Maps to add layers of information to a typical mashup.

GIS adds that critical layer of accuracy, and is essential in remote areas which are not mapped by these services. So you collect data (typically latitude, longitude and altitude information), mark your points of interest and upload this on a map, Mr. Pradeep explains.

Using attributes these simple maps can be used, accurately, to tell a story and document several layers of information.

Tracking changes
Say you wish to record access to health facilities in a backward district. A GPS device helps you collate info and create a ‘schema’ of data that can be uploaded directly to any mashup. Open source tools such as JUMP or UDIG can help you work easily with GIS datasets. The map can be interactive, you can track changes and can be as dynamic as you want it to be — for instance, you upload videos of health care facilities or highlight patches of social exclusion.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/drawing-maps-for-change

Wired state of mind

radha — 2011-04-02T13:56:55Z

Information technology is the driver of society today — the basic block of innovation and growth in organisations, the mainstay of the 21st century. The decade bygone was only an indicator of the things to come. Whether its ideas or friendships, the future indubitably belongs to linking-up on the web, writes Malvika Tegta , DNA - Digital Edition, Monday - 28th December, 2009.

Did cyberscape make us cogs on a new machinery or liberate us, empower us or make us vulnerable, enrich us with cultural diversity or homogenise us? There isnt a simple answer. Not in a diverse world digitally sewn into a remarkably new pattern. Here what is certain is what is manifest — the emergence of an information society witness to changes in organisation structure, work cultures, community life, lifestyles, medicine, governance, activism, political participation, commercial business, conventional media, spaces for those on the social fringes, emergence of support systems. And a new connected state of mind.

Increased spread of the web and an exponential increase in internet platforms and applications unleashed a world of possibility for the user like never before. You could collaboratively edit a dynamic encyclopedia, collectively write a book on an idea seeded in the US and source ideas for your art project from perfect strangers from across the globe. There were endless ways of connecting with people we never knew existed — an increased consumption of global culture.

A phenomenon that enabled linking up like never before was social networking, invented in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. The Facebook culture that it spawned was drastically going to change our world as we knew it.

Consider how your life changed. A regular college evening in 2000, which was spent on chai, sutta and long walks, was invested in collecting updates about friends living on the same hostel wing on Facebook or Twitter. You were poked if you were being lazy about parting with your current mood update. When you spread out after college, these platforms kept you perpetually in the loop. You knew whod put on weight, whose relationship status had changed, that xyz was feeling crabby today. You, in turn, made sure that you posted one good picture of you in the Jaisalmer deserts for your 369 Facebook buddies to see.

And, all that upload and download of continuous information was negotiated on multiple browser windows, deftly juggled at work, while you waited for your strawberry crop on Farmville to mature.

In short, social lives of the 15% of us (Indians) with internet access were, if not fundamentally altered, certainly uploaded and impacted over the last 10 years. We became comfortable with the idea of trading identities and data about ourselves with companies like Orkut, Facebook or Google in return for the opportunity to realise the last connection on our six degrees of separation map.

Factors that made 24*7 wired lifestyle possible were miniaturisation, therefore portability computers; the smartening up of mobile phones; better broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity, and social media boom. Laptops made way for notebooks, notebooks for netbooks, and cell phone companies rolled out browser-based phones like the Blackberry and Android handsets.

To grasp the changes in the backdrop of the colossal exchange of data was to revisit Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhans line, made famous way before the Internet got big, “The medium is the message”.

Cultural evolution
The Internet grew up fast over the past 10 years, both embodying social values like connectivity, participation, creating, collaborating and self-sufficiency, and in turn affecting them. It went from read-only sites to being driven by user generated content. The user became the creative dynamo, armed with tools like blogs, review forums, and sites like WordPress, Blogspot, Flickr and YouTube.

Then came social media: Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, Twitter. Peer-2-peer file sharing application BitTorrent and music sharing sites like Napster came to represent the new philosophy. Here, the user became an active supplier of movies or music without the need for an intermediary server, as was generally the case before.

“The three cultural turns that social networking has introduced have been peer-2-peer networking, collaborations and new processes of publication and dissemination. These have changed our notion of history, cultural production and consumption, and knowledge production,” says Nishant Shah, director, research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. “Sites like Wikipedia have dismantled the processes of knowledge production and learning and introduced new forms of knowledge-sharing, like crowd sourcing. Collaborations have managed new forms of emotional bonding, creative production and interaction which propel the blogosphere and public opinion. These have an impact on questions of consumption, lifestyle patterns, etc.”

24x7 connectivity
The Internet speeded up time and we “drew gratification from speed”. You wanted to look up a breakfast place, a word meaning or answer to the first thing off the top of your head like why are men the way they are? You wanted Google to turn up an answer, and fast.

Since free social working sites became a landmine of data on consumer behaviour, trends, likes and dislikes, they needed to attract and keep the numbers. A few sites maintained a near monopoly; search was to Google, social networking meant Facebook and realtime synonymous with Twitter. Apart from constant re-invention, the sheer potential for large-scale networking was the reason. “My friends stick to Gmail, Facebook and Twitter because we dont want to manage information on too many sites,” says Saurabh Shrivastava, an MBA student.

It was reported that Facebook users woke up to water virtual crops at 4am just to stay ahead on Farmville, or sign into Twitter to see how far the world had come. Instant feedback was the expectation. The experiences and satisfactions were on multiple windows; to be out of that pattern caused anxiety. That was also in part because people fell back upon structures of social support online, which were earlier unavailable; BlackBerry/smartphones to the rescue.

Though the network grew stronger, it essentially comprised weak ties. Technology consultant Atul Chitnis feels that wider reach… reduced real-world interactions are unnatural in the social perspective, and have made social interactions more competitive. “Its more about getting more comments and reactions.”

What writer James Harkin portrayed as the new crack cocaine, professor Clay Shirky saw as not the case of information overload but of “filter failure”.

Virtual & physical
While we became human nodes spending a large part of the day on the network, the physical fed into the virtual world and vice-versa. Shortened attention spans created an attention economy, leading conventional media to get increasingly visual and in some cases sensational.

The response to crisis speeded up and social mobilisation became easier. In Tsunami-hit South and Southeast Asia, people mobilised resources for the disaster-affected. A pub attack on women in Mangalore snowballed into the nationwide Pink Chaddi campaign.

While its constantly said that the Internet connects us virtually and isolates physically, Shah says: “Contrary to popular perception, studies have shown that interface time increases peoples face time because new friendships, alliances and interests are anchored in the physical world.” The quality of interaction, however, will go down, says Chitnis, “due to current social patterns created by loss of cultural distinctiveness, and reduced real-world interaction”. This will especially be true for young adults “who will grow up not knowing a world without social networking”.

Language blends
Shah sites the change in language as the most visible and dramatic. “Easy access to writing and publishing tools has led to the development of new forms of speech and articulation. In countries, where English is not the majority first language, new blends like Singlish (Singapore), Hinglish (India) and Chinglish (China) have emerged as Western contexts, cultural products and ideas proliferated in new vocabularies on the information superhighway. These changes are associated with other changes in terms of new linguistic identities and nationalities,” he says.

Niche goes pop
The growth of the Internet revolutionised the economics of distribution of the media and the entertainment industry, a trend Chris Anderson tracked in his book, The Long Tail. Once it would have been unthinkable to get a copy of a Skinny Puppy CD in the music store because it simply wasnt worth the stocking cost — it wasnt popular enough. And if it wasnt stocked, it was as good as non-existent for a buyer who had never heard of it. That was the era of the blockbuster: what was profitable sold. The Internet changed this: with virtually no space constraints, and the low manufacturing and distribution cost of digital content, a hit became just as good as a miss. Both constituted sales: larger the number the better. Today, Google, Rhapsody, Apple iTunes and Amazon, all operate on that business model. The result: niche worlds have become much more visible and mainstream.

So, as we slow-waltz to the buzz of information, an online etiquette evolves. We gradually learn to turn noise into substance, come to terms with the blurring of private and public, mobilise in crisis, hone the skill of swimming through information to come up with the right find, and learn to direct at least some part of leisure time spent surfing and chatting to tap into the Internets true potential.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wired-state-of-mind

A provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile

nishant — 2011-08-02T08:57:07Z

In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.

In its classical form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer, and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two major challenges India has faced, of linguistic diversity and geographical distance, and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later to this posting).

This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant characteristic of communications technology since at least the invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series, and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable, fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would breach a major barrier, once and for all.

What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge constitutes. Further, that these apprehensions may have been derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first, an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:

1. It has been difficult to include human resource as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen historically as also, and even perhaps primarily, a human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation[1], with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the sender’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that technology can aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones where recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model both as peers and, even more significantly, as originators as well as enhancers of data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).

2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to come up against a bias written into standard communications models – and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend to underplay what this paper will call the significant sender/recipient. While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile communications, it has been a common problem that unless either a clear focus exists on geographic areas or significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to make up for the wasted energy.

This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in ideological commitment to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out different synergies between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.

This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be community radio, low-power transmission-reception systems (most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various internet-based networking models.

3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr. Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135 million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?

In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the community, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s movie fan, internet’s blogger and networker, solar energy’s barefoot engineer, software’s media pusher and television’s citizen-journalist. A specific focus for study will be the models of participatory learning in the classroom, using film, the vinyl disc, the audio cassette, the radio, the television, the web and now the mobile phone.

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

Techies mapping change

radha — 2011-04-04T06:51:49Z

A group of 40 Bangaloreans, including techies and social activists, are creating digital maps that will be used to bring social change in India - an article in the Bangalore Mirror by Renuka Phadnis - Monday, December 07, 2009.

Here is an example of how technology can be misused and used. A year ago, following the Mumbai blasts, everyone was talking about how terrorists had misused information from Google maps. Now, a group of 40 people in Bangalore including activists and techies, are creating digital maps that will be used to bring social change in India.

Called “Maps for Making Change” the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, a social organisation that studies the connection between the Internet and society, and the NGO Tactical Tech Collective (Bangalore and UK) are creating a map of India that will show hotspots where social change can be brought about.

Individuals working with groups and organisations working for social change across India, including grassroots activists, NGO workers, artists and researchers, sent in 70 high quality and detailed additions to the digital map. These places across India highlighted issues such as: the socio-economic aspects and consequences of the construction of Bangalore’s Metro, fighting for clean rivers, people’s rights to livelihoods in the Himalayas, monitoring the national implementation of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), mobilising slum dwellers to engage with Mumbai’s new Development Plan, human rights violations in Kashmir, identifying land where internally displaced people can be resettled in the North East.

“You don’t have to be a professional cartographer. With new technologies such as GPS and the Net, anyone can easily add to digital maps,” says Dr Anja Kovacs, fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Bangalore Angle

In a city like Bangalore, the potential of using digital maps is tremendous. For instance, such maps could be used to show which Metro routes and stations Bangaloreans want. Or, it could show how BBMP’s reserved wards are delineated (example, the population profile in Bellandur or Girinagar). The maps could tell us where migrant labour (masons, carpenters, plumbers) enter the city, where they live and where they move on (information that could be useful for Unique Identification Authority of India too!). It can also show where marginalised people live in Bangalore in slums, along railway tracks, by the lakes.

Says Bangalorean techie B V Pradeep, who provided technical support to the map team, “In a map, every person draws what is important to him. One person may draw a mall, another may mark the school and hospital. This map will give visibility to invisible people.”

Bangalorean Rekha Shenoy, who has been involved in rehabilitating earthquake-affected people in Kutch for the past eight years, says, “Such digital maps are a good resource of marking places and social issues that other people know nothing of.”

Any one can access Maps for Making Change. See email list (http://groups.google.co.in/group/maps-for-making-change). The wiki will be up and running in a few days time (maps4change.cis-india.org), said Dr Kovacs. To follow on Twitter, use the hash tag #maps4change.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/techies-mapping-change

10 tactics for turning information into action

radha — 2011-04-05T04:19:46Z

Tactical Technology Collective (TTC) with The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and the Alternative Law Forum, is happy to announce the Bangalore launch of TTC's newest toolkit - '10 tactics for turning information into action'.

‘10 tactics’ explores the use of technology and social media platforms such as Google Earth, Twitter and Facebook on human rights advocacy in the developing world. The film presents ten strategies for turning information into action and is aimed at global human rights advocates, as well as campaigners of all kinds.

The launch will be in the form of a screening organised by Tactical Technology Collective- India, CIS and ALF. After the screening, there will be an open discussion on the use of social media for advocacy.

This documentary is very important and timely viewing for all and most relevant to advocates working in the grassroots, campaigners, information actvists...

This event is open to all. Admission is free. Attendees will receive a copy of the toolkit in its offline form.

For more information about the film and the event log in to: http://www.informationactivism.org/, or call 080 4153 1129.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/10-tactics-for-turning-information-into-action

Mumbai no longer ‘meri jaan’

radha — 2011-04-04T06:52:29Z

Why online (and offline) activism after 26/11 never took off; what should have been done to mobilize people - an article in the Livemint by Seema Chowdhry and Samanth Subramanian - 20th November, 2009

On “One Million Strong for Bombay” (23,601 members), a 9 October post concerned the activist Hansel D’Souza, chairman of the Juhu Citizens’ Welfare Group, the Citizens’ Consensus candidate for the Andheri (West) assembly constituency; an earlier post involved the schedule of the Jazz Yatra. On “The Black Badge for Bombay” (853 members), the last post, from 31 August, wonders if Pakistan is a pawn being used by China against India.

“The idea behind ‘Black Badge for Bombay’ initially was to keep the pressure on so that the reaction to the attacks in terms of government preparedness results in concrete action,” says Somasekhar Sundaresan, the group’s creator. “The government has now set up a combat force in Mumbai, which was the stated immediate objective of this movement and
pressure group. After that, we needed to move on.”

Sundaresan admits that the posts have not been updated more frequently because he hasn’t worked hard enough to get people interested in newer issues. “Most of my discussions about civil rights movements are restricted to five or six friends who are members of this Facebook group too,” he says. “It is easier to talk to them because I meet them
professionally and personally often.” “The Black Badge for Mumbai” has also been unable to organize offline meetings.

What these groups lacked, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, was a dedicated team to keep the momentum going. “They don’t have intelligently incremental action points that keep their audiences increasingly engaged,” he says in an email interview. “The creators often underestimate the importance of offline activities that will keep their audiences motivated. Finally, many of them take their membership for
granted and don’t bother sending regular updates or even an occasional thank you.”

It was perhaps the need to sustain momentum that drove some of the offline citizens’ groups into the political sphere. Anil Bahl allied his Let’s Rebuild India with the Professionals Party of India. A group called Jago Mumbai turned into the Jago Party, which fielded a candidate in the Lok Sabha election from north-west Mumbai. (He lost.) “We decided that we couldn’t do anything alone,” says Bhuresh Barot, a working member of the Jago Party. “You need to be in power to do anything.”

As his party’s south Mumbai coordinator, Barot witnessed a rapid dissolution of voter outrage back into voter apathy; in the Lok Sabha election, the turnout stood at 43.3%. “The main reason seemed to be that voters thought they already knew the ideology of every party,” Barot theorizes. “And they decided they simply didn’t have faith in the candidates.”

Link to original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mumbai-no-longer-2018meri-jaan2019

Shanty home

radha — 2011-04-04T06:53:08Z

A nationwide initiative is imploring that you look closely at the greyed-out areas on your GPS maps, says Jaideep Sen in an article in the Time Out Bengaluru Magazine, November 13-26 2009 [Vol 2 Issue 9]

Call up a map of Bangalore city on Google, key in the letters “HAL”, and hit the return key. When the squiggly lines demarcating the area show up, put down the end of your forefinger at the Marathahalli end of the Old Airport Road stretch, and begin tracing your way all the way up to MG Road. It’s an easy route to follow, if you’re merely looking to head from one end of the city to the other, but that isn’t the purpose of this particular exercise, which could well be tried out along all major roadways in any city across India.

As the two Bangalore-based groups Centre for Internet and Society, and Tactical Technology Collective describe it, the attempt of that lingering fingertip is to ascertain the possibilities of creating “maps from the margins and of margins”. While that wouldn’t make immediate sense to most GPS-impelled drivers, what they’re implying is that you look around that route to try and locate and identify the numerous slums, unauthorised settlements and illegal waterways that remain greyed-out along those delineated main roads and prominent residential areas. As co-hosts of a two-month-long nationwide project titled “Maps for Social Change”, the groups are also wagering that you most likely won’t find such expanses on a map. Although, if you were to explore the neighbourhoods of say, HAL, Indira Nagar and Ulsoor, you’d find at least 30 unmarked shanties along that stretch of Old Airport Road alone.

Official figures peg the city’s slum-dwelling population at roughly 10 per cent of an estimated total 5.3 million people, in a little over 200 slums as declared by the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board. While that figure would appear minor in comparison to that of a city like Mumbai, where 60 per cent of approximately 19 million people are said to live in slums, it’s precisely that kind of disparity that this project aims to pin down against latitudinal and longitudinal positions. The purpose, said a note from the groups, is to use “geographical mapping techniques to support struggles for social justice in India”. The end result, it added, could make maps as “tools to fight injustice in society”. To understand that intention, the activists and technology specialists of the two host groups are urging people, and groups involved in social projects especially, to revisit maps and identify possibilities relevant to local campaigns and movements.

“In other countries, there’s a lot of talk about social movements using technology, even in subversive ways, but in India, this hasn’t really taken off,” said Anja (pronounced Anya) Kovacs, a Belgian who has lived in India for eight years, is a member of various campaigns in New Delhi, and is a CIS member spearheading this project. While there are many reasons for Indians to be desisting from technological means, there are many practical applications where mapping techniques can benefit social causes, she insisted.

“One example is to do with people who face displacement caused due to upcoming Special Economic Zones,” explained Kovacs. “The media, at times, portrays people against such models of development as a minority. But if you count the number of people involved in these movements, you’d come up with a mad number, and there are a mad number of struggles going on.” The project, she added, could help place such information on a map, “so that different classes of people could see what the truth actually is”.

The application inviting proposals from groups, individuals and students, begins with an exhortation for people to rethink the concept of maps. “Most of us think of maps as representations of territory,” it states. “But have you wondered why poor people are rarely given prominence, or at times are absent altogether?”

The graphic representation of a map also presents a handy educational medium, added Kovacs. “People working on concerns of sexual harassment, or state repression, public health, water management issues… the possibilities are immense.” Allan Stanley, another CIS member working on the project’s technical aspects, said the aim was to facilitate training, and extend their expertise. “It’s easily doable even for people with little internet experience,” said Stanley. “Where you create mash-ups, with [online photo and video hosting services] Flickr and You Tube, and some overlaid locative work.” At advanced levels, Stanley said that open-map projects could serve to track things like education, and density of schools in areas. Kovacs also spoke of the recent “pink chaddi” campaign, against instances of violence inflicted upon women, where a simple Google map was used to mark locations that attacks were reported from, to highlight the possibility of indicating potentially unsafe urban regions.

Link to original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/shanty-home

Improving Collective Intelligence

radha — 2011-04-05T04:19:02Z

CIS in collaboration with iMorph, Inc. and Program For the Future, is organizing a Tweetup on Dec 20th, 2009 at TERI from 4pm to 7pm.

The tweetup is to increase the awareness for "Improving Collective Intelligence".

Tools like Twitter and other social networks allow global participation of a large number of people in solving some of the World's pressing problems. This Tweetup is aimed at identifying some of these problems, brainstorming about ways to solve them and raise the awareness of the power of Collective Intelligence.

Specially, a Collective Intelligence Challenge organized by "The Program For The Future" will be the first step towards the effort. A description of the project (from the website - http://thetechvirtual.org/projects)

Develop a practical method, tool or technology that connects people so that they collectively act more intelligently. The challenge embraces all areas of human endeavor – not just technical domains like computing or engineering but also the arts, business, economics, education, government, health, law, philanthropy, science and other spheres. Winning entries will be displayed in the participating museums.

Participating museums: Tech Museum of Innovation, MIT Museum , Science Center Singapore, Citilab Barcelona, Global Women's Leadership Network

Indian Organizations - National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, Innovation Cell at KCG College of Technology

More Information

Contacts:
Dorai Thodla - dorait@gmail.com
Hrish Thota - dhempe@gmail.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/improving-collective-intelligence