Centre for Internet & Society

Winners of the Opensource.com 2015 Community Awards

by Prasad Krishna

Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source.

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Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014

by Rahmanuddin Shaikh

Telugu Wikimedia (including their projects Telugu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikisource etc.) is one of the largest and most powerful Indian language Wikimedia projects, and it is growing and expanding everyday. In the last half of 2014, Telugu Wikimedia community members contacted CIS-A2K team with a request to organize a MediaWiki tutorial workshop for them. Following their request, on 28 December 2014, CIS-A2K team organized a MediaWiki hackathon event for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.

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ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଅନ୍ତର୍ଜାତୀୟ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ

by Subhashish Panigrahi

This is an op-ed I authored for Odia newspaper the "Samaja" that got published on January 30, 2015. Through this post I intend to highlight the needs for taking the Odia language to international fora instead of keeping it confined within the books. I have covered the focus area of 3 free and open source projects: Odia Wikipedia, Odia Wikisource and Global Voices Odia in the column highlighting the need for more people to contribute.

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Citizen Media Summit 2015

by Prasad Krishna

The Citizen Media Summit 2015 was held in Cebu City, Philippines on January 24 and 25, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker at the event.

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Code As Communication

by Prasad Krishna

Gene Kogan will give a talk at the Centre for Internet & Society's Bangalore office on February 2, 2015. The talk will be from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Gene's talk will draw analogies between software, communication, creativity, and expressivity. Programming has a long history of comparison to other written media, with inevitable consequences on our legal policy over authorship and ownership.

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Musician donates Gwalior Gharana songs to free e-library

by Prasad Krishna

A few years ago, Mumbai-based musician Neela Bhagwat realized that her old notebooks filled with lyrics and notations of age-old 'bandishes' were in tatters. Afraid that she might lose them forever, Bhagwat decided to make fresh copies.

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Centre should partner local communities in 'Digital India': Expert

by Prasad Krishna

The central government needs to partner communities at the grassroots level and integrate the country's vernacular component to make the Digital India initiative a success, an expert said here Friday.

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Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers

by Subbiah Arunachalam

A few commercial publishers dominate provision of access to scientific and technical information sought after by researchers around the world. Increasing subscription prices of journals at rates higher than general inflation caused librarians to think of forming consortia, but publishers started selling online journals as bundles, and libraries ended up with many journals their researchers have very little use for. Scientists and librarians adopted open access, but publishers came up with hybrid journals and article processing charges to beat any adverse effect on their profits caused by the fast-spreading open access movement. We compare the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India. We end with a few suggestions.

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Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web

by Prasad Krishna

Andhra Loyola College in association with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS- A2K) is conducting a six-day camp titled ‘Wiki Winter’ at Wikipedia Lab in the campus.

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