Centre for Internet and Society

Workshop report pdf

sachia — 2009-03-16T10:32:15Z

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Workshop report odt

sachia — 2009-03-16T10:32:50Z

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Workshop report word

sachia — 2009-03-16T10:34:19Z

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Hindi translation WCAG

sachia — 2009-07-06T08:36:42Z

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June 2009 Workshop Report

sachia — 2009-06-26T05:57:32Z

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Open letter to UN IGF

sachia — 2008-11-30T07:59:06Z

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sampada1

sachia — 2009-04-07T11:06:20Z

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sampada2

sachia — 2009-04-07T11:06:54Z

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rt2

sachia — 2009-06-24T12:36:05Z

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tactical

sachia — 2011-09-07T12:04:47Z

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Gender and Technology

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:46Z

A course module designed by CIS for the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

Introduction:

Let us begin with three statements of facts and reflect upon them:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.
In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.
George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

These sound like disjointed bits of trivia, and indeed, are probably facts that are all too familiar to us. But what joins them together? What are the common implications that these three statements are suggesting to us? We need to see, that the theme that runs common in all the three statements is that they are all about women and their relationship with technology in some form. Let us look at all the three sentences in detail and see if we can work out the implications:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.

Does this imply that women are less artistic than men? Surely, the question is no; in fact, men who take to the arts, are often perceived as feminine and that arts and culture are in the domain of the women. We, of course, can make a certain historical reading and suggest that art as a profession belonged to the realm of the public and hence women did not have access to these arenas – the choice to be a female painter, or artist, or writer. And that is indeed a valid reading of such a statement. However, deeper than that is the relationship that women had with technology. We often forget that even arts when they first were taken up institutionally, were techniques and technologies. That historically, the art of painting – which was indeed a technology that had its heyday in Renaissance Europe – was also a technology, and one that was unavailable to women for a very long time. It is only when these technologies get superseded by newer technological inventions that they become rare, private, and feminine enough to be granted to women.

However, that does not mean that women did not have any relationship with technology. What the statement draws our attention to is that women were indeed the major subject of technologised cultural productions – as mythical creatures, as objects of erotic representation, as monsters, as demons, as beasts, as goddesses and as sometimes representative of abject and frail human conditions, women have been almost obsessively at the centre of all technology imagination. Even now, when we look around us, at billboards, and advertisements, we constantly see the messages of consumption and selling, as etched on the body of a woman; even in instances when the product being sold or the body of the woman have nothing in particular.

And Virginia Woolf draws our attention to exactly that. At the Ox-bridge library that she is in, she discovers a long list of “women and…”ⁱ and then reflects, “Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently.” (Chapter 2, just before footnote 3)

Let us remain with these thoughts for a moment then: that there is, when we talk of technology and technologised production, a certain gendered relationship; that women did not always have access to acts of production and control over technology, and that they were obsessively the subjects of technology and technologised production; and as an aside, that what we today understand as ‘arts’ or ‘artistic’ was historically in the domains of technology and science and that such shifts happen due to a series of socio-political and econo-cultural events which we will think of sometime later. And now let us look at the second statement:

In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.

If you throw back your mind to some of the most iconic and cult representations of technology in almost any of your favourite sci-fi movies, you might realize, that most of these representations are women. Starting all the way from the movie Metropolis, where you have the demonized robot Maria, to Star Trek, where the mother ship is indeed, a mother; to Lara Croft Tomb Raider to the ghost in the machine – the mother board, the mother ship, the robots and the systems that need to be controlled and tamed, are always women or appropriating the female form or feminine in nature. In the slight variations from the law, you have an occasional character like Sonny in the movie I, Robot, but there too, we also have the feminine V.I.K.I. who turns out to be the actual villain of the story. We need to look into why, our imaginations of technology – and we are not looking at technologised production right now, but technology itself – are so gendered in nature. Why is it that we always have a particular idea of technology as feminine, as irrational, as demonic, as something that needs to be tamed and controlled, preferably by men?

Isn’t it a strange thing that on the one hand, we identify science as the domain of the masculine and the male, and the technologies that govern science as feminine in nature? We are going to perhaps complicate our first ideas about the gendered nature of technology now: We are going to say that it is not as if the gendered biases or construction of technology are limited to the cultural production and technologised arts but to the very imaginations of technology itself. When we talk of even our daily electrical gadgets – computers, laptops, cellphones, ipods, wiis we catch ourselves talking about them in a feminine form – objects of consumption, objects we have an eroticized relationship with, and objects which need certain control and mastery. Now keeping these in mind, let us go to the third statement that we began with:

George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

It sounds alien to our ears, used to listening to the Arundhati Roys and Jhumpa Leharis of our time, to imagine that there was a time when women were not allowed to write; and if they were allowed to write, they were allowed to write only a particular kind of things, and that even if they were allowed to write, they were not necessarily allowed to become published authors within a publishing industry market. It seem perhaps funny, to imagine that there was a time when women tried on the names of men to write; just like it must have seemed funny, to somebody in the eighteenth century, to think that women would have to wear men’s clothes in order to enter the professional world. Once we remove the ‘funny’ quotient from this particular statement, what remains is the hard fact that technologies are a part of the culture industry – there are markets, there are audiences and consumers, there is an economics of visibility and distribution which is at work. And as with other technologies, for a very long time, the technologies of print and writing, also kept women as either the audiences to their products or the subject of their production, but very rarely at the centre, as creators and masters of those technologies. So that, when women wanted to write, not mere romances, but larger fictions, they had to take on the guise of men and write without their own names and identities.

To go back to the question of technology, then, we also need to look at the gender and technology question as not simply a question of art and expression, but also that of economic forces that shape these ideas and reinforce certain kind of images within us.

Reading 1: (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3 available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter3.html )

Let us take for example, the case study that Virginia Woolf gives us, about Judith Shakespeare – William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister.

(Please refer to the text and addresses the following questions on technology and gender relationships:)

Why is technology always thought of as more easily accessible to men than women? Is it in the inherent nature of technology that it makes itself available to men or is there an entire social construct to legitimize only some kinds of usages of technology as valid? The story of Judith Shakespeare that Woolf draws, addresses these questions quite effectively. It also points out how, the question of livelihood and gender is also closely linked in with our understanding of technology.
How does this masculine imagination of technology change the very nature of the person who controls technology? For example, a man who is not very good at different technologies would be considered effeminate or not masculine enough. On the contrary, men who are more adept at certain kinds of technologies are also considered not male enough. Similarly, women who enter into certain kinds of technology oriented roles, will always be looked upon as ‘women in a man’s world’ or sometimes as ‘one of the boys’; gendered with masculinity, beyond her own control. Extending that logic, women have their own technologies and women who do not take to those are also labeled as aberrant or deviant. We are now trying to posit the idea that it is not as if being a man or a woman precedes technology; but in fact, the socio-political gendered contexts within which technologies operate, indeed create us as men and women, masculine and feminine, in our access to technologies, in our role within the technology paradigm, and our ability to control certain kinds of technologies.
The common sense understanding that technologies follow gender – in books like Why Men won’t listen and women can’t read maps; or in bio-deterministic assumptions that boys should be good at numbers and women should be good with languages – needs to be questioned. There is a small (and perhaps very clever) claptrap that comes into being when we try and dismantle these notions. When we question, as Woolf does, any of the tenets of technology, at the level of the imaginary, the arguments that are posited against it are at the level of material technologies. Let’s take that example of the very popular book title, ‘Why Men won’t listen and Women Can’t read maps”. If we were to suggest, keeping the technology and gender relationship in mind, that the maps reading exercise, requires a certain kind of masculine identity, which women are not encouraged to perform and hence, even though they might have the capacity to read maps, they are never trained or indeed discriminated against if they can read maps, the argument that is given to us is that in a given sample, certain percentage of female participants responded in an identifiable pattern which is their inability to read map. The evidence presented is at the level of majority acts, of biological and neural research – research that presumes that technology is a neutral tool to which the brain responds without any kind of external influence; research that further presumes that the brain is an autonomous independent entity that innately responds to certain kinds of technologised stimuli. We need to avoid this kind of oppositional dialectic between the scientific and the cultural, and perhaps learn to understand that science is indeed a social construct and arises out of different cultural practices, and that culture is not merely in the realms of the imaginary but also has very material and significant consequences.

We have so far deduced a few things:

That technology and gender are not mutually exclusive domains of understanding but that technology, in its very conception, is gendered.
That different technologies are made accessible to certain kinds of gendered behaviours through complex socio-cultural and economic processes.
That technologies are not neutral, and indeed, in their imaginary (and sometimes material) construct, demand a masculine or a feminine identity on the part of the person they are interacting with.
That technologised productions are indeed about representation and their politics but they are also about the politics of access and livelihood and create a relationship between genders; where one is produced and the other is the producer.
That the relationship between gender and technology is one of transactions, where, technology is often treated as the feminine, which would then need to be tamed, domesticated or exorcised of its excesses, and brought under the control of Man with a capital M.

It is with these ideas in the back of our mind that we need to now look at a new relationship between technology and gender. Let us look at how technologies indeed become feminized – not only in their representations and access, but in their economic development and proliferation.

Reading 2 (Jennifer Light. When Computers Were Women. Available at http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/Light%20J%201999%20T&C.pdf)

As with the earlier part of the module, let us again begin with looking at three examples, but this time in the very specific realms of digital technologies and computers. We shall go through three exercises and then see if we can bind them together to talk about a different dimension to explore the gendered nature and the gendering role of technologies.

Starting with the Father: If you paid attention to the history of computing in your school days, you will remember that the father of the Computer is Charles Babbage. One is not particularly sure what Fatherly function Mr. Babbage performed, but it must be something unmentionable with a circuit board and some vacuum tubes. In the history of technology – even as it is unfolding right now - there are a few names that emerge as the architects, the creators, the fathers, the grandfathers, the builders and the miracle workers of technology.

Especially in the very accelerated world of computers and internet, we always hear of new names cropping up as THE people who made the internet, the www, and now the web 2.0, what it is now. Let us do a quick exercise and try to list down ten names that we think are influential in our contemporary understanding of technology. Let me give you a few of the more obvious ones – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sabeer Bhatia, Jimmy Wales… you can continue with this list till you have exhausted the most famous of your internet icons – the people who made the internet. And now let us pause and review the list. Chances are, that your list doesn’t have any women in them. If there are women, they might be less than one third of your list.

Why does this discrepancy happen? When you look at the IT city of Bangalore, you realize that there are as many women as men employed in the IT sector. Indeed, if we expand the scope of IT to include mobile and networked economies like the BPO and the Outsourcing industry, we know for a fact that the number of women employed and involved by these new economies is significantly higher than the number of men employees. Why then, is the IT still treated as a.) an essentially male domain created and dominated by men b.) as the play ground of the alpha male nerd who controls technology c.) as dangerous or not conducive to women?

Let’s stay with those questions and see if we can tie them up with the next thing we need to do. Here is a small news-paper clipping from not so very long ago in Bangalore - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1098752.cms Let’s discuss what are the issues that the article is raising up. Can we see a certain kind of connection between gender and technology being created here, even if it is not clearly spelled out for us? While violence against working women who enter the public sphere, is indeed a concern, the specific nature of the call centre and its technologised economy and related lifestyle is actually more a concern than the women who are working and the violence that affects them. The article, and indeed, much of the discourse that followed this particular case of a call centre employee raped and murdered by the cab driver, very vocally suggested that technology creates conditions of terror for women. Perils and dangers seem to attach themselves to women in the IT industry. There is an underlined sense of danger and fear that is etched whenever it comes to talking about gender and technology and this is one such instance.

The third exercise we want to do is to do a bit of profiling. We will look at a list of words and try and imagine what kind of gendered images we produce out of our popular understanding of them:
1. Nerd
2. Geek
3. IT engineer
4. Call Centre employee
5. Systems Administrator

How are these terms gendered and how does our perception of these terms reflect the biases of technology and the material bodies that are made to bear the burden of technologies? How are we conditioned to think of our bodies in relation to technology? How, lastly, do economic factors determine what kind of bodies inhabit what kind of activities, and which, activities, indeed, become more visible, public and masculine.

The reading for this module deals especially with these questions. Light, shows us, in her history of computing, that there was a time when there was a reversal of roles and a reversal in recognizing the most important parts of computing. The system administrator, the Man who created the entire mainframe where the computing took place, was the obviously most important person(s) in the system. The system administrators were able to control the operating system, fix the bugs, and direct women, fresh mathematics graduates, who did the actually computing, to carry the data from one source to another so that results could be aggregated. In those times, when computers were so large that people were actually able to walk through the machines, the women, were actually called computers!

However, as mainframes started shrinking, and as we entered the era of personal computing, the system admin guy was a fast disappearing category. His job was taken over by a reliable assembly line and automated programme aggregators that ensured that assembled machines with pre-installed operating systems were being delivered to the individual users. The women, on the other hand, were the first programmers as we understand them. They had intricate knowledge of the ways in which computing worked and were the only people who actually knew how to write programmes in different languages and lead them to a fruitful execution.

With the change in the nature of programming, the systems admin men slowly took over the role of the programmers and through various figures, like the nerd, and the geek, and the maths wiz, reinforced an older idea that women were not good at numbers, that the new computers were technologised demons which needed to be mastered, and that it is a man’s job to work with the machines and so women should not be considered an integral part of it. So quick and invisible was this transition, that they literally re-wrote history, so that we never really understand the role women played in the history of computing and we don’t remember any mothers of computers or the female architects of the internets. How does such a shift happen? What are the kind of forces that allow for such a radical re-writing of the history? How do economic and market forces, feminize and masculinise technologies, so that the role and the contributions of women in those areas become obliterated and certain prototypical stereotypes get reinforced in a loop?

Light’s essay brings into question the gendered relationship between technology and human beings, but it also draws our attention to questions of livelihood, which we need to ask, following our earlier questions of access. Technologies get gendered, not only through questions of access or historical constructs, but often through figuring out its public reach and market worth. It would be a worthwhile experiment to see, for instance, how, if it is a feminine trait to keep in touch and network, the credit for inventing the first social networking systems, goes to men? What are the institutional processes that keep women’s contribution, labour and efforts within a technology domain as invisible?

And following these, are the concerns of how, even though we see women in the fields of technology, participating and evolving these new technologies, why do we buy so easily into the idea that the relationship between women and technology is always one of danger or terror? Why do we often reinforce the idea that digital technologies is necessarily a domain of the masculine, when it comes to the production of the spaces, but again, the domain more of the feminine, when it comes to consumption of these technologies? Light’s essay demonstrates to us that apart from the imaginary role of technology and its feminization/demonization, there are also material forces and processes by which these technologies get defined as not only available to male or female performers but also marked as feminine or masculine in the kind of roles that it demands from the participants. The material history of technology, from a gender perspective, makes us aware of the fact that the imaginary biases of technology have very real consequences in the lived practices around us and often are subject to the forces of market economies and emerging cultural practices.

i The list that Woolf makes in the second chapter and her immediate reflections after that: “Condition in Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain of,
Profounder sub–consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare’s opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,
Dean Inge’s opinion of,
La Bruyere’s opinion of,
Dr Johnson’s opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning’s opinion of, . . .

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.

And here is La Bruyère:

Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les
hommes——

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/gender-and-technology

Metaphors and Narratives

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:52Z

A course designed for Christ College, Bangalore

Status of Course: Basic, Semester II

Duration: 4 credits, 45 hrs.
Course Objectives

The course will serve as an introductory study of Internet technologies and the various social phenomena associated with them to investigate how the Internet becomes a catchall word for contemporary times. Students will explore the several layers of internets to look at the basic debates around questions of identity, subjectivity, gender, and governance, as they have emerged in the last four decades of cybercultures theory. The course will try and initiate new pedagogic practices of thought and research, looking at the several narratives of the internets available to us – from online communities, gaming and pornography to the wider debates around censorship, surveillance and privacy. The emphasis of the course is to de-mystify and consolidate the various narratives of the internet that are available to us from different disciplines and to provide a comprehensive and pedagogic frameworks to make meaning of the digitally inflected world that we live in.

Course Evaluation: Individual assignments from a list of topics or a topic worked out in consultation with the course instructors, depending upon the individual choice of the student.

Course Pedagogy: Contact session class room teaching, film screenings, seminars and discussion groups.

Course Content:

Module 1: Surfing the internets

The ‘Internet’ has become one of the most persuasive and prevalent metaphors of our times. As more and more sections of life and being get inflected by Information and Communication Technologies, more narratives of the ‘Internet’ are produced. These narratives often mystify the Internet – through misnomers or through frameworks from earlier technological paradigms which fail to understand or explain the ‘Internet’ – and are not in synchrony with one another. The first Module introduces the internets in their plurality and looks at the various disciplinary approaches to disentangling the internets.

A brief history of the internet technologies

· Origin and intentions

· The principles that built the internet

· The emergence of the WWW

Internet - Cyberspace

· Understanding Cyberspaces

· Convergent Histories of earlier technologies

· Bridging the virtual-real divide

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Gibson, William. Neruromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Huston, Geoff. “A Decade in the Life of the Internet”. The Internet Protocol Journal. Volume 11 No. 2. 2008.

Lyon, Katie Hafner and Matthew. Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New york: Simon and Shuster, 1996.

Robbins, Kevin. "Cyberspace and the World We Live In." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 1992.

Manovich, Lev. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” in The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

Michael L. Benedikt, 1991, Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge: MIT Press

Module 2: The body in the digital paradigm

One of the most significant debates, across disciplines trying to engage with internet technologies, is on the site of the body. With cyberspaces providing multiple conditions within which the narratives of the body can be produced, there has been a radical revisiting of what it means to be human, to be gendered, to be sexual, and to be subject to various kinds of regulation and processes of censorship. This module looks at some of the seminal debates around these issues, by exploring various sites of cyberspatial identity and networking.

The body in the cyberspace

· The real body and the virtual body

· Spaces of regulation and bodies of surveillance

· Anthropomorphisation and the need to be human

Gender and Sexuality Online

· Obscenity, pornography and the sexual body

· The gendered being and the cyborg

· Subject to punishment: Role playing and fantasizing online

Pre-lecture readings:

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1996.

Balsamo, Anne. "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitan Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." The village voice (1994).

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social-Feminist in the Late 20th Century." In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Shah, Nishant. "Material cyborgs; asserted boundaries" European Journal of English Studies 12.2 .2008.

Sengupta, Suddhabrata. Signatures of the Apocalypse”. Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net. (2003)

http://www.metamute.org/en/Signatures-of-the-Apocalypse 5th July, 2005

Module 3: Circulation, Regulation and Intellectual Property

The economics of being online is closely related to the circuits of transmission, the viral networking and the questions of ownership and possession. As the boundaries between the State and the Market blur, there is an increased public and legal discourse on Intellectual Property, the processes of piracy and the need for regulation and intervention. The third module in the paper brings to the fore, the questions of freedom, of open access and equality, and the conditions of regulation that restrict a free flow of information online.

The value of Information

· Knowledge and Copyright

· Notions of possession and value of information online

· Digital Commons and the freedom of expression

Intellectual Property and the law

· Theft and piracy online

· Ownership and usage rights

· IPR and the role of digital technologies

Pre-Lecture Readings:

Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin. 2005.

Liang, Lawrence and Mayur Suresh. “Copyright/Copyleft : Myths about Copyright”.

(2006) http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-suresh010205.htm 21st August, 2008.

Rosemary J. Coombe. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property. Duke University Press.

1998.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/metaphors-and-narratives

Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:28Z

Prof N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, discusses open access in his keynote address at the 26 March 2009 one-day conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons'.

On 26 March 2009, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, organised a day-long conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons', as a way to highlight the need for Open Access in Indian academia and research. The speakers and panellists included Prof N. Mukunda of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dr D.K. Sahu, MD and CEO of Medknow Publications, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow with CIS, Dr A.R. Upadhya, Director of NAL, Mr N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD. of Informatics, and Mr Sunil Abraham, Director of Policy at CIS.

Prof N. Mukunda gave the keynote address, which is reproduced below.

“Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories – Some Viewpoints from an Academy”

Invited key note address at the Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons (Open Access)’ on 26 March 2009, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore

N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

1) Dr. Upadhya, Dr. Goudar, Prof. Arunachalam, Dr. Poornima Narayana, Prof. Chan, Prof. Willinsky, Prakash, Chandramohan from the Academy, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, may I on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences express a warm welcome to all of you to this one day Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons’. This is the Academy’s Platinum Jubilee Year, and for NAL it is the Golden Jubilee; and it is a pleasure for the Academy to join NAL and the ‘Centre for Internet & Society’ in hosting this meeting. Thanks also to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for their initiatives in organizing this event. I am here substituting for Prof. D. Balasubramanian, President of the Academy, as he has to be at a meeting at Chennai today. If only the fanciful Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were correct, the world could have split into two copies, and Prof. Balasubramanian also into two copies, one in Chennai and one here; and he could have spoken in both places simultaneously! In the tea break, I can tell you more about this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if any of you are interested.

I am used to giving seminars and colloquiua, on subjects of my research, but never have I given a key note address or an Executive Summary. These are new to me. Also, as you all know, President Obama always needs a teleprompter while giving his fine speeches. Similarly, I cannot speak without a written text in front of me, so please permit me this luxury. Let me also add that I believe in the well-known saying — levity is the soul of wit.

2) The Academy’s efforts in the Open Access direction go back to 1998. It was then that the journal Pramana was made available on the Academy website completely free for all to read. Thereafter all the other Academy journals have also been made freely available online, so now all ten Academy journals are available. Quite recently the speed of access has been considerably improved. In 2006 the Academy entered into an agreement with Springer to co-publish the international online and print editions of the ten journals, but with the proviso that world-wide open access on the Academy website would continue. So now there is the version on the Academy site, which is accessible world-wide and free, and also the value-added SpringerLink version available to paid subscribers. This arrangement is working quite well. The download figures from both sites are quite encouraging, and in any case the visibility of the journals world-wide is much better than it used to be. INSA by the way has signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration and its journals are also freely accessible.

3) Two important things happened in April 2008, just about a year ago. INSA arranged a meeting on Open Access and Copyright issues on 26th April, 2008, again thanks to Prof. Arunachalam’s initiative; and Prof. Balaram wrote an editorial in Current Science on 10th April 2008 on the subject ‘Science Journals: Issues of Access’. I must confess I am completely ignorant and totally naive in all these matters, so whenever necessary I turn to one of Prof. Balaram’s numerous beautiful editorials – and get educated about the finer points of English literature at the same time – I also read some of the steady stream of emails from Prof. Arunachalam which arrive each day. He is constantly exhorting us to do various things – like Mr. This or Mr. That we should give him the honorary title “Mr. Open Access”, it is a onepoint agenda with him. So I learn a lot from both these sources which are at least openly accessible to me. Incidentally a collection of Prof. Balaram’s editorials is likely to be published soon, and several of us have been asked to write editorials to introduce his editorials on various subjects. Science journals are proliferating in number and spiraling in costs. So these raise difficult problems of affordability for libraries and institutions. There are also issues of judging quality, and looking at the economics of the entire process, the whole information chain – overall costs of dissemination of research results, journal publishing and production, refereeing, circulation… who pays for what, who profits, is it reasonable or exorbitant? There is the impact of technologies on all this – these are times of extremely rapid changes, with new undreamt of opportunities appearing all the time. These are true of other arenas of life as well – in education, governance, entertainment, in news communication and so on. As a physicist I cannot help remembering that all this began in 1948 with Claude Shannon’s Classical Theory of Information – a major conceptual revolution which showed that information could be measured, and so could its transmission and fidelity and so on. Such a beautiful set of ideas – a fascinating mathematical structure embedded within the classical theory of probability. And this was accompanied and later followed by technical advances, transistors (1947), semiconductors and so on. Balaram’s view is that Institutional Repositories are more easily achievable than Open Access. This may greatly change the structure and traditional roles of libraries as we know them, at least as far as the sciences are concerned. He mentioned the recent much-heralded Harvard University faculty decision which ‘authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member’s work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost’. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a similar even wider step very recently, on the 18th of this month.

There is also discussion of who pays – or should pay – for the costs of publishing research results – a shift from the traditional ‘researcher pays’ era through ever increasing subscription costs to a new ‘author pays’ arrangement. The idea is that agencies that fund research – whether private or public – should include costs of publication in their support. Balaram mentions that for some high impact journals, the cost to the author for one paper can be as much as Rs. 2.5 lakhs! When I saw this, I could not help wondering – what would someone like Albert Einstein do in such a situation? He was working in a Patent Office in Berne as an assistant third class about a hundred years ago, and of course he had no research funding of any kind; but in his spare time he wrote papers that revolutionized physics! His papers were all published, he even received free reprints – but how would he fare today? One gets the impression that subscription costs for well-known journals in those days were quite reasonable; and in historical accounts one reads that people like Julius Springer were in frequent contact with figures like Arnold Sommerfeld and others in a mutually beneficial and enlightened atmosphere.
It seems we have to accept and acknowledge that the methods of doing science, the costs, the sociology of the scientific enterprise, have all changed enormously. It has become intensely competitive, one can even say that cut-throat methods are common, it seems the scientific enterprise is no longer the domain of scholars alone. Claims for priority are severe. In a piece that appeared on 9th February 2009 in the New York Times, celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, the writer said:

“One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; and for 12 years more before its sequel, ‘The Descent of Man’, which explored how his theory applied to people.”

The old times are gone forever, the times of Darwin and Einstein. The game has become a game, with new rules of play. The new patterns and methods however seem more natural for the younger generation to adjust to, but some of us of an older generation cannot forget the past so easily.

4) The INSA meeting discussed many aspects including the need to educate working scientists about their rights with respect to copyright. There is a recent email from Arunachalam on this from Amsterdam. Again I think younger scientists are aware of their rights more than old fogeys like me, we are the ones needing education. There is a need for change in Copyright patterns, especially for books out of print, to decide when something should move into the Public Domain, and so on. Some of the major INSA recommendations are to granting agencies to mandate Open Access for results of publicly funded research, and to scientists to publish in Open Access journals by choice.

Some tasks are set for the Academies too, such as setting up Institutional Repositories, and to work toward Open Access in all possible ways. In this context, it is possible that the three national Science Academies of India – IASc, INSA and NASI – may try to cooperate in these matters, as they have been doing in the case of science education recently.

5) From its inception, publication of journals has been a major effort of the Indian Academy of Sciences. There has always been a striving to maintain standards. Today we can say about our ten journals, they are reasonably good, about the best from India. The main concerns – in these times of very rapid change and impact of new technologies – are: how do we maintain refereeing and review standards, how to tackle increasing cases of plagiarism, and while coping with all these how do we move in the Open Access direction? Quality of journals is most precious for the Academy, this is hard to achieve and to maintain, the whole enterprise seems to be under pressure.

6) Let me end by returning to Balaram and INSA and mention a recent initiative of the Academy. With generous help from the Indian Institute of Science, we are trying and hoping to set up an Institutional Repository covering all publications of all Fellows past and present. Starting since 1934 – the total number of Fellows is about 1500, 900 present and 600 past. And the total number of research publications may be around 60,000 or 75,000. The hope is that in this Platinum Jubilee year this effort should get started and make some progress. We should try to get a substantial number of entries into the Repository within this year, catch up as soon as possible, then make it an ongoing automatic process. Otherwise many of us here today will also become past Fellows before the job is done. Getting titles and abstracts seems easy, with full text there may be problems, but here Arunachalam tells us authors have more rights than they realize. Let us see what we can do. It seems about 50 institutions in India already have set up such repositories, but we have miles to go before we sleep!

I am happy to have given the first key note address of my life today – I am sure the day’s discussions will be full of ideas and fruitful. It has been a pleasure to have been here, my thanks to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for inviting me, and most of all to Prof. Balasubramanian for asking me to be here in his place.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories

International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:34Z

Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop.

I was in Amsterdam for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam of CIS and other participants from UK, USA, Japan, and Australia. The workshop was funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER Project. The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for the future course of international repositories’ action.

The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories infrastructure. Soon after the keynote, participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to draft action plans on the following topics:

International Organization
Identifier Infrastructure
Citation Services
Repositories Handshake

I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’ group. The handshake group, which consisted of mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh. Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered: one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and interoperability.

On the second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit opportunities' on the principles of more (content), better (quality metadata), easy (uploading) and rewarding (for depositor). The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use cases like:

Easy deposit method for multi-authored papers, with different affiliations from different countries, in multiple repositories
Communication between institutional, subject and funding repositories
Publisher deposits in repositories (IR/SR)
Institute induced deposits

We had two breakout group presentations during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.

Finally, all participants assembled at the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation Services group. Leslie Carr, who was the moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull references from a document in repositories.

The next impressive development came from the Repository Identifiers group. The moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation here). Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.

Clifford Lynch of CNI summed up of the outcomes of the break out groups in his closing remarks. He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs. He also prioritised 'Identifier Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on it.

There was a funders' meeting after the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface. With pre-workshop wiki discussions on repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.

During the workshop, I met a few key people involved in the DRIVER project, particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from ISTI-CNR, Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about DRIVER, which has come up with a set of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines have been translated into three other languages, showing their international acceptance. To streamline repository developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a DRIVER-like initiative to ensure metadata uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.

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Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

sachia — 2011-08-23T02:55:16Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is a signatory to a letter being sent to the Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of FOSS at state IT academies.

The state of Karnataka has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft under which three IT academies have been established in the state, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga, in 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained at these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum at these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers. This MOU will expire in the coming academic year. Therefore, Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India are sending a letter to the Education Secretary for the state of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of a FOSS-based curriculum in these IT academies, and explaining why this would be a useful move.

The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the signatories to this letter, which is reproduced below.

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The Education Secretary

Government of Karnataka

MS Building

Bangalore, Karnataka.

Sub – Microsoft IT Academies in Karnataka

Dear Sri Nadadur,

Karnataka has a MOU with Microsoft under which three 'IT Academies' have been established in the State, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga during 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained in these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum in these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers.

There are a couple of issues with this program.

Firstly Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS. Free software is software which gives the users the freedom to use, study, modify and share, while in the case of proprietary software, the vendor prevents the study, modification and distribution of the software. The freedoms of FOSS provide users and the rest of society with several important advantages, which are briefly listed below:

a. With proprietary software, the teachers only learn be superficial 'users'. This is because, proprietary software companies prevent access to the “source code” that goes into the creation of software. With FOSS, students can learn not only how to use software, but also how create and modify the software applications. Hence with FOSS, students will not just be passive users but will actually construct knowledge. As we know, 'Constructivism' is a key feature of the National Curriculum Framework 2005.

b. FOSS supports the creation of local language versions of the software. For example, Kerala has locally created software in Malayalam for its IT@School program. Similarly the Kannada community Sampada has created a complete Kannada distribution by customising existing FOSS software.

Though Microsoft has provided Windows and Microsoft Office gratis at these academies, it does not provide the same software to the teachers who are trained at the centre. Hence the teachers who intend to purchase computers would need to shell out considerable amounts for the software which they have become used to in the schools. However, if the teachers are trained on FOSS alternatives to Windows and Office, at at negligible price (the cost of a CD which is around Rupees ten), each teacher can be a given a copy of the software. The training can also cover the installation of the software, if required. In this way, the teacher training can lead to the actual use of computers in the schools and teachers homes and make the training meaningful and lead to the greater dispersion of ICTs. Currently, most teachers learn to use these products but have no continuity of learning which makes the training futile.

Of course, the issue of FOSS is not only one of cost. Even if proprietary software were offered free of cost, our nation will eventually have economic losses, due to permanent dependency on software monopoly.

These are some of the reasons why Karnataka has chosen FOSS in its own ICT@Schools program. The computers in Karnataka schools run on GNU/Linux platform under this program. We would like to submit that the teacher training in the IT Academies at Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga also need to be aligned to the IT@School program, and hence teachers should be taught on the same FOSS software platforms as well.

We had a meeting with Ms Vandita Sharma last November, along with Dr Richard Stallman, the founder of the global Free Software movement, and explained these issues. She was sympathetic to these arguments on the public benefits from FOSS and mentioned that the department would take appropriate action in this regard as is consistent with the public interest and those of the teachers and children in our government schools. She mentioned that the MOU with Microsoft is expiring in the coming academic year and and requested us to formally write to her in this regard, hence this letter.

We request that the Government take a firm stance in favor of adopting and promoting FOSS and chose FOSS in its software procurement to align the department to the government schools.

A few months back, organisations that are working to promote FOSS came together to establish a 'Coalition of the FOSS Community in India' whose goal is to collaborate with governments and other organisations to promote the adoption of FOSS, specially in the public sector. Several of the member of this coalition are based in Bangalore, including the Centre for Internet and Society, Sampada, Swatantra Malayalam Computing, Deeproot Linux, IT for Change etc. Faculty from IIM-B, Bangalore University as well as other academic institutions are also members of this coalition. Members of this coalition are willing to provide any technical support or guidance that the government may require in this regard. For eg, FOSS curriculum for both schools and for teacher training is available in Kerala and can be adapted to Karnataka schools. It should be noted that FOSS is already being used in many institutions in Karnataka, including IISC, IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IITK and many engineering colleges.

We hope our submission will be considered by the education department as well as by the government and we look forward to working with you to help bring these ideals into reality. If you think it would be useful, we could plan a small workshop / interaction, or even a series of workshops for different stakeholders, to discuss the issue in more detail and look at the implications of the choice of the software platforms for the ICT programs in the department.

We look forward to your response.

Yours truly

Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India (list of signatories is provided overleaf)

May 9^th 2009.

Copy - Commissioner for Public Instruction, Sri Kumar Naik

Copy - State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Sri Selva Kumar

Copy - Principal Secretary, DPAR (Dept of Personnel and Administrative Reforms) e-Governance

Copy - Principal Secretary, Department of IT

enclosed:

Why Government of Karnataka should adopt and promote FOSS

Kerala IT@Schools project

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/letter-to-education-secretary-may-2009