Centre for Internet and Society

February 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:16:29Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects have been published online for public review:

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

Digital Natives

CIS has interest in developing Digital Identities as a core research area and looks at practices, policies and scholarships in the field to explore relationships between Internet, technology and identity. The Digital Natives project is funded by Hivos, Netherlands. CIS involvement has resulted into these:

Columns on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following articles were published in the Indian Express recently:

Pull the Plug [published in the Indian Express on February 20, 2011]
A FLASH of Change [published in the Indian Express on February 6, 2011]
Wiki changes the world [published in the Indian Express on January 23, 2011]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project took place in Santiago, Chile, from 8 to 10 February 2011. Samuel Tettner wrote a report about the workshop:

Digital Natives with a Cause? —Workshop in Santiago — an Afterthought

Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is doing Masters on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause? framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The new ones are:

Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Coordinator in the Digital Natives project. He has written one blog entry:

Computer Science & Society – The Roles Defined

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

New Blog Entry

The Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010: Does it exceed its Mandate in Including Provisions Relating to Other Disability Legislations?

Intellectual Property

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entries

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software, its latest involvement have yielded these results:

New Blog Entries

Internet Governance

Announcement

Google Policy Fellowship Program: Asia Chapter

New Blog Entries

Privacy

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24^th March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Blog Entries by Elonnai Hickok

Elonnai Hickok is a Programme Associate in the Privacy in Asia project. She has published a series of Open Letters to the Finance Committee regarding the UID:

Other New Blog Entries

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Spectrum auctions - 'Jhatka' or 'Halal'? [published in the Business Standard on February 3, 2011]

Forthcoming Events

CIS is holding some conferences/workshops in the month of March in Delhi and Bangalore:

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Electronication: Ragas and the Future (March 6, 2011 Jaaga, Bangalore)
Design!publiC (March 18, 2011, Taj Vivanta, New Delhi)

Staff Update

Deepti Bharthur

Deepti Bhartur is a Research Intern at CIS. She did her BA (Hons) in Journalism from Lady Sriram College, University of Delhi and completed her Masters in Communication from Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. Deepti joined the Accessibility team of CIS and is working on accessibility in telecom policy in India.

News & Media Coverage

Growing cyberspace controls, Internet filtering (Hindu, February 20, 2011)
2(m) or not 2(m) (Business Standard, February 19, 2011)
Can the twitterati change the world? (The Times of India, February 12, 2011)
Can the mouse be a tool of revolution in India? (DNA, February 12, 2011)
Social Network Suicide (Bangalore Mirror, February 6, 2011)
New Kids on the Blog (Indian Express, February 6, 2011)
Procuring books in Indian libraries (Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange, February 4, 2011)
What Are You Accused of? Find Out Online (Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2011)
One among the clan of Wikipedians (Hindu, January 27, 2011)
Digital Wrongs (Forbes India, January 24, 2011)

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Looking forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to write to us for any queries or details required. If you do not wish to receive these emails, please do write to us and we will unsubscribe your mail ID from the mailing list.
CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2011-bulletin

January 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:25:44Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! It gives us immense pleasure to present regular updates on the progress of our research on the mainstream Internet media. In this issue of we bring our latest project updates, news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

Digital Natives

Column on Digital Natives

Is That a Friend on Your Wall? [published in the Indian Express on 9 January 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Blog Entry by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is a MA candidate on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The latest is:

The Digital Tipping Point

Announcement

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Accessibility

New Blog Entry

Accessibility in Telecommunications

Intellectual Property

Copyright, patents and trademarks are the most important components on the Internet. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entry

New Release of IPR Chapter of India-EU Free Trade Agreement

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralised authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cybercrime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Within the larger field of Internet governance, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue forum that was instituted by the WSIS processes and that is their only formal outcome, has fast emerged as one of the key institutions. As the definition quoted above indicates, a unique feature of the field of Internet governance is that, unlike many other governance spheres, it does not only involve governments. Historically, not only governments but also the technical community and private players have played a crucial role in the development of the Internet. In the context of the IGF, that role is not only explicitly acknowledged but also institutionalised as the IGF formally brings together governments, private players and civil society actors from all areas of and organisations involved in Internet governance. Moreover, now that the open and egalitarian potential of the Internet is increasingly under attack, this unique nature of the IGF, in addition to its WSIS roots, has made it a prime venue to remind stakeholders in all areas of Internet governance of the commitment they have made earlier to building a “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society” (WSIS Geneva Principles, Para 1). CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has the following shape:

New Blog Entry

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace

Privacy

CIS has undertaken many new and exciting projects. One of these, "Privacy in Asia", is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and is being completed in collaboration with Society and Action Group. "Privacy in Asia" is a two-year project that commenced on 24 March 2010 and will complete within two years from the commencement date, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties. The project was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote an over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Apart from "Privacy in Asia" CIS is also participating in the " Privacy and Identity" project, which is funded by the Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of Privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhaar. The "Privacy and Identity" project started in August 2010.

New Blog Entries

Staff Update

Prashant Iyengar is a lawyer and legal scholar who has worked extensively on intellectual property issues particularly focusing on copyright reform and open access. He is a past recipient of an Open Society Institute fellowship for research into Open Information Policy, and has been affiliated with the Alternative Law Forum – a collective of lawyers in Bangalore engaged in human rights practice.

Prashant joined the Centre for Internet and Society as a lead researcher in the Privacy India project recently.

Telecom

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

The policy langurs [published on 6 January 2011]

News & Media Coverage

Civic hackers seek to find their feet in India (Livemint, 24 January 2011) and (IndiaInfoline, January 2011)
A Tweet and a poke from the CEO (Livemint, 24 January 2011)
Clicktivism & a brave new world order (Mail Today, 2 January 2011)
Would it be a unique identity crisis? (Bangalore Mirror, 2 January 2011)
Nel suk dei nativi digitali. Perché gli studenti 2.0 hanno bisogno di una bussola per orientarsi (Il Sore24 ORE, 2 January 2011)
A Refreshing Start! (Verveonline, Volume 19, Issue 1, January, 2011)
Getting Connected (Livemint, January 2011)
Knowledge Warriors (Il Sore24 ORE, January 2011)
Nishant Shah Quoted in Livemint 2011 Tweet-out (Livemint, January 2011)
Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants (Bahama islands info, 30 December 2010)
Mothers discuss kids, music, fashions, on Net (The Hindu, 26 December 2010)

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2011-bulletin

10th International ISTR Conference

praskrishna — 2012-08-05T08:03:28Z

The 10th international ISTR conference was organised by ISTR at Universita Degli Studi Di Siena in Italy from July 10 to 13, 2012. Nishant Shah gave a lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism.

Nishant Shah spoke as a panelist in the panel "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change".

This Tenth International Conference of ISTR marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of this global community of scholars and interested others dedicated to the creation, discussion, and advancement of knowledge pertaining to the Third Sector and its impact on human and planetary well-being and development internationally.

In this era of far-reaching changes in the way that societies are organized, the Third Sector is playing a critical role and has significantly gained importance in many countries. Democratization and the role of civil society in social integration and participation are in the spotlight with recent mobilizations particularly in the Middle East and ongoing suppression of civil society under authoritarian regimes in parts of the world. New media, social networks and other technological innovations raise new opportunities and challenges for organizing collective action and the diversity of civil society. Marketization and its impact on the Third Sector is attracting renewed research interest as welfare budgets are cut and the role of nonprofits is called into question in difficult fiscal times in many nations. A second type of marketization is also attracting attention particularly the growth of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the emergence of social enterprises and changing philanthropic paradigms. International research toward a better understanding of the implications of these changes continues to gather momentum.

ISTR’s Tenth International Conference in Sienna, Italy offers an excellent opportunity for further dialogue on these and other changes in an environment of rigor, reflexivity, authenticity and creativity. Siena encapsulates a mix of tradition and innovation that is woven from ancient webs of social engagement and enduring beliefs in justice through periods of peace and conflict. It provides an excellent setting to explore the role of third sector studies as an integrative science with short and long term objectives geared towards understanding and addressing societal concerns. Three exciting plenary sessions will canvas major theoretical and practice developments in the Third Sector and highlight the rich history and accomplishments of the host nation’s Third Sector.

See the event details on ISTR website
Read the program supplement for ISTR's 10th International Conference

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference

July 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T11:46:15Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of July 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a constitutional analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules notified in April 2011, an analysis of the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Act and CIS statement on Exceptions and Limitations for Libraries and Archives made at WIPO.

Jobs

CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the following posts:

Research Manager: CIS is seeking an individual, full-time, for a period of 12 months, beginning from October 2012. The Research Manager is expected to contribute to conceptualising, managing and executing research projects in the field of Internet and Society, build knowledge networks of researchers towards collaborative and open knowledge production and dissemination, developing and executing the monitoring and evaluation processes for humanities and social sciences based research, supporting and managing academic, popular and hybrid publishing projects from existing and new research and initiate innovative and creative areas and methodologies of studying the Internet and its practices in India and the larger Global South, to develop key research clusters and networks. Send in your applications by September 5, 2012 to admin@cis-india.org.
Programme Director – Access to Knowledge: CIS is seeking a Programme Director for its New Delhi office. The Programme Director will manage CIS’s Access to Knowledge programme which is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, to support the growth of Wikipedia and its sister projects and to advance access to free knowledge in India. The Programme Director will partner with the large Wikimedia community in India to focus on Indic and English languages and will manage a team of four staff members.
Programme Officer – Access to Knowledge and Openness: CIS is seeking an individual with a strong background in policy research and advocacy to be part of its Openness and Access to Knowledge programmes. The candidates must have knowledge of Indian and international law on copyright, demonstrable research skills, public-speaking skills, open to travel and work independently.
Programme Officer – Internet Governance: CIS is seeking an individual with a strong background in legal research and policy work to be part of its internet governance (IG) programme. The candidates must have good knowledge of Indian and international law on freedom of expression and privacy, demonstrable research skills, have strong communication skills and be media savvy with the ability to convey complex legal issues clearly to a general audience, open to travel and work independently.

To apply for the posts of Programme Director and Programme Officers, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) or Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three references.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Featured Research

Constitutional Analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules, 2011 (by Ujwala Uppaluri): Ujwala Uppaluri provides a constitutional analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules notified in April 2011, and examines its compatibility with Articles 14, 19, 21 of the Constitution of India.
Overview and Concerns Regarding the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Act (by GeneWatch UK & the Council for Responsible Genetics, US): The 2007 DNA Profiling Bill pending before the Parliament attempts to create an ambitious centralized DNA bank that would store DNA records of virtually anyone who comes within any proximity to the criminal justice system. The Bill contains provisions limiting access to and use of information contained in the database, and provides for the deletion of a person’s DNA profile upon their acquittal.

Columns

Internet Censorship: Anonymous Can’t be Just Harmful Hackers (Nishant Shah, FirstPost, July 13, 2012): If there was ever an interesting time for people concerned with freedom of speech and expression to live in, it is now, and it is definitely in India. It has been a series of battles the last couple of years, where a slightly out-dated government machinery has been trying to control and contain the burgeoning online spaces, only to be put in their place by the new-age tech-ninjas that have risen as the new heroes in our digital times.
Open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet Freedom (Sunil Abraham, Thinking Aloud, July 17, 2012): Sunil Abraham’s open letter to Hillary Clinton was based on a presentation made during a panel discussion at a Google sponsored conference titled Internet at Liberty 2012 in Washington DC on May 24, 2012. The present article published in Thinking Aloud is an updated version of the blog entry published by CIS earlier this year.

Event Report

Privacy Matters — Medical Privacy (Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration, Pune, June 30, 2012): Privacy India in partnership with the Indian Network for People living with HIV/AIDS, CIS, IDRC, and Society in Action Group with support from London-based Privacy International, held a public discussion on "Medical Privacy". Elonnai Hickok introduced the draft book Privacy in India: A Policy Guide that Privacy India had been compiling. The participants discussed medical privacy in India, the legal aspects of medical privacy, Supreme Court views on medical negligence, confidentiality and privacy, best practices on medical privacy in various health settings, etc.

Ongoing Event

The Asian Edge: 2012 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Summer School: The 2nd Biannual Inter Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Summer School is being hosted in Bangalore, India by CIS and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The IACS Summer School brings together South and East Asian experts from different disciplines as faculty for graduate and advanced research students to engage with key issues of larger social, cultural and political concerns in cultural studies in Asia.

Upcoming Event

Role of the US Tech Companies in Government Surveillance: A Lecture by Christopher Soghoian (Centre for Internet and Society, 194, 2-C Cross, Domlur Stage II, Bangalore (Near Domlur Club and the TERI Complex)): Your internet, phone and web application providers are all, for the most part, in bed with US and other foreign government agencies. They all routinely disclose their customers' communications and other private data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Worse, firms like Google and Microsoft specifically log data in order to assist the government — How? — Find out — Christopher Soghoian will give a lecture on the role companies play in assisting government surveillance.

Events Organised

Privacy Matters — Consumer Privacy (India International Centre, New Delhi, July 7, 2012): Privacy India, in partnership with the Centre for Internet & Society, International Development Research Centre, Society in Action Group and Privacy International, invite you to a public conference focused on discussing the challenges and concerns to consumer privacy in India.
The Fifth Elephant (NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore, July 27 and 28, 2012): The event was organised by HasGeek and supported by CIS. The first day covered the technology track and talks from business and industry were held on the following day.

Events Participated

Speak Easy: Citizenship, Freedom of Expression and Online Governance (American Centre, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi, July 31, 2012): Chinmayi Arun, a Fellow at CIS spoke at this event organised by the YP Foundation, Youth Ki Awaaz, Change.Org and RTI Anonymous.
Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum 2012 (Aoyama Campus, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, July 20, 2012). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session on international public policy and internet governance issues pertaining to the internet. The event was organised by APrIGF.Asia.
Fifth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (New Delhi, July 22, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting held under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.
Fourth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Planning Commission, New Delhi, July 9, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in the fourth meeting on privacy issues under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.

News & Media Coverage

A Net of Hatred (Samar Khurshid, Hindustan Times, July 14, 2012): “The problem is...that internet conversations become extreme. Liberals don’t get embroiled in heated arguments while fundamentalists, dedicated to extreme ideologies, tend to win out." Web censorship...is in vain as the net is too vast to control.”— Pranesh Prakash.
Post-website attack, cops hot on pursuit of Anonymous hackers (The Times of India, July 11, 2012): “Anonymous consists of a large bunch of activists who gained some credibility in India after they organised offline protests. But this operation doesn't serve any purpose and brings down their credibility as details of those who filed complaints have been revealed.” — Pranesh Prakash.
The kids are all on Facebook (Shikha Kumar, Daily News & Analysis, July 8, 2012): “Children’s interaction online should always be under parental supervision. Censorship and control is not the responsibility of the government, but of parents.” — Sunil Abraham.
Freedom debate takes a new course (Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, July 1, 2012): “Under Indian copyright law, ISPs cannot be liable for copyright infringement committed by their users. So while it is good that the court clarified that its order was limited in its scope, it is possible to read even this as going far beyond that which is allowed under the law.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Access to Knowledge

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

WIPO

CIS participated at the 24^th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights held in Geneva from July 16 to 25, 2012. The outcomes are listed below:

India's Opening Statement on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at SCCR 24: The opening statement of the Indian delegation was delivered by G.R. Raghavender on July 19, 2012. The statement called upon all countries to conclude textual work on the treaty and call for a Diplomatic Conference to finalize it.
CIS's Statement on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired: Pranesh Prakash read out CIS statement on July 20, 2012.
CIS's Statement on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: Pranesh Prakash read out CIS statement specifically on the Chair's Non Paper on the Protection of Broadcasters which was released on July 23, 2012.
CIS's Statement on Exceptions & Limitations for Libraries and Archives: Pranesh Prakash delivered the statement on the issue of exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives on July 25, 2012.
Transcripts of Discussions at WIPO: The proceedings were live streamed. Copies of the unedited transcripts are hosted for archival purposes.

International Press Coverage

U.S. support sought for treaty to allow blind people access to copyrighted works (Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post, July 24, 2012): “The vast majority of visually disabled people live in poor, developing countries where very little money is spent on converting books into accessible formats, while they are much more readily available elsewhere...The treaty would end the book famine that they currently face.” — Pranesh Prakash.
US and EU blocking treaty to give blind people access to books (Paige McClanahan, The Guardian, July 30, 2012): “We in developing countries have found our voice and we are not going to back down. When people are demanding their basic rights, no power in the world is strong enough to stop them getting what they want.”— Rahul Cherian.

National Press Coverage

EU stalls treaty talks to allow copyright waiver for print disabilities (The Hindu, Priscilla Jebaraj, July 25, 2012): “[The treaty] would allow organisations working for the blind to import and export accessible works without seeking the copyright holder's permission, since very little money is spent in developing countries on converting books into accessible formats, while they are much more readily available elsewhere.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies:

Blog Entry

Accessibility of Government Websites in India — Test Results

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Blog Entries

Unpacking Openness: From Seemingly Transparent to Definitely Opaque: Nishant Shah was in Netherlands recently and as part of his trip had given a public lecture to an audience at Kennisland. One of the respondents wrote a small write-up of the talk. This was originally published on the Kennisland website on July 25, 2012.
2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics (by Rebecca Schild): The 2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics convened a panel on Open Access. There was consensus amongst the panelist that the “big question” facing the open access movement no longer remains "if" or "why" open access, but rather "how" open access. The panel proved instructive for shifting the discussion away from ideology towards concrete questions facing the open access agenda and its implementation.
Open Government Data (by Pranesh Prakash): Pranesh Prakash provides an analysis of the chapter that CIS published in this report with Transparency & Accountability Initiative.

Grant Award

Wikimedia Foundation awards grant to Centre for Internet and Society to expand Access to Knowledge in India: Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant to the Centre for Internet and Society to expand their Access to Knowledge program in India. This information was published by Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer on the Wikimedia Foundation website on August 1, 2012.

Digital Natives

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

Book Review

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies: Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012.

Digital Natives Newsletter

Citizen Activism the Past Decade: The deadline for contribution to the Digital Natives newsletter expires on August 15. Nilofar Ansher gives a list of topics that contributors can explore in this blog entry.

Columns

Across Borders (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, July 5, 2012): “Digital Natives are not only a mobile-wielding generation, but also a mobile generation. They are fluid, not necessarily tied to the geographies of their origin, and often imagine themselves, as travelling across different networks and systems, like the information traffic on the internet. This dislocation of the fixity of where we are from and who we are is one of the most exciting results of the digital turn.”
Revisiting Techno-euphoria (Nishant Shah, DML Central, July 5, 2012): “The gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital — which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.”

Event Participated

10th International ISTR Conference (Universita Degli Studi Di Siena, Italy, July 10 – 13, 2012): Nishant Shah was a panelist in the session, "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change". He gave a public lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India

Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 200,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The following are the latest outputs:

Fixed Line Telephones (by Jürgen Kock): This module discusses the features and the various stages of the development of fixed line telephones, its early history, the basic principle of a fixed line telephone system, plain old telephone service, digital telephones, cordless phones to today's features of fixed line telephones.
Different Forms of Video Communication (by Tina Mani): In this module, Tina Mani takes us through some of the common forms of video communication such as video calling, video conferencing, telepresence and video sharing.
Broadband Policy, 2004 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish Ghosh tells us that the Policy was laid down by the Government of India in order to realize the potential of broadband services. It aimed at enhancing the quality of life by implementation of tele-education, tele-medicine, e-governance, entertainment, etc.
Cable Television Networks Regulation Act, 1955 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish examines the purpose of the legislation, the persons affected by it, the administrative bodies which come under the Act, the penalties (including the consequences in case of non-compliance), appeal process and the debates surrounding the legislation.
The Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish Ghosh throws light on the main objective of the Act — that of regulating the possession of wireless telegraphy apparatus.

RTI Application

Use of DPI Technology by ISPs — Response by the Department of Telecommunications : Smiti Mujumdar on behalf of CIS filed requests under the Right to Information with the Department of Telecommunications, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, BSNL and MTNL, asking a number of questions related to the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology by Internet Service Providers (ISP) in India and corresponding regulations. A scanned version of the response from the Department of Telecommunications is hosted online.

Column in Business Standard

Decision Analysis for Interest Rates (Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, July 5, 2012): The discipline of systematic evaluation through applying process-flow and decision analysis — in this example, of financial logic — can help make reasoned, practical decisions, whether for interest rates, or for resolving issues in power supply, or in telecommunications, spectrum and broadband.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. Over the last four years our policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos. With the Government of India we have done policy research for Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.

CIS is an accredited NGO at WIPO and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2012-bulletin

December 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T11:28:02Z

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs arising from these projects are now online for public review:

Pornography & the Law
This monograph attempts to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/f1sQsi

Re:wiring Bodies
Dr. Asha Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/gYCP1C

The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem — An Inquiry into Technology and Governance
The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour. The deadline for peer review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/iiYJp1

New Blog Entries

Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities

Queer Histories of the Internet

A Detour: The Internet and Forms of Narration: A Short Note

Digital Natives

Columns on Digital Natives

Make a Wish [published on 19 December 2010]
Play Station [published on 5 December 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Publication

Position papers from the Thinkathon conference held at Hague from 6 to 8 December have been published:

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers

Accessibility

National Award

Nirmita Narasimhan got a National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India on 3 December 2010. The award was presented by Smt. Pratibha Patil, President of India under the Role Model category. The event was telecast live on Doordarshan.

Nirmita Narasimhan wins National Award

Conference Report

An international conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT was held in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The full report of the conference is published online:

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - Conference Report

New Blog Entries

Intellectual Property

New Blog Entries

Openness

Reports

Event

Wikipedia Meetup in Bangalore, This time in TERI

Privacy

CIS is doing a couple of projects, one Privacy in Asia which is supported by Privacy International, UK and the other on Privacy and Identity which is funded by Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar.

New Blog Entries

Telecom

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Take 'Model T' for Telecom

News & Media Coverage

An online community platform for people with different needs (Sify News, 12 December 2010)

Self-regulation in media and society meet to gain legal perspectives (Indiantelevision.com, 13 December 2010)

This Is All India Radia (Outlook, 6 December 2010)

'Pakistan' hackers target India's top police agency (Google News, 4 December 2010)

Intellectual Property Rights as seen in a graphic novel (TimeOut Bengaluru, 1 December 2010)

The Niira Radia Tapes: Scrutinizing the Snoopers (The Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2010)

Mobile banking set to get a boost from IMPS (The Hindu, 28 November 2010)

UID elicits mixed response (Deccan Herald, 23 November 2010)

Time to bury e-mail? (DNA, 21 November 2010)

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2010-bulletin

Vote for the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest!

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:32:00Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos are super excited to present the final videos in the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest. We invite readers to vote for the TOP 5 Videos. The finalists will each win EUR500! Voting closes March 31, 2012

Who’s the Everyday Digital Native? This global video contest has the answer

They effect social change through social media, place their communities on the global map, and share a spiritual connection with the digital world - Meet the Everyday Digital Native

The Everyday Digital Native video contest has got its pulse on what makes youths from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds connect with one another in the global community – it’s an affinity for digital technologies and Web 2.0-mediated platforms coupled with a drive to spearhead social change. The contest invited people from around the world to make a video that would answer the question, ‘Who is the Everyday Digital Native?’. Following a jury-based selection process, the final videos are now online and open for public voting.

Run by the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) with the support of Dutch NGO HIVOS, the contest will see the top five videos with the most votes declared winners on April 1, 2012. The 12 finalists in the video, who come from different parts of the globe, are each vying for the top prize of USD 500 and a chance to have their shorts screened in a film screening and panel discussion hosted by CIS.

Referring to the theme of the contest, Dr Nishant Shah, Director of Research and Co-founder of the Centre, says that the contest aims at highlighting the alternative users of digital technologies. These are people who are often not accounted for either in mainstream discourses of changemakers or in academic biopics on digital natives. “The 12 video proposals show that the everyday digital native does not wake up in the morning and think, ‘hmmm today I will change the world’. And yet, in their everyday lives, when they see the possibility of producing a change in their immediate environments, they turn to the digital to find networks that can start a change”, says Shah.

Apart from the top five public selections, the jury members will be instrumental in picking their two favorites among the finalists. Talking about the range of ideas that participants sent in jury member Leon Tan, a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden, says, “The contest is an exciting project as it has the potential to portray the lives of digital natives from different corners of the world. The generosity of the contestants in creating video proposals is commendable as is the range of ideas suggested. The ideas address both the opportunities and risks of what we might call digital life.”

Adds Shashwati Talukdar, a filmmaker and jury member from India, “It was really interesting to see how different all the proposals were. Some of them were taking the notion of digital native as a personal one and some were very clearly political and sought an intervention in the real world. Dutch digital media artist and jury member Jeroen van Loon refers to a proposal from the USA where the participant wanted to explore the possibility of unplugging from his digital life. “It’s very interesting how digital natives question their own world. The proposals are good examples of how technology and culture constantly change each other. We can learn a lot from the global digital natives.”

Profiles of the finalists and their videos can be viewed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives

June 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-07-27T09:48:16Z

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

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the sixth issue of its newsletter for 2013. Hivos published a White Paper by Nishant Shah titled Whose Change is it Anyway?, which attempts to reflect critically on existing patterns of making change and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. The Access to Knowledge team carried out a quantitative analysis to identify trends and growth patterns in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013. CIS drafted the Privacy Protection Bill and amended it as per feedback gained from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Privacy Roundtable Events. CIS made closing statement on the Treaty for the Blind at the WIPO Diplomatic Conference which was concluded with the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled. In a research paper Nehaa Chaudhari gives an analysis of patent pools, Sameer Boray gives an analysis of video piracy and Pranav Menon gives an analysis of India-EU FTA and issues surrounding data protection and security. In this period we organised the Institute on Internet and Society with support from the Ford Foundation at Golden Palms, Bangalore from June 8 to 14, 2013.

Celebrating 5 Years of CIS
CIS is now 5 years old and we just celebrated this by holding an open exhibition in our offices in Bangalore and Delhi from May 20 to 23, showcasing our work and accomplishments over the period. We had about 170 visitors from the general public coming in to our office. Videos of the event are here.

Google Policy Fellowship
CIS has initiated processing of applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Shortlisted candidates would be informed about their interview. However, as of now there will be a 20 days delay in announcing the list for the interview.

Jobs
CIS is inviting applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project) and Editor/Content Developer. To apply for these posts, send in your resume to Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org). CIS is also seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org).

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
CIS and the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapter on Jharkhand:

The Jharkhand Chapter (by CLPR, June 30, 2013).

Note: All the chapters published on the website are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Award

Girls in ICT Day 2013 (organized by ITU-APT Foundation of India with support from CMAI - Association of India Communication and Infrastructure, FICCI Auditorium, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, May 7, 2013). Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan got a felicitation for her contribution and achievements in the field of Information and Communication Technology. The honour was conferred during the celebration of this event.

Media Coverage

A Treat for the Blind (by Chitra Narayanan, Business World, June 26, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation has given a grant to CIS to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Access to Knowledge (Previously IP Reforms)

WIPO
Pranesh Prakash participated in the WIPO Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities in Marrakesh, Morocco, June 17 to 28, 2013. The conference concluded with the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works by blind persons, persons with visual impairment, and other print disabled persons, by requiring mandatory exceptions in copyright law to enable conversions of books into accessible formats, and by enabling cross-border transfer of accessible format books. Click for:

CIS's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind (by Pranesh Prakash, June 28, 2013).
India's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind (June 29, 2013).

Pervasive Technologies

Pervasive Technologies: Patent Pools (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 27, 2013).

Other (FTA, Piracy)

The Right Way to Fight Video Piracy? (by Sameer Boray, June 6, 2013).
India-EU Proposed Free Trade Agreement: Issues Surrounding Data Protection and Security (by Pranav Menon, June 8, 2013).
India- EU FTA: A Note on the Copyright Issues (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 18, 2013).

Event Participated

Governance in the Age of the Internet and Free Trade Agreements (organized by Thai Netizen Network and co-hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia)

The A2K team consists of three members based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Subhashish Panigrahi and one team member Nitika Tandon who is working from Delhi office.

Statistical Report

Indian Language Wikipedia Statistics (by Nitika Tandon, June 30, September 2012 – April 2013).

Event Organised

A 'Kannada' Wikipedia Workshop for Bloggers (Suchitra, Bengaluru, June 23, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.

Event Co-organised

Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (co-organised by A2K team and Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop.

Upcoming Event

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education (co-organised by HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS, Indian Institute of Science, July 13, 2013).

Blog Entries

My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad (by T. Vishnu Vardhan, June 26, 2013). The workshop was conducted in March but the report was published only in June.
Wikipedia Visual Editor (by Nitika Tandon, June 27, 2013).

Press Coverage (including videos)

A Feature on Wikipedia and Telegu Wikipedians (HMTV, May 30-31, 2013). Watch the video.
Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme (HMTV, June 1, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan took part in a one hour live phone-in programme on Wikipedia.
Wiki donors (by Akhila Seetharaman, TimeOut Bengaluru, June 21, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja are quoted.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Prajavani, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Samyukta Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Vijaya Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion (Suvarna News, June 13, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific.

Openness

Column

Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, June 24, 2013).

Event Hosted

RHoK Global Event (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, June 1 – 2, 2013). Yogesh Londhe shares with you a post-event report.

Internet Governance

CIS began two projects earlier this year. The first one on facilitating research and events on surveillance and freedom of expression is with Privacy International and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The second one on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia is with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada:

Cyber Stewards Project
Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project.

Video Interview

An Interview with Ram Mohan (June 30, 2013)

Event Organized

The Geopolitics of Information Controls: A Presentation by Masashi Crete-Nishihata (TERI, Bangalore, June 19, 2013). About 20 people participated in the event.

Privacy Research

Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (With Amendments based on Public Feedback) (by Elonnai Hickok, June 30, 2013): CIS drafted the Bill. Based on feedback received from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Roundtables the Bill was amended.

Interviews

Interview with the Citizen Lab on Internet Filtering in India (June 24, 2013). Maria Xynou interviewed Masashi Crete-Nishihata and Jakub Dalek from the Citizen Lab on internet filtering in India.
Interview with Billy Hawkes (June 20, 2014). Maria Xynou interviewed Billy Hawkes, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on recommendations for data protection in India.

Columns

Indian Surveillance Laws & Practices Far Worse than US (by Pranesh Prakash, Economic Times, June 13, 2013).
World Wide Rule (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, June 14, 2013). Nishant Shah reviews Schmidt and Cohen's book “The New Digital Age”.
Way to Watch (by Chinmayi Arun, Indian Express, June 26, 2013).
The State is Snooping: Can You Escape? (by Snehashish Ghosh, India Together, June 26, 2013).

Blog Entries

India Subject to NSA Dragnet Surveillance! No Longer a Hypothesis — It is Now Officially Confirmed (by Maria Xynou, June 13, 2013).
SEBI and Communication Surveillance: New Rules, New Responsibilities? (by Kovey Coles, June 27, 2013).
Open Letter to "Not" Recognize India as Data Secure Nation till Enactment of Privacy Legislation (by Elonnai Hickok, June 19, 2013).
Open Letter to Prevent the Installation of RFID tags in Vehicles (by Maria Xynou, June 27, 2013).

Events Organised

Technology, Power, and Revolutions in the Arab Spring (CIS, July 2, 2013). Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan gave a talk.
Learn to Secure Your Online Communication! (CIS, Bangalore, June 30, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.
Learn to Secure Your Online Communication! (IIC, Delhi University, South Campus, New Delhi, July 6, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.

Event Co-organised

4^th Privacy Round Table Meeting (co-organised with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Data Security Council of India, Mumbai, June 15, 2013).

Upcoming / Ongoing Events

Digital Activism in Europe (The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, July 8, 2013). Bernadette Längle will give a talk.
Privacy Round Table, Kolkata (co-organised with the Federation for Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the Data Security Council of India, Lytton Hotel, Sudder Street, Kolkata, July 13, 2013).

Event Participated In

Biometrics or bust? India's Identity Crisis (organized by the Oxford Internet Institute, July 2, 2013). Malavika Jayaram was a speaker.

Video

Pranesh Prakash on the US snooping into Indian cyber space (by Tehelka, June 2013).

Media Coverage

Indian student in Cornell University hacks into ICSE, ISC database (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 6, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
‘Hacking’ sparks row over exam evaluation (by Vasudha Venugopal and Karthik Subramanian, Hindu, June 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Internet firms deny existence of PRISM (by Javed Anwer and Ishan Srivastava, Times of India, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash are quoted.
Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications (Tech Dirt, June 8, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Facebook, Google deny spying access (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 9, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Govt mulls advisory on privacy issues related to Google, Facebook (by Thomas K Thomas, Hindu Business Line, June 10, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Cyber experts suggest using open source software to protect privacy (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 22, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Govt goes after porn, makes ISPs ban sites (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Indian govt blocks 40 smut sites, forgets to give reason (by Phil Muncaster, The Register, June 27, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Concerns over central snoop (by Aloke Tikku, Hindustan Times, June 28, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Internet users enraged over US online spying (by Maitreyee Boruah, Times of India, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Issue of duplication of identities of users under control: Nilekani (by Anirban Sen, Livemint, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar (by Anjan Trivedi, Time World, June 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access. It will also touch upon various policies and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation of policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules are being published in the Internet Institute website:

Event Organised

Institute on Internet and Society (supported by Ford Foundation, Golden Palms Resort, Bangalore, June 8 – 14, 2013). Pranesh Prakash, Bernadette Längle, Vir Kamal Chopra, AK Bhargava, Ananth Guruswamy, Archana Gulati, Chakshu Roy, Elonnai Hickok, Gaurab Raj Upadhaya, Helani Galpaya, Michael Ginguld, Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, C. Nandini, Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan, Dr. Nishant Shah, Parminder Jeet Singh, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Satyen Gupta, Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam, Sunil Abraham, Tulika Pandey and T. Vishnu Vardhan were speakers at the event. The presentations can be accessed here.

Telecom

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

Newspaper Column

Law & Order through Traffic Systems (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, June 5, 2013 and cross-posted in Organizing India Blogspot).

Digital Natives

White Paper

Whose Change is it Anyway? (by Nishant Shah, Hivos, June 18, 2013).

Digital Humanities

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

Blog Entries

Mapping the Field of Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 11, 2013).
A Suggested Set of Values for the Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 12, 2013).
Archive Practice and Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 24, 2013).

About CIS

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

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

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

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

September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T06:48:33Z

Welcome to the newsletter of September 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a second analysis by Snehashish Ghosh on the latest list of sites blocked by the Indian government from August 18, 2012 to August 21, 2012, a research on the issues of internet governance by Smarika Kumar, publication of a report on Accessibility of Government websites in India by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, the Access to Knowledge programme plan and updates from the Wikipedia community in India on Indic languages, updates from the Habits of Living workshop organised in Bengaluru, the events connected to the visits of international DNA experts, Helen Wallace and Jeremy Gruber in India, and introduce you to our Access to Knowledge team members.

Announcements

Office in Delhi
CIS now has an office with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge programme in Delhi at G 15, top floor, behind Hauz Khas G Block Market, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, Ph: + 91 11 26536425.

New Team Members

Nitika Tandon: Nitika Tandon is a Program Officer with CIS. She has an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands and is a recipient of Dean's Fund Scholarship Program, Erasmus University.
Shiju Alex: Shiju Alex is a Consultant. His background is technical writing and he is interested in Indic language computing and community building for Indic language Wiki projects. Presently he works out of CIS office in Bengaluru.
Subhashish Panigrahi: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Programme Officer to CIS's Access to Knowledge programme and works out of CIS's Delhi office. His background is Business Development in Corporate Communications. He works on designing and implementing programs to provide on-wiki and off-wiki support for new editors.
Noopur Raval: Noopur Raval is working as Consultant - Communications for the Access to Knowledge team at CIS. Having previously worked in the media, she is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Cinema Studies from JNU, New Delhi.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the posts of Research Manager, Researcher/Editor, and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply for these posts send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) with three references. Archives of our bulletins can be found here. Click to read the newsletter on our website.

Accessibility

Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report (by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, September 26, 2012): This is a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. It was published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The report consists of an executive summary, introduction, methodology, findings and recommendations and interpretation and recommendations. Examples of errors are given as appendices.

Project

Creating a National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities: An Introduction (by Anandhi Viswanathan, September 28, 2012): CIS is engaged in a two-and-a-half year project starting from August 2012 to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. This project is supported by the Hans Foundation. The Resource Kit will be brought out in both English and Hindi and disseminated to policy makers from panchayat to ministry levels throughout India. Anandhi gives an introduction to the project in this blog entry.

Blog Entries

WIPO Treaty for the Visually Impaired — Moving from a Treaty on Paper to a Treaty that is Workable on the Ground (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): After many years of hard lobbying by the World Blind Union, it appears that the WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities (TVI) could become a reality next year.
Breaking News on Electronic Accessibility (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): The Parliamentary Standing Committee constituted to study the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill has in its report explicitly recognized the concept of electronic accessibility and reasonable accommodation. This is the first time in the country that these two concepts have been reflected at the level of a Parliamentary Standing Committee in relation to a non-disability specific law.

Access to Knowledge

Submission

Feedback to Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 (by Pranesh Prakash, September 29, 2012): submitted its written comments on the Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 to Mr. G.R. Raghavender, Registrar of Copyrights & Director (BP&CR), Ministry of Human Resource Development. Pranesh does a detailed analysis and provides recommendations on Rules 8,9,10, 29(6), 34(2), 37, 71(3), 72, 74(1), 74(6), 75, and 79 (3) and (4).

Projects

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan: Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 of a 22 months ‘grant’ (beginning from September 1, 2012 to July 31, 2014) of upto INR 26,000,000 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of CIS. The prime objective is to support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects and supporting India-focused efforts to improve the quality of India-relevant content on Indic languages and English Wikimedia projects.
Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace (by Jadine Lannon, September 25, 2012): Jadine Lannon gives an introduction to the new A2K research initiative. Pervasive technologies have flooded the Indian market and are changing the ways in which the average Indian accesses knowledge but very little is understood about these technologies, particularly when it comes to their legality. CIS hopes to do a research that aims to understand how pervasive technologies interact with Intellectual Property laws and what can be done to protect these technologies from being labelled “illegal” and eradicated from the Asian market.

Event Participated

Meeting of the Global Network on Flexible Limitations and Exceptions (organised by American University Washington College of Law, Washington D.C., September 12 to 15, 2012).

Internet Governance

Featured Research

An Introduction to the Issues in Internet Governance (by Smarika Kumar, September 23, 2012): Smarika provides a detailed analysis to the issues that we face in Internet Governance today. She tries to canvass the controversies in the areas of internet governance that broadly focus around the institutional structures to govern the internet, discusses the evolution of these models against the historical background of internet governance and then proceeds to present the criticisms of each of these models with an emphasis on the interests of the regular internet user.
Analyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II (by Snehashish Ghosh, September 25, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”). This analysis was re-posted by Medianama on September 26, 2012.

Columns

The Five Monkeys & Ice-cold Water (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 16, 2012): “The Indian government provides leadership, both domestically and internationally, when it comes to access to knowledge.”
SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech (by Chinmayi Arun, Hindu Business Line, September 1, 2012): If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.

Media Coverage

Censorship makes India fall two places on global internet freedom chart (by Dilnaz Boga, Daily News & Analysis, September 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Pitroda seeks to put govt information in public domain (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 25, 2012): “One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media…they (government) should be available all the time.” — Sunil Abraham.

Govt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 19, 2012): ““The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process...We have to see what coordination results out of the body.” — Sunil Abraham.

Mind of the millennium teen (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, September 16, 2012): “We live in accelerated times...The breathlessness of our times is evident in everything — from the kind of movies we make to the ways in which our news and information travel. At the end of the day, our younger generations are also products of our times.”— Nishant Shah.

China outranks India in world’s first ever web index (First Post, September 6, 2012): ““The Internet today doesn’t work according to the idealistic principles of openness, and democracy of information that Berners-Lee envisioned for it, and in India in particular, although the Internet has helped us rethink what the government can do, the attitude is that that Internet can only be used in ways that the government sees fit.” — Nishant Shah.

Need a standard strategy to deal with Web issues: Chandrasekhar (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Political war on the web (by Kunal Majumder, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “The fact remains none of the blockings were politically motivated.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Government to hold talks with stakeholders on Internet censorship (by Shalini Singh, The Hindu, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

The state. And the rage of the cyber demon (by Shougat Dasgupta, Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “While some people may see Twitter as akin to friends talking in the pub, others use the service as a bulletin board.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Watch out for fettered speech (by Rohit Pradhan, Business Standard, September 1, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Events Organised

DNA Profiling Bill
International DNA experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States visited Bengaluru and Delhi and shared their experience in DNA sampling and gave feedback to the DNA Profiling Bill. Meetings were conducted with lawyers and the plaintiff in the Pascal Mazurier's rape case and with VR Sudarshan and Hormis Tharakan. There was a coverage of the event in Kannada media. Public lectures were organised in Bengaluru and Delhi:

UK DNA Database and the European Court of Human Rights: Lessons that India can Learn from Its Mistakes (organised by CIS and Alternative Law Forum, September 24, 2012): Helen Wallace from GeneWatch, UK and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics in the United States gave a public lecture.
The DNA Profiling Bill: Developing Best Practices (India International Centre, New Delhi, September 27, 2012): International experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States gave a public lecture. Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.

Blog Entry

A Public Meeting on DNA Profiling Bill in Delhi (by Elonnai Hickok, September 29, 2012): Elonnai has blogged about the public lecture delivered by Dr. Helen Wallace, Jeremy Gruber and Dr. Anupuma Raina.

Upcoming IGF Events
At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop:

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m.

Sunil Abraham will be a panelist in the following workshop:

New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m).

CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops:

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.).
Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.).

Events Participated

Second Freedom Online Conference (organised by the Ministry of Information and Communications, Republic of Kenya in partnership with the government of Netherlands at UN complex in Gigiri, Nairobi, September 6 and 7, 2012). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on Access to Internet: Challenges and Opportunities.
Multi-stakeholder Discussion on India’s Position in UN for Internet Governance UN Committee for Internet Related Policies (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, New Delhi, September 19, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
Seventh Meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting. This was the final meeting of the series.

Talk

Talk at Yale University (New Haven, September 19, 2012): Pranesh Prakash gave a talk on censorship, intermediary liability, and the way forward.

Video

Internet Governance Plenary (August 28, Tokyo, Japan): Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Ang Peng Hwa, Paul Wilson, Duangthip Chomprang and Raul Echeberria at this event organised by APNIC on August 28, 2012. Kuo Wei Wu, CEO, National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NIIEPA) was the moderator.

Openness

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012): Shiju Alex provides a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. He provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

Workshop Reports
Although most of the following workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the report for all of these was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring these.

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): This post is about the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop held in Ludhiana, Punjab on July 28, 2012. Surinder Wadhawan, a Mumbai based Wikipedian played an important role in designing this workshop and introducing Punjabi Wikipedia to the Punjabi speakers. Long-term Punjabi wikipedian G.S.Guglani also joined this workshop. The event was covered in the Tribune, Hindustan Times, Punjab Infoline, and YesPunjab.com.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012. Veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani came forward to spread the message of Punjabi Wikipedia among Punjabi speakers.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012): The workshop was held at the Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar on August 17, 2012. Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop. One of the active and long-time Punjabi Wikipedian Guglani Gurdip Singh led the workshop with the active support from Shiju and Subhasish.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized in Chandigarh by the British Library over two days on August 24 and 25, 2012. Bipin Kumar, Head of British Library and Christina, Deputy Manager had pivotal roles in designing this workshop with support from Piyush, a wikipedian. The session on Day 1 was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi and the session on Day 2 was conducted by Subhashish and Piyush.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012): This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur. Prof. Ashwin Kumar from the Department of English, Tumkur University and Kannada wikipedians, Om Shiva Prakash, Hareesh, Tejus and Pavithra played vital roles in organising this workshop. Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.

Blog Entries

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012): Nitika Tandon tells us about the Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telegu Wikipedia, how it will run, its necessity and the future steps.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012): A series of Wikipedia meetings were organized in Hyderabad on September 29 and 30, 2012. These workshops were a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community. There was coverage about this event in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Event Organised

Thinking with Data@CIS (CIS, Bengaluru, September 16 – 18, 2012): The course offered at the National Institute of Advanced Studies was screened in CIS office.

HasGeek HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of September: Cartonama Conference (TERI Complex, Bengaluru, September 22, 2012). The event was organised by HasGeek with support from CIS.

Digital Natives

Newspaper Column

One. Zero. (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, September 16, 2012): “The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak.”

Pathways to Higher Education

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and CIS. The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India. Training workshops were organised in the month of September at Xaviers in Mumbai on September 6, 2012 and in Newman College, Thodupuzha from September 17 to 20, 2012. Each workshop had 25-30 undergraduate students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They were trained to use digital technologies in order to think through problems of social justice.

Researchers at Work

From 2012 to 2015, the RAW series will build research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects is a global collaborative project to renew the conceptual power of networks. It concentrates on changing the habits of living. The Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University is an important locus.

CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Jadine Lannon and Alok Vaid-Menon live blogged about the event:

Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s) (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Radhika Gajjala Lectures on e-Philanthropy (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space
(by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Namita Malhotra on Amateur Pornography (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).

Telecom

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India

Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 2,00,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The knowledge repository deals with these modules: Introduction to Telecommunications, Telecommunications Infrastructure and Technologies, Government of India Regulatory Framework for Telecom, Telecommunication and the Market, Universal Access and Accessibility, The International Telecommunications Union and other international bodies, Broadcasting, Emerging Topics and Way Forward. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers.

The following are the new outputs:

Associations Regulating Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): Broadcast regulation in India is currently an intricate web, with multiple agencies involved in formulating and implementing policy, drafting and enforcing legislation.
Optical Fibre (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): This unit tells us what is optical fibre, the types of optical fibres, how does an optical fibre work, fibre-optic relay system, and why are optical fibres uses in telecommunication systems.
Direct to Home (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit tells us about Direct to home television, its history, how it works, the programming, its advantages and disadvantages are discussed in this module.
Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit brings you the history and evolution of cable television in India, talks about other cable based services, cable television digitization rule and the end consumer in India.
Private FMs (Commercial, Campus and Community Radios) (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 24, 2012): This unit introduces us to AM and FM, tells us the role of private FMs including what is a community radio and what is a campus radio.
Types of Radio Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 28, 2012): This unit tells us what is radio broadcasting, takes us through the history of radio broadcasting in India, explains what is AM and FM in the Indian context.
A History of All India Radio and Its Operations (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 29, 2012): This module gives us a picture of the history of All India Radio and its operations.

Newspaper Column

Changing Our Game (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, September 5, 2012): “Adopting 'co-ordination models' like the Stag Hunt could reduce contention and improve outcomes.” This was re-posted in Organizing India blogspot.

Event Participated

Insights India 2012 (organised by MACH, Bangalore, September 26 – 28, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh and Srividya Vaidyanathan participated in this event.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2012-bulletin

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: Radhika Gajjala Lectures on e-Philanthropy

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T05:40:08Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners. The aim of the workshop is to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Today, Radhika Gajalla gave a lecture about a body of work which she called as "Emerging forms of Surrogacy, E-Philanthropy and Digital Globalization through Online Micro-transactional Platforms". It looks at online micro-transaction platforms. She ran us through some of the history of micro-finance theory, from Yunis' methods of female empowerment to micro-finance as a profit-generating activity, and the newer online micro-finance platforms like KIVA, microplace and CARE's online micro-finance portal.

Radhika also spoke about labor organization and supply chains forming for handicraft micro-enterprises in India. She identified two categories of platforms that entrepreneurs could use: sites that link buyers directly to producers, like Etsy and Ebay, and mirco-finance websites that solicit (usually Western) donors. In some cases, resources like Ebay cannot be used in India (or couldn’t in the past) because of barriers like the banning of paypal, and there is more demand for the micro-finance platforms from lenders (Westerners); these forces have worked to make the empowered entrepreneur a much more legitimate and accessible image for lenders.

Consequently, Radhika begins to identify the politics of imagery on online micro-finance platforms, and identified two aspects of the images common on these online platforms: the empowered receiver (who is being directly empowered by the loans) and the empowered giver (who is being made to feel good by being enablers for these receivers). The images being used by the MFIs are strategically used to create the sense of connection or the belonging to mutual networks with the lenders — an example of this is individuals in the West who weave seeing a picture of an Indian weaver and want to fund her not just because they interpret her as poor but also as a fellow weaver. This philanthropic model of giving also uses guilt relief as a motivation — the return on the loan is the relief of guilt.

In the participant discussions, it was pointed out that the images also spur lending through the promise of improving lives. Also, this concept of using moral responsibility to prompt giving can be paralleled with the movement in Western business spheres of social responsibility.

Another participant brought up the idea of mobilization, and asks us to think about what mobilizes individuals or groups to give in to these micro-finance organizations? Is it really hope, or is it shame? To what extent can these really motivate us?

Further, participant interaction caused us to wonder if, on websites like KIVA, both lenders and receivers become nodes and entry-points into new networks, or even the sites of new network creation.

As for my own thoughts, I was particularly interested in a point that one participant made on the expression of poverty in the images on KIVA: they do not showcase destitution. While they are images of poverty, they are also images of hope — the colours are bright, the subjects are smiling. Are these images much more powerful as motivators for Western donations because Westerners are desensitized to images of destitute poverty? Or are they just more accessible to Western viewers?

While destitution suggests a rigidity of causal structures that cannot be altered by either the subject or the viewer, the image of the smiling Indian woman standing in front of the spinning wheel expresses the concept that poverty is escapable using the inherent tools and skills possessed by the subject, to the only thing missing that is capital — an idea that is much more accessible to the Western donor. It is also possible that the movement in international aid and development media from images of destitution to images of hope impresses upon the donor that there has been progress in the Global South, possibly progress that can be attributed to actions of Western development initiatives, which legitimizes the donation by implicating that improvement is possible and currently taking place.

Continue to follow our live blog of the Thinkathon for more thought-provoking discussion!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-radhika-gajjala-lectures-on-e-philanthropy

We Have the Answer for You. So, what's the Question?

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:30:51Z

The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest invited everyone to send in videos that answered the question: who's the everyday digital native? Participants from all parts of the globe now have the answers.

Click here to view the videos and vote for your favorite! Voting ends March 31, 2012.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/answer-for-you-what-is-the-question

Digital Native: The bigger picture

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:11:57Z

For all our sleek machines, we are slaves to the much larger Internet of Things.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 1, 2018.

There was a time, at the turn of the millennium, when we were trying to cope with the fact that we live with sapient technologies. It was new, to be thinking of cohabitation with things that speak, interact, listen, and act in tandem with us. I still remember the time when the first pagers and cellphones arrived — how difficult it was for people to figure out the social etiquette for living with these devices.

From those early days, we have come a long way. Digital things are everywhere — and we talk to them everywhere and everywhen. On a regular day, our phones are on our dining tables, our devices are buzzing with notifications silently in our pockets, and they are guiding us in our everyday practices. They are not just bringing us information but also listening to us, pre-empting our moves, doing things that we have not even imagined yet. Living with technologies is old — the new normal is living in technologies.

I was recently reminded by a research team that the cars we drive are giant super-computers with engines. That a new car on the roads has more computational processing power than the land-rover on Mars. Our cars are indeed computing devices and we sit in them, depending on a variety of computational processes to keep us safe, as we are hurled at high speeds ahead. Our smart homes, too, are slowly becoming sapient surfaces with specific functions. Microwaves that remember meal times, coffee machines that sense our proximity and start brewing or refrigerators that keep track of our expired food — they are all very basic computing devices that we are already used to.

However, our life is not just with the devices but the immense networks of other devices that they connect with. I got reminded of this very starkly on a recent trip to India, when I realised that the SIM card that I had bought the last time has been deactivated for non-use. At the same time, procuring a new SIM was going to need patience, time and Aadhaar authentication, which won’t happen at the airport. Additionally, there were no wifi hotspots to use in the middle of the night. Thus started the longest night of my life. In that four-hour digital blackout, I found myself thinking of my condition as a state of disconnectedness, of paralysis. I was surrounded by my two phones (don’t ask), my iPad, my laptop, and, armed to the teeth with charging cords and power-banks. Yet, none of them were of any use.

Once disconnected from the cloud that caters to my entertainment and the services that keep me talking, it was as if all my devices were useless. I scrolled through multiple screens and then gave up, resigning myself to looking at others with data, with malignant longing. It was with great shock that I realised that my devices are only gateway machines. Despite all the money and effort I have spent in selecting specific hardware combinations and care equipment, without their capacity to speak to other machines-servers, controllers, nodes — they are almost entirely pointless.

So used am I to instant interaction, reciprocation and feedback with my devices, I forgot that I am actually in conversation with an Internet of Things that far exceeds my immediate intimacy with my personalised screen. Somewhere in there is a powerful reminder of why data protection and security are so critical, but also fragile in the connected Web. Because we can do almost anything that we like to keep our individual devices secure, but the large networks that give them life and animate them are completely out of our control. In the face of this uncontrollable void, the best we can do is hope that things will be safe. And that illusion is not going to last long — in these moments of disconnection, one realises it. Thankfully, before the head got filled with the dark side of digital connectivity, I chanced upon an old movie I had saved on my laptop to show in a class once. It was Wall-E. I decided to just watch that film about a world where the only live thing was a robot, and in some strange way, found it very comforting.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-1-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-bigger-picture

Digital Native: How smart cities can make criminals out of denizens

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:19:23Z

People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 15, 2018.

I first heard about smart cities in 2003. Sitting in India, it seemed to be a very strange concept being developed in the Netherlands, where the planners were trying to arm an entire city with smartness. The idea was that if we deploy enough cameras, devices that see, machines that hear, and data connectivity that envelopes the city in a seamless cloud, it might lead to more order, discipline, and control. To me that felt like a strange experiment because under all of those different imaginations of the city as a neat, organised, controlled environment, were assumptions that were alien to my Indian sensibilities.

It was strange to look at all the promises that “smartness” would deliver — it would make human life easier. It would increase safety and create order out of chaos. It would build new lifestyles that are filled with assistive technologies. In all of these, was the imagination of the city as a laboratory — controlled and efficient, as opposed to riotous and serendipitous. The cities were positioned as filled with intention, so that the interruptions of people, animals, festivals, traffic and crowds would be removed through the deployment of these digital devices and networks. What needed to be preserved was the city and its infrastructure, rather than the individuals and communities that make the city alive and exciting. We wanted our infrastructure to be smart, taking decisions on our behalf, and shaping our lives through the algorithmic protocols that they were coded to embody.

In that faraway time, these had felt like idle speculations. Fifteen years on, I have now come to realise that the biggest motivation for building smart cities was not really facilitating human movement, habitation and habits. Indeed, at the heart of the smart city project was the setting up of a massive surveillance apparatus that would clinically diagnose the unwanted people and processes in the city, and surgically remove them — with the assistance of predictive technologies that would be implemented in policing and planning these city spaces.

Smart cities were not constructed to make people’s lives easier. They were constructed because, increasingly, all the people in a city are imagined as “users”, who need to be instructed through terms of services, how they must behave and live in these city spaces. One of the biggest cultural turns in the massification of the digital web was that almost all users were imagined as potential criminals by the very virtue of them being connected. Internet service providers and regulators knew that if people are connected, they will be violating the law at some point or another, sometimes unknowingly. People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues. The largest traffic on the internet is for pornographic and often banned material which finds its audiences on the connected web. Spammers, viruses, hijacked machines, and, often, searches for unexpected items lead people onto the dark web where the questionable human interactions happen frequently.

The introduction of the digital terms of services was essentially to presume that the user was a potential criminal who leases hardware and software, and, platforms from proprietary companies and governments could then control and discipline the user through comprehensive surveillance practices. Construction of smart cities performs a similar function in the physical space. Instead of thinking about citizens as co-owners who shape city spaces, smart cities establish a service level agreement with its occupants, and reduces them to users. Any deviation results in punitive action or devaluation, often curbing the movement, and the rights of belonging to the city spaces.

While it is true that smart technologies can facilitate certain aspects of human life, they depend on unfettered data collection, predictive profiling, correlative algorithms and conditions of extreme invasion and control — which are all predicated on the idea that you will falter. And when you do, the technologies will be there to witness, record, archive, and punish you for the daily transgressions till you are wiped into becoming a predictable, controlled, cleaned up drone that travels in docility across the networked edges of the city. We will be assimilated. Resistance will be futile.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching

We Are All Cyborgs

nishant — 2015-04-24T12:00:54Z

The cyborg reminds us that who we are as human beings is very closely linked with the technologies we use.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on April 29, 2012

If you look at any illustrated history of human civilisation, you will quickly realise that it is also a history of technology. From the discovery of fire by Homo sapiens to the contemporary homo digitalis, there is no escaping that technologies of different kinds have not only changed the way we live but also helped us realise what it means to be human. Often, we treat these technologies as external to us, thinking of them as tools that we deploy to perform a particular task. However, as our technologies become more transparent, intimate and customised, we realise that we are developing relationships with the technological devices that surround us. So, if your laptop crashes, you feel crippled. There are people who proclaim that they feel amputated without their cellphone. It is quite reasonable to feel lost without the information compass of the internet.

This relationship between human beings and technologies has been very concisely defined in the idea of a cyborg. A cyborg is a human-technology synthesis which enhances our capacities to live as human beings. While it might seem like a slightly new idea, once you realise that we constantly live with technologies and often internalise them in our bodies, it is not difficult to wrap our head around it. Think of people with pacemakers or prosthetic limbs or different implants in their bodies, who experience technologies as an integral part of their everyday life. Similarly, think of the wide range of technology apparatus that you depend on to live a “regular” human life. We have also seen iconic cyborg representations in popular movies — from the absolutely unforgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 to our very own dimpled Shah Rukh Khan as Ra.One — there has been a persistent imagining of the human being as we know it, evolving to become some sort of a super man, enhanced by advancements in digital technologies of virtual reality.

There has been a growing anxiety, almost a moral panic, about how technologies are alienating us, replacing face-time with inter-face time so that we are all growing “alone together”. There is also, across generations and users, a growing separation of those who work with technologies and those who don’t. There is much concern about the human becoming corrupt because of the ubiquitous presence of the pervasive and invasive technologies around us. In the face of these anxieties, the cyborg stands as a culturally significant and timely reminder that we, as human beings, are very closely linked with the technologies that we use. And that we need to stop thinking of technologies as merely gadgets and tools that surround us. The different objects that remind us of the presence of technology are not the same thing as technology itself. Technology is a way of thinking about things, a way of relating to the world around us. The most intrinsic forms of technologies are the ones that we don’t even recognise as a part of our innate mental make up.

Do this simple experiment. Right now, while you are reading this, do not look at any clock or time-measuring device and guess what time it is. Chances are that you will be, give or take a few minutes, more or less accurate. Even if you are temporally challenged, you will at least know what part of the day it is, morning, afternoon, evening or night. The point is that we are absolutely and completely creatures of time. We cannot think of ourselves outside of it and even when we might be dramatically wrong about it, there is no escaping the fact that we are always thinking of ourselves and the world around us through time.

We experience our lives and our relationships in cyclical notions of the clock’s face, thinking of our actions as borrowed from the future, lived in the present, and relegated to the archives of the past. It then, must come as a bit of a shock (it certainly did to me, the first time I was made to realise it) that time is not natural. Time is a human way of measuring a passage of actions. Time is a technology which has now become such a potent metaphor of life that we have forgotten to make the separation of the human and the technological.

And thus, whether you might be a tech-savvy digital native or a byte-fearing luddite, there is no denying the idea that when it comes to technologies of time, you are already a natural born cyborg. This ability of technologies to become transparent and an inalienable part of who we are forms cyborgs. The process through which they become transparent is not easily accessible, but it does begin by an internalisation of the technology’s processes in our everyday vocabulary. So the next time you think of yourself as a system that needs to be upgraded, or unable to pay attention because you don’t have enough bandwidth, remember that you are engaging in a flirtatious relationship with the digital. And slowly, but surely, we are all turning into cyborgs, as the new technologies rearrange patterns of our life and living.

digitalnative@expressindia.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:36:29Z

What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by HEIRA: The need for innovative curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.

Peer 2 Peer: One of the observations that was made unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become the call of the day.

Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom, rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a facilitator who builds conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship with the idea of curriculum and teaching.

Reciprocal evaluation: It was pointed out that the grade oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.

Inspired by the Badges contest at HASTAC, it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades. Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of learning.

Role based learning: Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education classroom.

We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.

These initial discussions look at the possibility of innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop

Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People

nishant — 2017-07-05T17:04:23Z

We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 24, 2017.

The first time I encountered an internet shutdown was in 2009. I was a visiting researcher at the Shanghai University and I received a computer which had default web-filtering software installed on it. My already restricted access to the web was intensified by the Chinese government shutting down the internet as a response to riots in the north-western province of Xinjiang. My connections to friends and families back home were disrupted. It took me three days to figure out how to circumvent the ban using proxy-servers and anonymisers, which cloaked my physical location. I could then send out a message that reassured everyone that all was fine.

During those two weeks of shutdown, I realised, for the first time, how fragile our digital ecosystems are and how completely without ownership our digital transactions. We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions. In those romantic days, when I still believed that the digital promise of connectivity implied free and open public spaces for different voices to be heard and counted, it came as quite a shock to realise that the web is a contested and a controlled space. During my stay in China, once I figured out the work-arounds for these shutdowns, I spent the rest of my research time volunteering to create safe, open networks that allowed people in Shanghai, especially my students, to access the digital space. I used to take pride in the fact that, despite all our troubles in India, the internet shall remain free and that the Indian government would not compromise what is a constitutional right for free speech and expression. I remember joking that in India, the only reason I had internet shutdown was because of power outage or the incompetency of my service provider.

However, the last few years, and especially 2017, have taken away that false sense of faith and pride I had in our nation’s commitment to securing public voices of dissent, protest, and expression. The Human Rights Watch has reported that while we are just half-way into the year, the state governments in India have imposed 20 temporary internet shutdowns so far. These arbitrary, unplanned, ad hoc and reactive shutdowns have been marked as violations of India’s obligations under the international human rights law. The right to be connected is one of the new generation of basic rights available to citizens in a functioning democracy. While one can partially sympathise with the state’s argument that the shutdown was intended to crack down on rumours and hate speech instigating violence, there is no denying that these draconian measures cannot be justified by this empty rhetoric of security.

If anything, research has shown that shutting down communication channels in times of conflict encourages speculation and rumour because people no longer have access to verifiable news sources. When an internet shutdown is imposed, speculation, rampant misinformation, and credible untruths can contribute to a feeling of insecurity, danger, and knee-jerk action, which can precipitate mass violence. Especially for people who are already living precarious lives, the condition of being disconnected is severe because if they do come under attack, they no longer have any respite for urgent and immediate help. Analysis, over a period of time, has shown that the shutdown of the internet is not in the interest of keeping people safe but in the service of keeping authorities unaccountable for their actions. A suspension of all telecommunication services essentially provides the authoritarian powers an escape valve, where they are able to continue their actions, often violent, with impunity and without a sense of responsibility.

Internet shutdowns are not just about means of control but about exercising power, reminding the people in the digital commons who is in charge. It is also a sign of a crumbling apparatus of democracy, where the voice of the citizen, instead of being celebrated in the public, is seen as a problem which has to be solved. Internet shutdowns also have a clear identification of which kinds of voices should not be heard and, indeed, what can and cannot be said under restrictive conditions. Eventually, they discriminate against specific kinds of bodies — marked by identity characteristics — and leads to pathologisation and punishment of people who question the status quo. It is shameful for us that even as we dream digital, we are inching closer to the side of undemocratic demagogues rather than building robust telecommunication networks that enable the true potential of public participation and democratic governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-24-2017-digital-native-on-mute-the-voice-of-the-people