Centre for Internet and Society

An Open Letter on Internet Governance to the UN Internet Governance Forum

sachia — 2011-08-02T07:40:02Z

This open letter brings up concerns of democratic deficit in internet governance worldwide, and is addressed to the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF). It is to be delivered at the IGF's 3rd Annual Meeting at Hyderabad, India, from 3rd to 6th December, 2008. The signatories are Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi, Free Software Foundation - India, IT for Change, Bangalore, and Knowledge Commons, New Delhi.

This open letter brings up concerns of democratic deficit in internet governance worldwide, and is addressed to the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF). It will be delivered at the IGF's 3rd Annual Meeting at Hyderabad, India, from 3rd to 6th December, 2008.

The letter includes an information sheet exemplifying some of the problems of democratic deficit in internet governance.

The text of the letter is as follows:
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The IGF must ACT NOW against the threat to the public-ness and the egalitarian nature of the Internet

The undersigned wish to express their deep concern that the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), created by the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005 as an Internet ‘policy dialogue’ forum, is largely failing to address key public interest and policy issues in global Internet governance – including that of democratic deficit.

Who shapes the Internet, as the Internet shapes our new social context?

The Internet represents the single most important technical advance of our society in a long time, so much so that it defines a new emerging social paradigm. The basic characteristics of the Internet determine the contours of the emerging social order in many important ways. The Internet was conceived as, and still largely is, an extensive communication system which is democratizing, and has little respect for established social hierarchies. Interactions and associations built over this new ‘techno-social’ system have, therefore, held the promise of a more egalitarian society.

The era of innocence of the Internet however appears to be fast approaching its end. Today, the Internet of the future – the very near future – is being shaped insidiously by dominant forces to further their interests. (See the fact-sheet on the following page for some illustrations of this.) Unfortunately, global policy forums have largely failed to articulate, much less act on, crucial Internet policy issues, which concern the democratic possibilities for our societies.

The IGF needs to act now!

As the Internet Governance Forum convenes for its third annual meeting, between 3rd and 6th December, 2008, in Hyderabad, India, it must take immediate steps to anchor and discuss important global public interest and policy issues involved in Internet governance. If it does not act now, it may get seen as a space that only provides an illusion of a public policy dialogue, and, consequently, as being co-opted in furthering the agenda of dominant forces that are shaping the Internet as per their narrow interests. We therefore strongly urge the IGF to directly address the following key global public interest and policy issues:

Increasing corporatisation of the Internet
Increasing proprietisation of standards and code that go into building the Internet
Increasing points of control being embedded into the Internet in the name of security and intellectual property violations
Huge democratic deficit in global Internet governance

We exhort the IGF to adopt clear directions for engaging with these crucial public policy issues. The IGF should come out with a clear work plan at its forthcoming meeting in Hyderabad to address the four key areas listed above.

The global community – comprising not only people who currently have access to the Internet, but also the un-connected billions who are being impacted by it nevertheless – will judge the meaningfulness and legitimacy of the IGF in terms of what progress it is able to make on these issues.

Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi
Free Software Foundation - India
IT for Change, Bangalore
Knowledge Commons, New Delhi

Information Sheet
How the Public-ness and Egalitarian Nature of the Internet is Threatened
– Some Examples

Corporatisation of the Internet
Largely unsuspected by most of its users, the Internet is rapidly changing from being a vast ‘public sphere’, with a fully public ownership and a non-proprietary nature, to a set of corporatised privately-owned networks.

On the one hand, telecom companies are carving out the Internet into privately-owned networks – controlling the nature of transactions over these networks. They seek to differentially charge content providers, while also building wholly private networks offering exclusive content relay services. Developments like video/TV over Internet Protocol and the provision of controlled and selective Internet services over mobiles are contributing to increasing network-operators’ control over the Internet, with a corresponding erosion of its public-ness.

On the other hand, the commons of the Internet is also being overwhelmed and squeezed out by a complete domination of a few privately owned mega-applications such as Google, Facebook, Youtube etc.

Proprietarisation of standards and code that build the Internet

One of the main ways of appropriating the commons of the Internet is through the increasing use of proprietary and closed standards and code in building the Internet system. Such appropriation allows the extortion of illegitimate rent out of the many new forms of commons-based activities that are being made possible through the Internet.

Embedding control points in the Internet

A growing confluence of corporatist and statist interests has led to the embedding of more and more means of control into the Internet in a manner that greatly compromises citizens’ rights and freedoms. Whether it is the pressure on Internet
Service Providers to examine Internet traffic for ‘intellectual property’ violations; or imposition of cultural and political controls on the Internet by states within their boundaries; or ITU’s work on IP trace-back mechanisms; or the tightening of US
control over the global Internet infrastructure in the name of securing the root zone file and the domain name system, these new forms of controlling the Internet are being negotiated among dominant interests away from public scrutiny and wider public interest-based engagements.

Democratic deficit in global Internet governance
The current global Internet governance regime – a new-age privatized governance system professing allegiance mostly to a single country, the US – has proven to be an active instrument of perpetuation of dominant commercial and geo-political interests. Lately, OECD countries have begun some work on developing public policy principles that, due to the inherently global nature of the Internet, can be expected to become globally applicable. It is quite unacceptable that OECD countries shirk from discussing the same public policy issues at global public policy forums like the IGF that they discuss among themselves at OECD meetings. Apparently, developing countries are expected to focus on finding ways to reach connectivity to their people, and not burden themselves with higher-level Internet governance issues!

People’s and communities’ right to self-determination and participation in governance of issues that impact their lives should underpin global Internet governance.

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You can download the letter here (.pdf format).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/an-open-letter-on-internet-governance-to-the-un-internet-governance-forum

An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:53Z

In an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Dutch open source activist Arjen Kamphuis discussed his experience of successfully working with the government for a policy mandating open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands.

In 2002 Arjen Kamphuis co-authored a parliament motion to mandate open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands. The motion was unanimously accepted and, in 2007, became policy. The Netherlands thus became the first western country to make the use of open standards in public sector IT mandatory. Arjen is now working to e xport this set of policies to other European countries with the help of local political parties and business partners.

Arjen discussed his experience of lobbying for this policy change and some other questions related to his work as a consultant on IT strategy and the implications of nanotechnology and biotechnology in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Centre for Internet and Society: What is the Dutch government's policy on FOSS and Open Standards specifically and intellectual property rights in general? Provide some history, name the main lobbying factions in the Netherlands and their policy positions. What was your role in the formulation of these policies?

Arjen Kamphuis: The national action plan 'The Netherlands in Open Connection' is the government's answer to a unanimous vote in parliament in November 2002. The parliament stated that the market for desktop software was not functioning as it should and that significant vendor lock-in effects were harming both individual citizens and society as a whole. It requested maximum efforts from the government to change this situation. The suggested method for changing was mandating open standards in all public sector IT and actively supporting the adoption of open source software wherever functionally and technically feasible.

I was one of the people who got this process started by contacting a member of parliament from the Green Party. This was triggered by my inability to access the website of the national railway on 1 January 2002. The website had been redesigned and only allowed access to visiters with Internet Explorer. As a Linux user, I had previously had comparable problems with local government websites and electronic tax forms (usage of which was mandatory for small businesses like my consulting start-up).

After the unanimous vote in parliament, several people in the Dutch open source community, including me, kept the pressure on the government by monitoring major procurements and writing questions for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask the government. In 2004 this led to a breakthrough when the Justice Ministry ran a project to procure 147 million euros' worth of desktop software without going through a proper multi-vendor selection process. They only talked to one vendor, and that is against European Union regulations. Since some of the civil servants working on this project were gagged, we can conclude that some people were aware they were breaking the law, yet went ahead anyway.

When the news broke we made sure the MEPs were armed with the proper questions the next day, and the contract was dropped. In reply to questions asked to the government by the MEPs, the responsible ministers admitted that the government was very dependent on Microsoft for basic functioning of its office environments; that this was a problem; and that the government would take active steps to remedy this situation by moving forward with the requests made in 2002 by parliament.

Two-and-a-half years and an election later, a new under-Minister for Economic Affairs, Frank Heemskerk, took up the challenge and promised a comprehensive policy. I gave input for this plan in mid-2007 and it was formally published and adopted later that year as a national policy for all government and public-sector (i.e. tax funded) organisations.

The policy has three objectives:

improving interoperability between public sector organisations;
lowering the vendor-dependence of the public sector;
improving the functioning of the software market and supporting the Dutch knowledge economy

Some of the practical measures are the mandating of the use of open standards in all public sector organisations. Whenever software is procured, open source should be considered and preferred whenever functionally adequate. These two very basic rules change the entire market for IT in the Dutch public sector (40% of the entire market) and is having a profound effect on the way software vendors offer their products as well as the negotiating power of the client organisations.

I continue to advise both the decision makers and the civil servants overseeing the implementation of the policy.

CIS: What is the current status on the implementation of these policies?

AK: After a slow start the government organisation that is responsable for overseeing the implementation is now up and running. The basic problem is lack of awareness about both the practical value that open standards and open source software can contribute and the underlying political reasons for making it the preferred option for government information processing.

Thus a lot of the work for the next few years will be communicating these ideas to civil servants (be they IT professionals or managers who have other jobs). The policy helps a lot because it puts some serious weight behind the whole process. The fact that government organisations have to support Open Document Format for instance significantly heightens their interest in the technical subject matter!

So the policy gives the drive needed to get things moving and now it is up to us to communicate the how and the why in a way that is understandable for people who are new to these concepts. I have no doubt it will be a long process, we have over 20 years of proprietary legacy built up in our public institutions. Replacing those systems with open alternatives will take many years. All the greater a reason to proceed with some urgency.

The complete policy document has been translated into English and released under Creative Commons Licence:
http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf

In December 2007 I gave a talk in Berlin. Here a summary, slides and video are available:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2387.en.html

CIS: What can a country like India learn from the Dutch government's experience in eGovernance and ICT in Education?

AK: I am not familiar with the Indian political process but these are some of my lessons learned:

- The government will not do anything unless constant and significant pressure is applied by citizens. Politicians and civil servants only act if the pain of acting is less than the pain of not acting. Change is achieved by citizens standing up and working on these problems without guarantee of any reward or even achieving any results (it took us five years to get from a unanimous vote in parliament to an actual policy).

- Big IT companies may be your friend or your enemy. But even if they are your friends they generally will not be at the forefront of political action that could be seen as controversial. Once policies are pushed beyond the controversial stage and have been adopted as official policy some of them will support it. Others, with much to lose, will fight you and the policy every step of the way. The more money or loss of market share is involved the more radical the methods that are employed. Massive lobbying, applying political pressure through foreign governments, bribery and all kinds of other activities are well-funded, well organised and very common.

- In moving forward with these policies it's the lack of knowledge and vision with the the management of institutions that is by far the biggest bottleneck. Without a clear policy from the top it is impossible to get things moving in most organisations.

- Another big problem in switching over local governments and other smaller organisations is the fact that many of the advantages of such a switch is national and/or macro-economic in nature while the initial cost and risk is micro-economic in nature. Hence again the need for a national policy.

- The funding required to make significant improvements is often not that large compared to the existing operational budgets. Investing in the smart use of IT in education for instance is something that can pay for itself very quickly. This is generally also true for adoption of open source and open standards in general. By just reducing the yearly spend on software licences by 1% the entire government program can be funded.

- Simply stopping the procurement of new licences (while continuing the use of those already paid for) can often free up enough money to finance a migration process. This has been the case in the city of Amsterdam and the French Gendarmes.

- The actual value of better government services or education is hard to quantify in monetary terms. How do we value improved responsiveness, transparency, national sovereignty in information processing and supporting local service companies instead of foreign software companies?

- IT education should focus on understanding methods and principles, not products. The product life-cycle is 18-36 months, the educational process takes many years and the length of a career is decades. Any education with a focus on products leads to knowledge that is irrelevant by the time the degree is finished. Teach people to drive a car, not just a Volkswagen or Tata.

- The cost of physical books per student per year in the Netherlands is now greater that the cost of a laptop. This is insane since the content of those books is generally written by teachers who get paid very little for it. Using the funds to pay those teachers instad of the publishers and releasing the content under a free licence will free up resources to develop better educational programs and provide all students with computational tools to use them. All without increasing the total cost compared to our current situation. The financial numbers will be different for India but the basic principle is the same and works even better given the larger scale of India. The cost of producing and distributing electronic educational content will drop practically to zero when compared to physical on a per-student basis. Using funds to support teachers in the use of e-learning with open content is the way forward.

CIS: How can a local support environment for open technologies be created? Can local SMEs ever substitute for the transnational proprietary giants?

AK: Whether SMEs can supplant multinationals depends on the product being replaced. CPU manufacturing requires a very high upfront investment in R&D and manufacturing capability. This is usually far beyond any but a handful of companies. With software development and services things are very different. Software development only requires a human with programming skills, a good idea and a computer. The Free Software Movement has shown clearly that distributed methods of software development can lead to high quality products with excellent local support systems. Local organisations (or communities that are not even organisations) can often understand local needs and respond to local changes much better, faster and cheaper than large, lumbering corporations. If local organisations work together globally to share knowledge (and code) for those parts they all need they can beat any centralised system.

What many senior business and government leaders are struggling with is the realisation that many of the 'truths' they have learned while studying economics or business management or some such subject turn out to be empirically incorrect. For example: it has become clear there is no causal relationship between the cost of software and its quality or utility. This must be a fact that is difficult to truly understand and accept if you have been brought up believing the gospel of the Anglo-Saxon economic worldview. The current economic crisis is a great help in questioning some of those beliefs and opens up room for new ideas about economic vs. societal value of technology and its relationship to businesses trying to earn a living.

CIS: Could you tell us about the Dutch government's rollback on electronic voting machines? What is your opinion on the use of electronic voting machines in the upcoming elections in India?

AK: From the mid '80s onward, voting computers were introduced in the Netherlands. By 2006, the vast majority of all elections were being performed by proprietary computer systems. Citizens would press a button and then go home to watch TV. Some software that no-one could control, monitor or properly audit would spit out a result and that would be it -- new government. Only a handful of engineers (all working for the companies that made the voting computers) actually knew what the software did and could make the computer system say anything they wanted.

When the city of Amsterdam (the last holdout using paper ballots) announced in 2006 that it was moving to voting computers, a group of activists organised a campaign to ban voting computers. We felt that the very nature of democracy was under attack by running the election process in a way that makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to check the validity of the election. It also makes fraud a lot harder to detect. Detectability of fraud is the one of the primary properties any election process should have. We all know election fraud is also possible with non-electronic means but keeping it a secret is much harder in such cases (as we saw in the US and Zimbabwean election over the last years). There was a actual case of suspected voter fraud in a Dutch municipal election and the judge concluded that while the fraud seemed likely it could not be proven. Regrettably for the suspected council member the fraud could also not be disproven. This shows very clearly that such a method is wholly unsuitable for application in real democratic processes.

Through lots of media attention, a few spectacular hacks showing the technical insecurity of the systems, and legal pressure, we forced the government in 2007 to reverse the approval of the voting computers and go back to an all-paper balloting system. This reversal is part of a global backlash against electronic voting systems. Comparable changes have been going on in many US states and all over Europe.

I think India should have voting process that can be understood and monitored by its citizens. This understanding and monitoring should be possible without requiring advanced degrees in computer science, software engineering and electronics. The only way to have such a process is when there is a paper ballot involved. Such a ballot could be printed by a computer to increase the ease of use but all-electronic solutions are ruled out by the basic demands of what a democracy is.

India should move to either all paper systems or voting computer backed-up by a voter-verified paper trail.

Are more extensive telling of the tale can be found here: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

This is a link to the Berlin CCC conference of Rop Gongrijp's 2007 presentation (with video): http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2342.en.html

http://www.blackboxvoting.org has a wealth of information on this subject.

CIS: What are the services provided by Gendo? Could you describe some of the projects that you have undertaken?

AK: My company (gendo.nl) also provides consulting services in the area of IT strategy, development of open IT architectures and implementing those in mixed open source/proprietary environments. We are currently advising both national and local government organisations in the implementation of policies and plans to move to open standards and open source software. We are also involved in projects where we do the actual development and implementation of new systems to enable innovation and lessen the dependance of our client on proprietary systems. Currently we are involved with a healthcare organisation where we are assisting in re-architecting their entire IT environment to allow service innovation, lower cost and increase information security.

We have also been involved in information security work and other auditing in the financial services and government sector. Here our activities focus on the grey area between technology and process.

Outside the field of IT we also do other consulting work such as scenario planning and strategic future studies, mostly for large corporate clients. Most of the big Anglo-Dutch multinationals such as Shell or Unilever are on our client list. We also have a large number of clients in the financial services and insurance sector.

For all of these clients we organise presentations and brainstorming sessions, often preceded by research. This helps the leaders in those organisations think about the nature of rapid, technology-driven changes in their markets and the world in general. These insights are then translated into new products, services and ways of delivering them.

Forgive me if this all sounds a bit vague but with many of these clients there is some confidentiality agreement involved.

CIS: Could you tell us more about yourself? Maybe you would like to share some formative experiences.

AK: Writing my first paper on black holes at age 11 showed me that grown-ups usually also don't know what is going on in the universe either. Despite rumours to the contrary parents, teachers, senior managers and politicians are not all-knowing and are stumbling about just like most two-year-olds where complex issues are concerned.

Over the last quarter century I've had this intuition reconfirmed again and again. In a world that is changing faster and faster experience becomes obsolete rather quickly and wisdom is no longer the sole purview of older, more senior, people. We need young smart-asses who have not yet learned what is impossible, so they go out there and do it.

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Arjen Kamphuis (born 1972) studied Science & Policy at Utrecht University and worked for IBM as Unix specialist, Tivoli consultant and software instructor. As IT-strategy consultant at Twynstra Gudde he was involved in starting up Kennisnet, the Dutch educational network. Since 2001 he is operating as an independent adviser of companies and governments. He co-authored, in 2002, a motion in parliament that ultimately turned, in 2007, into a full-fledged policy of the Dutch government mandating the use of open source software in all government and public sector IT operations.

Arjen at present divides his attention between IT-policy and the convergence of IT, biotechnology and nanotechnology and its social and economic implications. His customers include: Shell, Unilever, Pfizer, Stork, and various hospitals, governmental institutions and insurance companies. Arjen guest lectures on technology policy at various universities and colleges.

When not consulting Arjen is actively involved in (digital) civil liberties, the open source movement and criticizing the war on terror.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-arjen-kamphuis

Agenda for e-Access Meeting

sachia — 2011-08-22T12:53:56Z

Download the agenda for the 7 November 2008 meeting on e-Access.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/agenda%20for%20Nov%207th%20meeting.doc.htm

Accessible websites could become a reality

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:17:26Z

Article by L. Subramani in the Deccan Herald, 11 February 2009

Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO that researches on Internet's influence on families and individuals, had reported that about 99 per cent of government websites have failed in meeting with the accessibility guidelines issued by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

As Kanchan Pamnani speaks about web accessibility, she relates to us an old story learnt at school. A crane called his long-time friend, a wolf, for dinner and showed a tall, narrow jar that had delicious fishes in it. Unable to put its head inside and eat, the bewildered wolf returned home hungry, as the crane enjoyed putting its long beak inside the jar and tasted its content.

“What’s the point in information being available on the Internet? The visually challenged can’t access the content all the same, since the design and presentation of websites are not friendly to the screen reader software they use to access them through PC and laptops. And they need this the most, since it saves their time and energy when they get things done online,” Ms Pamnani said.

Despite being home to the world’s largest visually impaired population, the problem of inaccessible websites has been common in India. What hurts Ms Pamnani, a visually challenged lawyer and folks like her is the irony that several website developers in India comply with accessibility norms while creating websites for their foreign clients for fear of their product getting rejected and ignore the same while making sites for home-based organisations.

Some months ago, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO that researches on Internet's influence on families and individuals, had reported that about 99 per cent of government websites have failed in meeting with the accessibility guidelines issued by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It had highlighted CMC Velore, RBI and IIMB as some of the institutions whose websites are either too difficult or impossible for persons with visual impairment to access with their special screen reading software.

“Someone has to take responsibility for this situation,” Pamnani mentioned. “Given that people from the IT community have created these websites, they will have to take the blame.”

Screen readers, which the blind use to get content of a computer in voice, comprises of text to speech engine (a sort of virtual larynx) and the software that allows users to interface with the system. However, graphically rich webpages or features that are primarily visual in nature become a potential minefield to the screen reader since it doesn’t know how that information can be rendered “readable” to the TTS engine.

Mindful of this bottleneck, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which play the role of rule-makers in the way the web functions, designed a set of guidelines web developers must use while creating websites. For instance, it calls for giving heading levels which makes screen reader users to press “Shift and the number key depending on which heading level (one to five) they want to reach” and straight away go to the heading instead of going line by line.

For webpages to be fully accessible, the guidelines ask developers to use HTML tags and create alternative, verbally described pages (to the graphically rich ones) that can be read by screen readers. Probably fearing the labour it takes, developers of websites are alleged to be overlooking the guidelines and disability activists say that the negligence is proving to be too costly for them.

“These days, most of the government documents are available on the Internet,” said Javed Abidi, Chairman, National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled Persons (NCPEDP). “The technology is available and there is also the necessary awareness, but web developers seem to be taking this issue too lightly.”

Abidi and Pamnani have been talking about the situation with NASSCOM and were close to hosting a Dharna in front of the venue where the industry body was hosting its leadership summit on Wednesady. However, the protest was called off since NASSCOM agreed to focus on the issue.

“As a first step, the body has agreed to make their own website accessible,” Abidi, the New Delhi-based, wheelchair-bound disability activist, said. “Then they have agreed to urge their members to follow suit. Also, despite their attempts to take up accessibility as a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) issue, we want them to consider this as a rights issue, since the United Nations Convention for Rights of Persons With Disability (UNCRPD), which India has signed and ratified, states (in article 9) that access to information is a right.”

So Pamnani and several other visually challenged users of the Internet feel the day when they can log on to the website of an online store and purchase anything of their choice isn’t far away.

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To read the article at the Deccan Herald website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/accessible-websites-could-become-a-reality

Access India Meet-Up, May 2009

sachia — 2011-08-31T10:50:37Z

Meet-up of members of Access India mailing list (open to invitees only)

Access India is an informal mailing list for the visually impaired community in India, in which subscribers primarily discuss technology and various aspects of its accessibility. Although the Access India mailing list, originally started in 2002, was intended to be a forum for discussing technology-related issues for the blind, it has over the years expanded to cover a whole range of social, educational, cultural, political and other issues of significance to the visually impaired community in India. It is one of the largest mailing lists of blind persons in India and has roughly 500 members from all over the country. Members of the Access India community in various cities hold informal gatherings from time to time. An annual national meeting of Access India members is also held, where various issues affecting the community are discussed in detail.

Agenda

2 PM: Welcome address by CIS, hosts of the meet.

2:05 PM: A round of introduction by participants.

2:30 PM: Presentation by representatives from AreaPal, a Bangalore-based social networking group founded by students. areapal allows users to locate and connect with people on the basis of their area and neighborhood. It is a genuine neighbourhood networking service. Apart from that, they also provide user-generated news, events and marketplace based information about a user’s area. For further information, please visit www.areapal.com.

2:40 PM: Question time.

2:50 PM: Presentation by representatives from 3I Infotech, a company which recently launched e-Mudhra, an initiative to roll out digital signatures. The main focus of the discussion will be the accessibility of their product. For additional information, please visit http://www.e-mudhra.com/

3:00 PM: Question time.

5. 3:10 PM: Presentation by representatives from iVolunteer, an organization that matches volunteers seeking volunteering opportunities
with organizations and individuals looking for volunteers in Bangalore. To learn more about the organization, please visit www.ivolunteer.in

3:20 PM: Question time.

6. 3:30 PM: Introduction to Inclusive planet. Inclusive Planet is in the process of building the largest online portal for disabled persons in India. It is intended to be a comprehensive portal containing various resources including employment resources, educational resources, a match-making
channel, accessible books section, discussion boards, resources for medical facilities, sports and entertainment center, etc. We hope to have a
representative from Inclusive Planet demonstrate the site for us, inform us about its scope and expansion plans, and tell us about how we can contribute toward making the site totally accessible. Please visit http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/

3:50 PM: Question time.

4:00 PM: Tea followed by open discussion on technology.

4:45 PM: Vote of thanks and conclusion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/access-india-meet-up-may-2009

Access India Meet-Up, 16 May 2009

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:46Z

We reproduce a brief report on the meeting of the Access India mailing list hosted at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society on 16 May 2009, between 2.00 pm and 5.00 pm.

The second annual meeting of the members of the Access India mailing list (Bangalore chapter) was held at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society office on 16 May 2009. The meeting was attended by 28 participants.

The agenda included a presentation by representatives from AreaPal, a Bangalore-based social networking group founded by students. AreaPal allows users to locate and connect with people on the basis of their area and neighborhood. It is a genuine neighbourhood networking service. Apart from that, they also provide user-generated news, events and marketplace based information about a user’s area. For further information, please visit www.areapal.com.

This was followed by a presentation by representatives from 3I Infotech, a company which recently launched e-Mudhra, an initiative to roll out digital signatures. The main focus of the discussion was the accessibility of their product. For additional information, please visit http://www.e-mudhra.com/

The next presentation scheduled was by representatives from iVolunteer, an organization that matches volunteers seeking volunteering opportunities with organizations and individuals looking for volunteers in Bangalore. To learn more about the organization, please visit www.ivolunteer.in

The final presentation was an introduction to Inclusive Planet. Inclusive Planet is in the process of building the largest online portal for disabled persons in India. It is intended to be a comprehensive portal containing various resources including employment resources, educational resources, a match-making channel, accessible books section, discussion boards, resources for medical facilities, sports and entertainment center, etc. Please visit http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/

One of the participants wrote a report on the meeting for the mailing list, and we reproduce this below:

The Bangalore offline Access India meeting, which took place today at the CIS (Centre for Internet and Society) campus, was a resounding success. About 30 AI members from different parts of the country were present to listen to four presentations made by IVolunteer, 3i Infotec, Area Pal and Inclusive Planet. All the presenters spoke about their services/products/organisations, and this proved to be useful for those present. For instance, the IVolunteer presentation opened the way for many to request volunteer help (as disability services is one of 12 areas for which the organisation helped with volunteers). Obviously, those present were interested in volunteers willing to read/scan books for them and other similar services.

Interestingly, the idea of digital signatures, which the 3i Infotec representative dealt with, prompted discussion on using digital signatures as a means of certifying disabled persons who wanted to buy railway tickets online. Sanjeev, the representative, was positive that this can be done.

Kavi Raj, who is from Area Pal, explained how their online platform linked people in the same neighbourhood/campus helped them exchange news and information relevant to them. Rounding up the interesting evening was Sachin from Inclusive Planet, who spoke about readable.in, an accessible online space where (visually impaired) people can upload/download books and share the books they have. He said the site already contains about 15,000 ebooks and asked for contributions. Inclusive Planet, which looks at services from the disability perspective, is poised to introduce spaces for restaurant/public place ratings (on the basis of their accessibility) and matrimonial services for the disabled where the emphasis will be on their abilities.

The evening was made more fun and interesting by our hostess Nirmita Narasimhan (attending on behalf of CIS), who introduced her organisation to the audience and gave us a chance to hear each other's voices for the first time (by letting us introduce ourselves). Thanks to Nirmita and Geetha's efforts and hard work, the event was a success. And, of course, we shouldn't forget the space and snacks provided by CIS and the wonderful support their staff provided in escorting us back and forth in the office building.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/access-india-meet-up-16-may-2009

‘Housing the Democratic City’: Panel Discussion Featuring Bill Dunster, Cino Zucchi and Sunil Abraham

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:42:02Z

Sunil Abraham, Director (Policy), Centre for Internet and Society, attended the first edition of the Biennale Democrazia in Turin, 22-26 April 2009. He participated in a panel discussion on the topic 'Housing the Democratic City'. This blog entry links to videos of his contribution to the discussion and reproduces the promotional material on the event as a whole.

In these videos (Part I, Part II & Part III) Sunil Abraham replies to three questions on the role of democracy in contemporary urban form:

In the future do you envisage a home for everyone?

Part I - Housing The Democratic City, Torino April 26, 2009.

How can we proceed towards more sustainable – or less unsustainable – development in the future?

Part II - Housing The Democratic City, Torino April 26 2009.

In your opinion what makes an urban place ‘democratic’, and is there a relationship between architecture, urbanism and democracy?

Part III - Housing The Democratic City, Torino April 26 2009.

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Cluster in collaboration with the Architects Association of Turin (FOAT) participates at the Democracy Biennial.

The first edition of the Biennale Democrazia, will take place in Turin the 22 – 26 April 2009, it is an international cultural event entirely dedicated to the ethical and political project of democracy a political system which, by definition, is in constant evolution and development, continually facing new challenges to be overcome. The Democracy Biennial is organized by the City of Turin, the Italia Committee and the Piedmont Regional government. It forms part of a series of programmes and public events called Esperienza Italia organized to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy in 1861. The Democracy Biennial takes its inspiration from the profound studies on democracy carried out by Norberto Bobbio and it is intended to function as a tool for spreading a culture of Democracy that can also be put into practice in everyday life. It aims to create a permanent, ongoing workshop, open to the public, that explores and debates, from both a local and international point of view, the fundamental values of democracy, the forms it has adopted and the challenges it faces today. The event will consist of different preparatory activities (workshops, debates, readings, international forums, in-depth seminars and events actively involving citizens (as well as films, theatre and music events).

In partnership with the Biennale Democrazia the Architects Association of Turin (FOAT), has curated a section, within the event program, entitled “Housing the Democratic City”. The section offers a series of sessions: a workshop, conferences and a call for paper that aim to stimulate reflections on issues related to housing the city, for a future of urban democracy.

In occasion of this important event Cluster, in collaboration with the Architects Association (FOAT), has invited a collaborator from Bangalore, India, Sunil Abraham to speak at the conference “Housing the Democratic City” at Teatro Gobetti on Sunday 26th April. Other participating speakers are Bill Dunster (UK), Cino Zucchi (Italy).

Sunil Abraham is an industrial and production engineer from Bangalore in India. In 1998 he founded Mahiti, an association dedicated to reducing the cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the voluntary sector. In August 2008 he co-founded The Centre for Internet and Society, that brings together a team of practitioners, theoreticians, researchers and artists to work on the emerging field of Internet and Society to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange. Sunil contributed to the last issue of Cluster, Transmitting Architecture in a dual interview and discussion with John Thackara entitled “Design in Urban Democracy:a question of survival?” here.

Sunil Abraham will also be speaking in two other sections of the Biennial on April 25 ‘Democracy and India’ with Prof. Federico Squarcini, professor of History of Indian Religions, University of Florence and ‘Democracy and Technology’ with the Politecnico of Turin. More details on the programme coming soon.

For info. please visit: Biennale Democrazia Order of the Architects of Turin (FOAT)

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Originally posted at http://www.cluster.eu/v2/themes/democracy/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/housing-the-democratic-city

'The Dark Face of Google'

sachia — 2009-03-24T06:51:47Z

Talk by Patrice Riemens

The extraordinary rise of Google Inc. from a 'confidential' search site in the late nineties, the heydays of Altavista, to its present preminent status on the internet, has attracted a lot of attention. The admirers see Google as the incarnation of things to come, not only in information retrieval & management, and not even on the Internet only, but in the economy and society as a whole. The nay-sayers variously view Google as a flattening behemoth of digital information, or as a cultural war machine, bent on the Americanisation of the planet, and generally as a mendacious commercial monopoly pretending to 'do no evil' while hypocritically promoting open source, access, and life in general.

Outside this discussion stand an ever growing mass of millions of users who ask no questions, profess neither admiration or hatred (and if so, rather the former), but are happy to use the search engine and the many other services provided by Google. That they hereby gladly if unwittingly contribute to reinforcing the assets of Google, in the words of Yann Moulier Boutang, "the only company in the world that is able to make 14 million people work for it at any given moment, for free", is one of the many starkly under-lighted aspects of this Internet giant's operative mode.

'The Dark Face of Google' is the title of the book written two years ago by the Italian Ippolita Collective, which Patrice Riemens is currently translating. Ippolita's brief is neither eulogizing nor demonising Google, but to understand it, especially in its less advertised aspects. Their aim is to educate Google's users, not to wean them away from it, and to politicise the discussion about search, digital services, and the management of information and knowledge in general. Patrice Riemens will discuss a few points in this context.

* The ways in which Google determines, undermines, or enforces existing power and knowledge structures

* The Google Books Project and how it reinforces IPR tyranny

* Google's local policies and how they affect fundamental civil liberties

This talk, like Ippolita's book, is intended as a general, informed introduction to an issue that has been insufficiently discussed, due to media hype, and the apparent innocuousness of a readily available, extremely fast and effective, free, Internet service.

Speaker

Patrice Riemens is a social geographer by education and a private intellectual and internet activist by choice. He is a promoter of Open Knowledge and Free Software, and has been involved as a "FLOSSopher" (a 'philosopher' of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movements) at the Asia Source and Africa Source camps, held to promote FLOSS among non-governmental organisations. He is a member of the Dutch hackers' group Hippies from hell.

He has formerly worked with De Waag Center for Old and New Media, an institute housed in an old castle in Amsterdam, on the cutting edge of technology, culture, education and industry. Patrice has also been on the staff of Multitudes, a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/the-dark-face-of-google

'Internet and Deliberative Democracy': Panel Discussion Featuring Sunil Abraham, Philippe Aigrain and Mario Losano

sachia — 2011-08-04T04:42:20Z

Sunil Abraham, Director (Policy), Centre for Internet and Society, attended the first edition of the Biennale Democrazia in Turin, 22-26 April 2009. He participated in a panel discussion on the topic 'Internet and Deliberative Democracy'. This blog entry links to a video of his contribution to the discussion.

Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore expresses previously unpublished views on piracy, attribution and the IP regime in a panel discussion on Internet and Deliberative Democracy with Philippe Aigrain (Sopinspace), and Prof. Mario Losano (jurist, Univ. Piemonte Orientale) moderated by J.C. De Martin of NEXA Center for Internet and Society at the premier edition of the Democracy Biennial, Torino May 25 2009.

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Please click here to read the original post on the Cluster website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/internet-and-deliberative-democracy