Centre for Internet and Society

World Narrow Web

pranesh — 2012-03-27T16:00:24Z

Censorship and how govt reacts to it may push us to country-specific networks, writes Pranesh Prakash in an article published in the Indian Express on 4 February 2012.

Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, recently announced that “[today] we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world”. In a move a few weeks ago, Blogger, Google’s blogging service, in effect announced something similar, by saying that default they would redirect Blogger users trying to get to Blogspot.com addresses (like http://example.blogspot.com) to their respective country sites (like http://example.blogspot.in). Twitter’s announcement was greeted with much disapproval by many Twitter users, as a move towards censorship, with some talking (on Twitter) about a boycott. Blogger’s move was hidden away, deep within a help page, and is being noticed now, and is causing quite a stir as caving in to censorship. Are these concerns justified? Before answering that question, let’s look at what the platforms’ announcements really say.

Twitter has given itself the ability to withhold specific tweets and users in particular countries where that content is legally required to be removed (generally with a court order). Their earlier option, they inform us, was to block the offending tweets and users in all countries. Apart from this, they will publish a notice for each tweet/ user that is blocked in a country. They will also be proactively publishing every removal request they receive at ChillingEffects.org, which allows us to hold them to account and question their decision to remove tweets.

Google, by redirecting you to the country-specific Blogger, is allowing for country-level removal of both blogs and individual blog posts. However, they also note that you can circumvent this by using a special “no redirect” address. Google currently forwards all search-related removals, but does not do so for Blogger-related requests, and all copyright-related complaints to ChillingEffects.org. Google does publish aggregate data relating to censorship of Blogger, on which free-speech advocates have been asking them to provide more granular information.

There are three problems. First, while Twitter was just as open to repressive governments’ requests last week, by making this change, they are advertising this fact to such governments. Thailand has noted it, and has congratulated Twitter.

Second, as Rob Beschizza, managing editor of the website Boing Boing, pointed out, there have been no instances of political content having been removed by Twitter. Even British courts’ super-injunctions (injunctions on speech, that prevent you from mentioning the fact that there is an injunction) were defeated by Twitter users, which only showed that attempts to censor material results in even more attention being drawn to it (which is popularly known as the “Streisand Effect”). So, does this now mean that Twitter will start applying local laws to judge “valid and applicable legal requests”, instead of American laws? What if the law is as bad as that which exists in India, where they are required to remove content within 36 hours based on any affected person’s complaint — without a court order? Will they still act on it? If they don’t, will the government or courts order Twitter.com to be blocked in India, finding it liable for illegal omissions?

Third, this trend points increasingly to the fact that we are witnessing a Balkanisation of the Web as more countries start asserting their sovereignty online. As Chinese dissident journalist Michael Anti pointed out recently, it seems we now need visas (read “circumvention techniques”) to visit the international Web. But even then, there is no longer a singular “international” Web, but an Indian Web and a Guatemalan Web, and an Angolan Web. And the government’s recent proposal of requiring companies to locate their servers in India is a move towards this (apart from being a move towards killing cloud computing).

That having been said, the reality is that the CEOs of Google, Google India, and Microsoft have been summoned to appear in Indian courts for allowing their users to publish material which they don’t know about, which is in a sealed envelope (and most of the accused companies haven’t been shown yet), and which they weren’t even asked once to remove.

The Intermediary Guidelines Rules passed by the Department of Information Technology in April 2011 do not require the user, whose content it is, to be told that there is a complaint, nor to be given a chance to defend themselves. It does not even require public notice that the content has been removed.

The truth is, the transparency around censorship that Google and Twitter are providing is far better than what most other companies are providing. For instance, Big Rock, an Indian DNS provider, suspended the CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com web address on the basis of a seemingly not legal request by the Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch, and did so without any public notice and without even informing the cartoonist whose web address it was. At least Google and Twitter are pushing back against non-legal requests, and refusing to remove content that doesn’t violate local laws. Single-mindedly criticising them will only put off other companies from following in their footsteps.

Instead of criticising those who are actually working towards transparency in censorship, we should encourage them and others, push intermediaries not to cave in to unreasonable censorship requests, prevent them from over-censoring on their own, and push hard for the government to incorporate their best practices as part of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules.

The original article was published in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/world-narrow-web

Digital Futures: Internet Freedom and Millennials

nishant — 2012-02-15T04:25:50Z

Last year was a turbulent year for freedom of speech and online expression in India. Early in 2011 we saw the introduction of an Intermediaries Liability amendment to the existing Information Technologies Law in the country, which allowed intermediaries like internet service providers (ISPs), digital content platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) and other actors managing online content, to remove material that is deemed objectionable without routing it through a court of law. Effectively, this was an attempt at crowdsourcing censorship, where at the whim or fancy of any person who flags information as offensive, it could be removed from digital platforms, writes Nishant Shah in DMLcentral on 3 February 2012.

While we were still reeling from the potential abuse this could lead to – from weekend drunken games where people send take-down notices on an ad hoc basis to regressive fundamentalists using this to silence voices of protests – we encountered another shock. The Information and Technologies minister of India called some of the biggest social networking platforms that support user generated content to exercise a regime of self-regulation and censorship. Citing content that was considered slanderous to political leaders in the country and potentially offensive to the religious sentiments of certain groups, he called for a ‘pre-screening’ of online content – invoking visions of thought police, where an army of thousands will be trained to read your personal and private information, sift it for offensive content, and disallow it to be published online.

And while we deal with the aftermath of what this might mean to the future of openness and our constitutionally enshrined rights of freedom of speech and expression, there was another shock that awaited us in 2012. Even as I write this, Facebook and Google – two of the largest social media platforms in India – have been 'implicated' in a gamut of civil and criminal charges. It has been alleged that these companies knowingly allowed obscene and immoral material capable of inciting prurience, communal tension, hatred and violence, to proliferate in their systems because it helps generate revenue. Because the people who uploaded the information are outside the jurisdiction of the court, they cannot be punished but these intermediaries that have allowed this content that is deemed ‘obscene, lascivious, indecent and shocking’, are now being held responsible.

There has been a lot of debate in and outside the country about the implications this has for the form and nature of information online. Freedom of speech and expression, information regulation regimes in emerging information societies, resurgence of authoritative governmentality in the face of quickly eradicating sovereignty, and the diminishing openness of the web, have all been variously discussed, much like the debates around SOPA/PIPA discussions in the US. In all of these conversations, there has been talk about the future but not about the people whose futures are the most at stake – digital natives. Pulling from my research, here are some summarized reflections of members of a younger generation pondering their digital futures:

Innovation: One of the tropes that allows digital natives intimate relationships with their technology gadgets, platforms and environments is to innovate. Especially in the global south where we cannot take ubiquitous and affordable access to the internet for granted, innovation is not merely about creativity in producing new content. Innovation is in mobilizing meager resources in order to achieve large tasks. Innovation is in cutting through existing boundaries of inequity and building communities of learning and information. Innovation is in finding ways by which access can be facilitated for large user bases. Free and open information is the reward that follows innovation. There is consensus that restricting access to information is a negative incentive for those approaching the information superhighway. And for some it is also “a challenge to find ways of accessing that information. They can ban it, but by the time they will ban it, our way of accessing it will have changed!”

Information Read/Write: Sometimes the promise of digital networks providing abundant information and knowledge, which is free to access and consume, overrides the actual allure of speech and expression. As one interlocutor explained in Wikipedia terms, “more people access Wikipedia to consume information others have produced rather than contribute to it...and it is the same everywhere. It is fun to write, but it is fun to write only because there is somebody reading it. Sometimes I go online to read rather than write.” The censorship debates often restrict themselves to freedom of speech and expression, but what they overlook is that this also interferes with the freedom to read. Reading is a form of engagement, interaction, formation of trust and affection online. And when information can no longer be easily read, it will have drastic effects on how young people connect and form communities.

Mapping Learning: For many digital natives in my work, the digital domain is not only a playground but also a space of learning. Not learning in its didactic forms, replacing universities and offering abundance of knowledge. For some, the digital space is a new process of learning. It helps them negotiate and cope with their formal curricula and offers alternative sources to understand and analyze reality. As many in our research group mentioned, “we already have access to enough academic material through our libraries. What we find on the internet are things that help us understand ideas through things that are familiar to us.” When pressed for an example, I was shown a wide range of popular and academic, cultural and social spaces – blogs, videos, movies, music, commentaries, tweets, mashups, etc., which the students often map back to their existing curriculum. “Sometimes the textbooks talk about things that happened before we were born. Or belonging to countries we don’t know much about,” explained a 19-year-old. So as a group they try and pull different and more familiar objects back into their discussions, using the web, its search potential, and social networking sites as filters to gain access to relevant knowledge.

It is in the nature of information to be filtered or censored. Even at a personal level we constantly filter out information that is not desirable or useful to us. It is understandable that certain kinds of information that are produced with malicious intent needs to be controlled. However, the recent attempts attack the very structures that define the social web as we understand it now -- openness, distribution, sharing, collaboration, co-creation and interactivity. For digital natives, being digital is not just about infrastructure and access. It is an integral part of how they embed themselves and negotiate with our information society. Regulation of information is not just about resolving the crisis of the present but also about shaping the digital futures for a generation that is growing up digital.

Banner image credit: zebble http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/6080622/

Read the original published in DML Central

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-futures-internet-freedom-and-millennials-2

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the Right to "Privacy Bill"

natasha — 2012-02-15T04:27:28Z

On January 21, 2012 a public conference “Privacy Matters” was held at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. It was the sixth conference organised in the series of regional consultations held as “Privacy Matters”. The present conference analyzed the Draft Privacy Bill and the participants discussed the challenges and concerns of privacy in India.

The conference was organized by Privacy India in partnership with the Centre for Internet & Society, International Development Research Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the Godrej Culture Lab and Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Participants included a wide range of stakeholders that included the civil society, NGO representatives, consumer activists, students, educators, local press, and advocates.

Comments to the Right to Privacy Bill

Welcome

Prashant Iyengar was the Lead Researcher with Privacy India, opened the conference with an explanation of Privacy India’s mandate to raise awareness, spark civil action and promote democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. He summarized the five “Privacy Matters” series previously organised across India in Kolkata on January 23, 2011, in Bangalore on February 5, 2011, in Ahmedabad on March 26, 2011, in Guwahati on June 23, 2011 and in Chennai on August 6, 2011.

Keynote Address

Na. Vijayashankar (popularly known as Naavi), a Bangalore based e-business consultant, delivered the key note address on the quest of a good privacy law in India.

He described the essential features of good privacy legislation. In analyzing the Draft Privacy Bill’s definition of the right to privacy, he suggested it should be defined through the “right to personal liberty” rather than through what constitutes “infringements”. Mr. Vijayashankar went on to explain that the “privacy right” should be taken beyond “information protection” and defined as a “personal privacy or a sense of personal liberty without constraints by the society”. He explained the various classifications and levels of protection associated with the availability and disclosure of data. He expressed concerns regarding monitoring of data processors and suggested that data controllers have contractual agreements between data processors, so as to ensure an obligation of data security practices. He also called for the simplification and division of offences and suggested numerous reasons as to why the Cyber Appellate Tribunal would not be an ideal monitoring mechanism or authority. See Naavi's presenation here

Session I: Privacy and the Legal System

Dr. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India

Dr. Krishnaswamy started off the presentation by questioning the normative assumptions the Draft Privacy Bill makes. He referred to the controversy of Newt Gingrich's second marriage, to question the range of moral interests that were involved. The Bill falls short in accounting for dignity in relation to privacy.

He described the Draft Privacy Bill as a reasonable advance, given where privacy laws were before. Although, he feels that it does fall short, in terms of a narrow position, on what privacy law should do. He also questioned if it satisfies constitutional standards. He stressed the importance of philosophical work around the Draft Privacy Bill considering that the nature of privacy is not neat and over-arching.

Privacy and the Constitutional Law

N S Nappinai, Advocate, High Court, Mumbai,

Nappinai spoke on the constitutional right to privacy. She explained the substantial development of Article 21 of the Constitution of India to include the ‘right to privacy’ with regards to its interpretation and application. She described the different shift of the application of the right to privacy in the West in comparison to India. The West has moved from the right to privacy pertaining to property to the right to privacy concerning personal rights, whereas India moved from personal rights to property rights. She outlined three aspects of privacy: dignity, liberty and property rights.

Ms. Nappinai dissected the Bill in its major components: interception, surveillance, method and manner of personal data, health information, collection, processing and use of personal data. Using these components, she questioned what precedence exists? What should be further protected or reversed? What lessons should legislators draw from?

Shortcomings of the Draft Right to Privacy Bill falls include:

The objects and reasons section in the Draft Privacy Bill declares the right to privacy to every citizen as well as delineates the collection and dissemination of data. Nappinai dismisses the need for this delineation on the grounds that data protection is an inherent part of the right to privacy, it is not exclusive.
Large focus on transmission of data. The provisions do not account for property rights pertaining to the right to privacy. Therefore, the ‘knock-and-enter’ rule, the ‘right to be left alone’ and the ‘right to happiness’ should be included.
Applicability of the Bill should extend to all persons as well as data residing within the territory. It would be self-defeating if it only includes citizens, considering that the Constitution extends to all persons within the territory.
The right to dignity is unaccounted for.

See Nappinai's presentation here

Session II: Privacy and Freedom of Expression

Apar Gupta, Advocate, Delhi

Apar Gupta is an advocate based in Delhi who specializes in IP and electronic commerce law, spoke predominantly on the interplay between privacy and freedom of expression. He used the example of an advocate tweeting about his criticism of a judges’ ruling, to illustrate how different realms of online anonymity enable freedom of speech. He went beyond the traditional realm of journalistic architecture such as television channels or newspapers and explained online community disclosure.

Mr. Gupta provided a practical example of Indian Kanoon, a popular online database of Indian court decisions. Because Indian Kanoon is linked to the Google search engine, many individuals involved in civil and criminal matters have requested Indian Kanoon to remove the court judgments, under privacy claims. This particularly occurs with individuals involved in matrimonial cases. However, as court judgment constitute public records India Kanoon only removes court judgments when requested by a court order.

He described the several ways legislators can define privacy and freedom of expression. Considering that the privacy of an individual may border upon freedom of speech and expression, he questioned whether or not privacy should override the right to freedom of speech and expression. In addition, Mr. Gupta discussed the debate on whether or not the Privacy Bill should override all existing provisions in other laws.

Additionally, he analyzed the provisions of the Draft Privacy Bill using three judgments. In these judgments, different entities sought of various forms of speech to be blocked under privacy claims. He spoke about the dangers of a statutory right for privacy that does not safeguard freedom of speech and expression. Considering that the privacy statute may allow for a form of civil action permitting private parties to approach courts to stop certain publications, he stressed the importance for legislators to ensure balanced privacy legislation inclusive of freedom of speech and expression.

Sexual Minorities and Privacy

Danish Sheikh, researcher at Alternative Law Forum

Danish examined the status of sexual minorities in the light of privacy framework in India. The tag of decriminalization has served to greatly alter the way institutions approach the question of privacy when it comes to sexual minorities. He used the Naz Foundation judgment as a chronological marker to map the developments in the right to privacy and sexual minorities over the years.

He outlined four key effects on the right to privacy due to the Naz Foundation judgment:

Prepared the understanding of privacy as a positive right and placed obligations on the state,
Discussed privacy as dealing with persons and not just places, it took into account decisional privacy as well as zonal privacy,
Connected privacy with dignity and the valuable worth of individuals, and
Included privacy on one’s autonomous identity.

He described various incidents that took place before the Naz Foundation judgment, pre-Naz, that altered the way we conceived of queer rights in general and privacy in particular, including the Lucknow incidents, transgender toilets, passport forms, the medical establishment and lesbian unions. Post-Naz, he described two incidents including the Allahabad Muslim University sting operation as well as the TV9 “Expose” that captured public imagination.

He concluded by asking: “What do these stories tell us about privacy?” The issues faced by the transgender community tell us that privacy doesn’t necessarily encompass a one-size-fits-all approach, and can raise as many questions as it answers. The issues faced by the Lucknow NGOs display the institutionalized disrespect for privacy and that has marginally more devastating consequences for the homosexual community by the spectre of outing. The issues faced by lesbian women evidence yet another need for breaching the public/private divide, demonstrating how the protection of the law might be welcome in the family sphere. Alternate sexual orientation and gender identity might bring the community under a common rubric, but distilling the components of that rubric is essential for engaging in any kind of useful understanding of the community and the kind of privacy violations it suffers – or engage with situations when the lack of privacy is empowering.

Session III: Privacy and National Security

Menaka Guruswamy, Advocate, Supreme Court of India

Menaka explored national security and its relationship to privacy. In her presentation, she compared the similar manner in which the courts approach national security and privacy issues. The courts feel national security and privacy issues are too complex to define, therefore, they take a case-by-case approach.

Ms. Guruswamy described three incidents that urged her to question national security and privacy. First, she was interested in the lack of regulation surrounding intelligence agencies and was involved in the introduction of the Regulations of Intelligence Agencies Bill as a private members bill. Second, national security litigation between the Salwa Judum judgment and the State of Chhattisgarh is an example of how national security triumphs constitutional rights and values. Third, privacy in the context of the impending litigation of Naz Foundation in the Supreme Court. She described the larger conversation of national security focus on values of equality and privacy. She discussed the following questions that serve in advancing certain conception of rights:

How do we posit privacy which necessarily, philosophically as well as judicially, is carved out as the right of an individual to be left alone?
What are the consequences when national security, which is posited as the rights of the nation, is in conflict with the right of the individual to be left alone?
Considering that constitutional rights are posited as a public facet of citizenship how does a right to privacy play in that context?

Privacy and UID

R. Ramakumar, professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Prof. Ramakumar spoke on UID, its collection of information and the threat to individual privacy. First, he provided a historical trajectory of national security that has led to increased identity card schemes. He described the concrete connection between UID and national security.

He briefed the gathering on the objectives of the UID project. He described several false claims as proposed by the UIDAI. He explicitly disproved the UIDAI claim that Aadhaar is voluntary. He did this by comparing various legislations associated with the National Population Registrar that had provisions mandating the inclusion of the UID number.

He went on to explain that the misplaced emphasis of technology to handle large populations remains unproven. He described two specific violations of privacy inherent in the UID system: convergence of information and consent. The UID database makes it possible for the linking or convergence of information across silos. In addition, consent is unaccounted for in the UID system. The UID enrollment form requires consent from a person to share their information. However, the software of the enrollment form automatically checks ‘yes’, therefore you are not asked. Even if you disagree, it automatically checks ‘yes’. Default consent raises the important question, “to what extent are we the owners of our information?” and “what are the privacy implications?”

Mr. Ramakumar was once asked, by Yashwant Sinha in a Parliamentary Standing Committee meeting, “Is the Western concept of privacy important in developing country like India?”. Using this question posed to him, he stressed the importance of privacy to be understood as a globally valued right, entitlement and freedom. He also referred to Amartya Sen’s work on individual freedoms.

Conclusion

During the daylong consultation numerous questions and themes relating to privacy were discussed:

How is the right to privacy defined?
How can the Draft Privacy Bill redefine the right to privacy?
How can reasonable deterrence mechanisms be included?
Does duplication of the right to privacy exists in different statutes?
Is the Cyber Appellate Tribunal an ideal monitoring mechanism or authority?
What are the circumstances under which authorized persons can exercise the Right of privacy invasion?
How can the Draft Privacy Bill account for the right to dignity?
How much information should the State be allowed to collect?
How can citizens become more informed about the use of their information and the privacy implications involved?
What would be the appropriate balance or trade-off between security and civil liberties?
What are the dangers with permitting the needs of national security to trump competing values?
What are the consequences for the homosexual community, when faced with institutionalized disregard for privacy?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/privacy-matters-analyzing-the-right-to-privacy-bill

How India Makes E-books Easier to Ban than Books (And How We Can Change That)

pranesh — 2012-02-21T11:50:56Z

Without getting into questions of what should and should not be unlawful speech, Pranesh Prakash chooses to take a look at how Indian law promotes arbitrary removal and blocking of websites, website content, and online services, and how it makes it much easier than getting offline printed speech removed.

E-Books Are Easier To Ban Than Books, And Safer

Contrary to what Mr. Sibal's recent hand-wringing at objectionable online material might suggest, under Indian laws currently in force it is far easier to remove material from the Web, by many degrees of magnitude, than it is to ever get them removed from a bookstore or an art gallery. To get something from a bookstore or an art gallery one needs to collect a mob, organize collective outrage and threats of violence, and finally convince either the government or a magistrate that the material is illegal, thereby allowing the police to seize the books or stop the painting from being displayed. The fact of removal of the material will be noted in various records, whether in government records, court records, police records or in newspapers of record. By contrast, to remove something from the Web, one needs to send an e-mail complaining about it to any of the string of 'intermediaries' that handle the content: the site itself, the web host for the site, the telecom companies that deliver the site to your computer/mobile, the web address (domain name) provider, the service used to share the link, etc. Under the 'Intermediary Guidelines Rules' that have been in operation since 11th April 2011, all such companies are required to 'disable access' to the complained-about content within thirty-six hours of the complaint. It is really that simple.

"That's ridiculous," you think, "surely he must be exaggerating." Think again. A researcher working with us at the Centre for Internet and Society tried it out, several times, with many different intermediaries and always with frivolous and flawed complaints, and was successful six out of seven times . Thus it is easier to prevent Flipkart or Amazon from selling Rushdie's Midnight's Children than it is to prevent a physical bookstore from doing so: today Indira Gandhi wouldn't need to win a lawsuit in London against the publishers to remove a single line as she did then; she would merely have to send a complaint to online booksellers and get the book removed. It is easier to block Vinay Rai's Akbari.in (just as CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com was recently blocked) than it is to prevent its print publication. Best of all for complainants: there is no penalty for frivolous complaints such as those sent by us, nor are any records kept of who's removed what. Such great powers of censorship without any penalties for their abuse are a sure-fire way of ensuring a race towards greater intolerance, with the Internet — that republic of opinions and expressions — being a casualty.

E-Book Bans Cannot Be Challenged

In response to some of the objections raised, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology, ever the dutiful guardian of free speech, noted that if you have a problem with access to your content being 'disabled', you could always approach a court and get that ban reversed. Unfortunately, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology forgot to take into account that you can't contest a ban/block/removal if you don't know about it. While they require all intermediaries to disable access to the content within thirty-six hours, they forgot to mandate the intermediary to tell you that the content is being removed. Whoops. They forgot to require the intermediary to give public notice that content has been removed following a complaint from person ABC or corporation XYZ on such-and-such grounds. Whoops, again.

So while records are kept, along with reasons, of book bans, there are no such records required to be kept of e-book bans.

E-Book Censors Are Faceless

Vinay Rai is a brave man. He is being attacked by fellow journalists who believe he's disgracing the professional upholders of free-speech, and being courted by television channels who believe that he should be encouraged to discuss matters that are sub judice. He is viewed by some as a man who's playing politics in courts on behalf of unnamed politicians and bureaucrats, while others view him as being bereft of common-sense for believing that companies should be legally liable for not having been clairvoyant and removing material he found objectionable, though he has never complained to them about it, and has only provided that material to the court in a sealed envelope. I choose, instead, to view him as a scrupulous and brave man. He has a face, and a name, and is willing to openly fight for what he believes in. However, there are possibly thousands of unscrupulous Vinay Rais out there, who know the law better than he does, and who make use not of the court system but of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, firmly assured by those Rules that their censorship activities will never be known, will never be challenged by Facebook and Google lawyers, and will never be traced back to them.

Challenging Invisible Censorship

Dear reader, you may have noticed that this is a bit like a trial involving Free Speech in which Free Speech is presumed guilty upon complaint, is not even told what the charges against it are, has not been given a chance to prove its innocence, and has no right to meet its accusers nor to question them. Yet, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology continues to issue press releases defending these Rules as fair and just, instead of being simultaneously Orwellian and Kafkaesque. These Rules are delegated legislation passed by the Department of Information Technology under s.79 of the Information Technology Act. The Rules were laid before Parliament during the 2011 Monsoon session. We at CIS believe that these Rules are *ultra vires* the IT Act as well as the Constitution of India, not only with respect to what is now (newly) proscribed online (which in itself is enough to make it unconstitutional), but how that which is purportedly unlawful is to be removed. We have prepared an alternative that we believe is far more just and in accordance with our constitutional principles, taking on best practices from Canada, the EU, Chile, and Brazil, while still allowing for expeditious removal of unlawful material. We hope that the DIT will consider adopting some of the ideas embodied in our draft proposal.

As Parliament passed the IT Act in the midst of din, without any debate, it is easy to be skeptical and wonder whether Rules made under the IT Act will be debated. However, I remain hopeful that Parliament will not only exercise its power wisely, but will perform its solemn duty — borne out of each MP's oath to uphold our Constitution — by rejecting these Rules.

Photo credit: Lynn Gardner, under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence*

This was reproduced in Outlook Magazine on 27 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-ebooks-easier-to-ban-than-books

Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: A Global Survey of Policy Interventions and Good Practices

nirmita — 2012-10-08T05:43:46Z

The Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies and the Centre for Internet and Societies in cooperation with the Hans Foundation have published the Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: A Global Survey of Policy Interventions and Good Practices. The book consists of a Foreword by Axel Leblois, an Introduction and four chapters. Deepti Bharthur, Axel Leblois and Nirmita Narasimhan have contributed to the chapters.

Foreword

Universal Service definitions have been developed by 125 countries and are the foundation for policies and programs ensuring that telecommunications are available to all categories of population. Universal service funds are the main vehicle used to fund those programs, primarily addressing imbalances such as lack of availability of services in rural areas. While geographic coverage has vastly improved over the past decade with wireless infrastructure, the scope of Universal Service has expanded to include other categories of underserved populations.

Among those, persons with disabilities and senior citizens, who represent 15% of the world population[1] are an increasing concern for legislators and regulators. Basic accessibility features for public telephone booths, fixed line or wireless handsets, customer services in alternate formats such as Braille, or assistive services such as relay services for hard of hearing or deaf persons are in fact not implemented in a majority countries.[2]

To address those issues, several countries have expanded the scope of their national definition of Universal Service Obligation to include persons with disabilities allowing programs promoting the accessibility of information and communication technologies to be covered by Universal Service Funds.

The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by over 150 countries since March 31st, 2007 will likely accelerate this trend: States Parties have an obligation to ensure that Information and Communication Technologies and Services are made accessible to persons with disabilities. This can be done by aligning the definition of Universal Service Obligation with article 9 of the Convention and expanding the charter of Universal Service Funds to cover programs promoting accessibility for persons with disabilities. This report is the first attempt to document how Universal Service definitions and related policies and programs have been implemented by various countries to ensure that persons with disabilities have full access, on an equal basis with others,to telecommunication services.G3ict would like to express its sincere appreciation to the Center for Internet and Society for its support of this project, to Nirmita Narasimhan for researching and editing this report;to the International Telecommunication Union for providing references and helping identify countries to be surveyed, and to the Hans Foundation for funding the print version of the report. Promoting universal service for persons with disabilities can affect positively the lives of millions of users around the world. We hope that this report may serve as a useful reference for policy makers, operators, organizations of persons with disabilities, and as a framework for good practice sharing among countries currently implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Axel Leblois
Executive Director
G3ict – Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs

Introduction

The advent of the Internet and accessible information and communication technologies (ICT) has opened up exciting possibilities and opportunities for persons with disabilities.The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the ‘UNCRPD’)3 has explicitly recognized the right of persons with disabilities to seek, receive and impart information on an equal basis with others4 and has placed specific obligations on member states to ensure that all ICT based facilities and services (which include telecommunications services) must be made available and accessible to all. To this end, member states are required to formulate and implement appropriate laws and policies at national, regional and global levels. In an age where almost all spheres of life are inextricably woven with and dependent on ICT, Article 9 of the UNCRPD on Accessibility is possibly one of the most powerful and critical tools in the hands of policy makers to ensure that persons with disabilities are assured of basic human rights such as education, health, employment and access to information and participation.While the lack of awareness amongst governments is undeniably a serious impediment to implementing accessible ICT in any country, an equally serious and perhaps more realistic problem is the lack of resources which is plaguing many countries, especially developing nations. The fact that governments are already struggling to ensure basic human rights for all citizens by judiciously dividing their limited resources for the whole gamut of needs makes it difficult for them to outlay separate and substantial budgets which may be required for implementing ICT accessibility. In such a scenario it becomes very important to look around and identify sources of funding, new or existing, which can be leveraged by governments to fulfill their obligation towards making all ICT based applications and services accessible and promoting assistive technologies for persons with disabilities.

This report aims to highlight the extreme suitability of leveraging the Universal Service Fund (USF) to implement accessibility and assistive technologies in telecommunications. It examines the evolution of the concept of USF, its minimum mandate and scope, funding sources, as well as project implementation mechanisms and showcases countries which are using the USF to fund accessibility projects through policies and programmes.

[1].WHO Global Report on Disability, June 2011 - http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/en/index.html

[2].CRPD Progress Report on ICT Accessibility – 2010 by G3ict - http://g3ict.org/resource_center/publications_and_reports

Click here for the Braille format
Download the Daisy version here
Download the book here PDF [302 KB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/universal-service-for-persons-with-disabilities

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

Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen

pranesh — 2012-01-04T08:59:14Z

The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. This article by Pranesh Prakash shows how the government has been able to achieve this through the Information Technology Act and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules it passed in April 2011. It now wants methods of censorship that leave even fewer traces, which is why Mr. Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology talks of Internet 'self-regulation', and has brought about an amendment of the Copyright Act that requires instant removal of content.

Power of the Internet and Freedom of Expression

The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communications platform from any that has existed before. It is the one medium where anybody can directly share their thoughts with billions of other people in an instant. People who would never have any chance of being published in a newspaper now have the opportunity to have a blog and provide their thoughts to the world. This also means that thoughts that many newspapers would decide not to publish can be published online since the Web does not, and more importantly cannot, have any editors to filter content. For many dictatorships, the right of people to freely express their thoughts is something that must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, we are now faced with the situation where some democratic countries are also trying to do so by censoring the Internet.

Intermediary Guidelines Rules

In India, the new 'Intermediary Guidelines' Rules and the Cyber Cafe Rules that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is 'disparaging', 'relating to... gambling', 'harm minors in any way', to which the user 'does not have rights'. When was the last time you checked wither you had 'rights' to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term "#IdiotKapilSibal", as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is 'disparaging', and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.

Excessive Censoring by Internet Companies

We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the general public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn't kept track, it would be as though that content never existed. Such censorship existed during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. Not even during the Emergency has such censorship ever existed in India. Yet, not only was what the Internet companies did legal under the Intermediary Guideline Rules, but if they had not, they could have been punished for content put up by someone else. That is like punishing the post office for the harmful letters that people may send over post.

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for 'government criticism'. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

'Self-Regulation': Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal's more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to 'self-regulate' reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is 'objectionable' (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google's Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to 'self-regulate' user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about 'transparency' and 'dialogue' only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal's latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn't remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any 'due process' or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

It's ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it. Bid adieu to it while there is still time.

The article was translated to Marathi and featured in Lokmat

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical

pranesh — 2011-12-12T17:00:50Z

The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place. Further, he points out that now is the time to take action on the draconian IT Rules which are before the Parliament.

Mr. Sibal is a knowledgeable lawyer, and according to a senior lawyer friend of his with whom I spoke yesterday, greatly committed to ideals of freedom of speech. He would not lightly propose regulations that contravene Article 19(1)(a) [freedom of speech and expression] of our Constitution. Yet his recent proposals regarding controlling online speech seem unreasonable. My conclusion is that the minister has not properly grasped the way the Web works, is frustrated because of the arrogance of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And while he has his heart in the right place, his lack of knowledge of the Internet is leading him astray. The more important concern is the IT Rules that have been in force since April 2011.

Background

The New York Times scooped a story on Monday revealing that Mr. Sibal and the MCIT had been in touch with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, asking them to set up a system whereby they would manually filter user-generated content before it is published, to ensure that objectionable speech does not get published. Specifically, he mentioned content that hurt people's religious sentiments and content that Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor described as 'vile' and capable of inciting riots as being problems. Lastly, Mr. Sibal defended this as not being "censorship" by the government, but "supervision" of user-generated content by the companies themselves.

Concerns

One need not give lectures on the benefits of free speech, and Mr. Sibal is clear that he does not wish to impinge upon it. So one need not point out that freedom of speech means nothing if not the freedom to offend (as long as no harm is caused). There can, of course, be reasonable limitations on freedom of speech as provided in Article 19 of the ICCPR and in Article 19(2) of our Constitution. My problem lies elsewhere.

Secrecy

It is unfortunate that the New York Times has to be given credit for Mr. Sibal addressing a press conference on this issue (and he admitted as much). What he is proposing is not enforcement of existing rules and regulations, but of a new restriction on online speech. This should have, in a democracy, been put out for wide-ranging public consultations first.

Making intermediaries responsible

The more fundamental disagreement is that over how the question of what should not be published should be decided, and how that decision should be and how that should be carried out, and who can be held liable for unlawful speech. I believe that "to make the intermediary liable for the user violating that code would, I think, not serve the larger interests of the market." Mr. Sibal said that in May this year in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The intermediaries (that is, all persons and companies who transmit or host content on behalf of a third party), are but messengers just like a post office and do not exercise editorial control, unlike a newspaper. (By all means prosecute Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft whenever they have created unlawful content, have exercised editorial control over unlawful content, have incited and encouraged unlawful activities, or know after a court order or the like that they are hosting illegal content and still do not remove it.) Newspapers have editors who can take responsibility for content published in the newspaper. They can afford to, because the number of articles in a newspaper is limited. YouTube, which has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minutes, cannot. One wag suggested that Mr. Sibal was not suggesting a means of censorship, but of employment generation and social welfare for censors and editors. To try and extend editorial duties to these 'intermediaries' by executive order or through 'forceful suggestions' to these companies cannot happen without amending s.79 of the Information Technology Act which ensures they are not to be held liable for their user's content: the users are. Internet speech has, to my knowledge, and to date, has never caused a riot in India. It is when it is translated into inflammatory speeches on the ground with megaphones that offensive speech, whether in books or on the Internet, actually become harmful, and those should be targeted instead. And the same laws that apply to offline speech already apply online. If such speech is inciting violence then the police can be contacted and a magistrate can take action. Indeed, Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc., exercise self-regulation already (excessively and wrongly, I feel sometimes). Any person can flag any content on YouTube or Facebook as violating the site's terms of use. Indeed, even images of breast-feeding mothers have been removed from Facebook on the basis of such complaints. So it is mistaken to think that there is no self-regulation. In two recent cases, the High Courts of Bombay (Janhit Manch v. Union of India) and Madras (R. Karthikeyan v. Union of India) refused to direct the government and intermediaries to police online content, saying that places an excessive burden on freedom of speech.

IT Rules, 2011

In this regard, the IT Rules published in April 2011 are great offenders. While speech that is 'disparaging' (while not being defamatory) is not prohibited by any statute, yet intermediaries are required not to carry 'disparaging' speech, or speech to which the user has no right (how is this to be judged? do you have rights to the last joke that you forwarded?), or speech that promotes gambling (as the government of Sikkim does through the PlayWin lottery), and a myriad other kinds of speech that are not prohibited in print or on TV. Who is to judge whether something is 'disparaging'? The intermediary itself, on pain of being liable for prosecution if it is found have made the wrong decision. And any person may send a notice to an intermediary to 'disable' content, which has to be done within 36 hours if the intermediary doesn't want to be held liable. Worst of all, there is no requirement to inform the user whose content it is, nor to inform the public that the content is being removed. It just disappears, into a memory hole. It does not require a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see this as a grave threat to freedom of speech. Many human rights activists and lawyers have made a very strong case that the IT Rules on Intermediary Due Diligence are unconstitutional. Parliament still has an opportunity to reject these rules until the end of the 2012 budget session. Parliamentarians must act now to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:54:21Z

Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these critically in order to build a better learning environment for themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.

Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.

As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction and learning.

The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:

The Costs of Belonging

Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend circles within the college environment.

It was particularly insightful for us to understand that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping ‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers, internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways, these students were digital natives if defined through access, because they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.

Based on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting, exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel excluded from the power of the digital.

The Need for Diversity

It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us. Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English, fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.

Such an idea might also help in reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find themselves tentative and intimidated online.

The breakthrough that the participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning lesson for us.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

As a part of their orientation to the world of the digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.

Working together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories, emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated special trainings with different experts in areas of language, communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure that is different from the regular classroom learning.

What would happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities, where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities, cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys, ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.

Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies. How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we organise a faculty training workshop later in December.

These three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream learning within higher education in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education

Know your Users, Match their Needs!

rebecca — 2012-02-27T15:06:14Z

As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. The following post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society.

Almost ten years have passed since the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law (FAL) was signed by eight legal information institutes and other FAL initiatives. Today, the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is growing with over 30 initiatives having signed onto the Declaration and providing free, online access to legal information. While the movement continues to gain momentum, the big question no longer remains why we need free access to law, but instead how FAL initiatives can continue to do so sustainably in the long-term. The principles of access and justice underpinning the FALM have been well-argued and few would dispute the notion that citizens ought to have access to the laws under which they are governed. As the Montreal Declaration states: "Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity…Maximizing access to his information promotes justice and the rule of law" (2002).

Regardless of legal system or political context, the importance of securing free online access to the law has been recognized from a variety of perspectives. Whether FAL is considered a critical democratic function or simply an essential efficiency within any legal system, it is difficult to contest that the internet has increased the accessibility of and ease with which legal information is being published and shared online. Setting the ideological and practical foundations of the movement aside, effectively demonstrating the impact of FAL initiatives and to secure their sustainability in the long-term remains the next big challenge for the FALM. Today, there is a growing necessity for grounded and realistic indicators that can validate some of the long-held assumptions around the impacts and outcomes of FAL initiatives. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, there is also a need for a more nuanced understanding of the factors that influence the sustainability of FAL initiatives— particularly in resource-scarce and often nebulous legal systems of the Global South.

This blog post provides some insight into the questions above through a brief summary of the results of the study Free Access to Law—Is it Here to Stay? This global comparative study was carried out by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. The project set out to begin providing answers to some of these critical questions around the impacts and sustainability of the FALM. It was initially hypothesized in the study that the sustainability of a FAL initiative rests upon a particular string of contingent factors. To begin, a particular condition would incentivize the creation of the FAL initiative — more often than not meeting the unmet needs of those requiring access to legal information. Next, if the FAL initiative is able to provide the service within a favourable context, it was suspected that it would produce favourable outcomes for both users and society at large. In turn, if the FAL initiative was able to provide benefits to users, it was theorized that these benefits would then stimulate reinvestment into the FAL initiative — forming a positive and sustainable feedback loop.

As the Good Practices Handbook highlights, the research hypothesis provided an accurate reading of what the sustainability chain of a FAL initiative might look like in practice. If unable to keep up with the evolving information requirements of their users, this study suggests that FAL initiatives run the risk of FAL becoming outdated and even outperformed by either government-based or private sector initiatives. This is why FAL initiatives must continue to be innovative and find new ways to meet users’ needs. Approaches take my include keeping their collections up to date, fine-tuning their services or even reinventing themselves through the provision of value-added services. Gathered from the experiences of the eleven countries across Africa and Asia examined in this study, the following is a brief summary of the nine “Good Practices” that emerging FAL initiatives can consider:

The FAL initiative should establish clear objectives: Before doing anything, the FAL initiative should decide what exactly it’s setting out to do…critical components such as content selection, targeted audience, expected reach, search functionalities and other website features help determine priorities and evaluate capacity to achieve these objectives.
How to be small and do big things: Most of the FAL initiatives studied as part of this project were formed of small teams (often less than five individuals). Initially, this may appear to pose a risk for sustainability. However, we saw a number of ways in which small teams have proven to be innovative, flexible, and able to thrive in environments of scarcity. However, as much as small teams can be seen as a source of innovation, they may also pose a risk in the medium to long-term.
FAL initiatives require expertise in both IT and legal information: Legal information management experts understand how the law is applied, how different texts and parts of texts speak to one another, and how these documents are used. IT experts can imagine a variety of ways to address these needs. If both forms of expertise is not available within the team of a FAL initiative, institutional partnerships provide promising sites for collaborative support. For example, the FALM constitutes a rich source of expertise and has proven to be a site of collaboration between established and emerging FAL initiatives. Further, universities have proven to be a significant source of human and financial resources for several FAL initiatives.
FAL initiatives should look to where they are headed (but not too far ahead): Because the purpose of a FAL initiative is to provide free online access to the law, it must secure access to this data for regular publication. How will legal information be received and organized by the initiative? In what format will it be published in? Early on, FAL initiatives need to develop both internal and external workflow processes to ensure that the initiative is able to provide regular access to updated information. Furthermore, an important finding of the study suggests that context plays a much larger role in a project’s sustainability. Consideration should be given to a country’s ICT infrastructure, the transparency of a government and their access to information regimes, and the nature of the legal information market when designing the workflows of an FAL initiative.
FAL initiatives should work with the ICT infrastructure in place: The quality and consistency of internet access varies across countries in the Global South. FAL initiatives should remain aware of how stakeholders and users are accessing the internet and develop their service accordingly. Considering the often intermittent nature of internet connectivity in the Global South, providing users with offline access to databases is a practical alternative.
FAL initiatives should use Free and Open Source Software: FAL initiatives should maximise their use of FLOSS. All FAL initiatives use FLOSS to some extent and without these flexible and cost-effective alternatives, it would be safe to infer that the FALM would have grown as quickly as it has.
FAL initiatives should be sensitive to culture: FAL initiatives rely on stakeholders and communities of users. Staying mindful of the professional and organizational cultures within a country may provide the initiative with a source of community support which may become a sustainability strategy. Further, integrated or parallel social networking platforms can play an essential role in community-building around the FAL initiatives and can also serve as another source of content in resource-scarce environments.
Find your users, match their needs: Project goals and appropriate strategies should be based on an in-depth understanding of the needs of those using the FAL initiative. As the sustainability chain suggests, when FAL initiatives produce positive outputs and outcomes, stakeholders will reinvest in the initiative to ensure its sustainability. If a user’s needs are effectively met by an FAL initiative, this group can provide either the resources or impetus for its continued success. Identifying who your users are and staying aware of their needs is a good way to secure reinvestment into the project.
FAL initiatives should diversify funding sources: This may be easier said than done — reinvestment can be the most challenging aspect of sustaining a FAL initiative. Early on, initiatives that receive donor-based funding benefit substantially upon investment. However, these initiatives are put at significant risk once initial seed funding has been depleted. Similarly, FAL initiatives that partnerships with other during their start up phase face similar fates as securing long-term service delivery can become a challenge. Possible funding sources included throughout the study include, among others: government, international development agencies or NGOs, the judiciary, law societies and the sale of value-added services.

In addition to these good practices, this study has emphasized the role the that the FALM has played in helping redefine online legal information as a public good. Each of the case studies demonstrates in a unique way the value openness plays in a legal information ecosystem, and how a robust digital legal information commons can be of benefit to users. Traditionally, the legal information market has been dominated by a select number of commercial players. In response, the FALM has created an important transnational space within which conversations around the provision of and access to legal information as a political right rather than a commodity to be bought and sold can take place. Encouragingly, governments in the Global South are catching and FAL initiatives from the South have proven to be immense sources of innovation in their own right. In Indonesia, for example, FAL initiatives have laid the groundwork for emerging government initiatives that are now prioritizing the provision of free, online access to legal and other government information. Today, I believe that we are witnessing an important paradigm shift as governments are beginning to recognize that “access” to legal information is a right to be held by the public.

Despite such headway, it is needless to say that FAL initiatives in the Global South continue to face immense sustainability challenges. However, it is hoped that this study can provide some practical insights for emerging initiatives and partnerships. However, as more FAL initiatives begin entering into the next stage of maturity and growth, it is more important than ever that they are able to adapt to adverse environmental changes and form long-lasting partnerships with information sources within government. Most importantly, FAL initiatives must remain dynamic and responsive to users’ needs. To do so, they must be able to tailor and expand their services, offerings and user-base. To secure their sustainability and relevance in the long term, they must also be continuously strengthening their ties and maintain open communication flows with users. If FAL initiatives are able to successfully make the transition from being supply side initiatives to becoming demand driven services, the FALM will be well-positioned for another decade of sustainable growth.

Download the collection below:

Good Practices Handbook (426 kb)
Environmental Scan Report (860 kb)
Local Researcher's Methodology Guide (1225 kb)

The full collection of case studies and the Good Practices Handbook was originally published on the Project Website. The Centre for Internet and Society oversaw the following case studies: India, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Philippines.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/know-your-users

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities (Russian Version)

praskrishna — 2012-04-26T10:04:08Z

The e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities is based upon the online ITU-G3ict e-Accessibility Policy Toolkit for Persons with Disabilities (www.e-accessibilitytoolkit.org) which was released in February 2010. This is the Russian translation of the same.

The Toolkit and its companion handbook have contributions from more than 60 experts around the world on ICT accessibility and is a most valuable addition to policy makers and regulators, advocacy and research organisations and persons with disabilities on the implementation of the ICT dispositions of the CRPD.

The handbook is a joint publication of ITU, G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with The Hans Foundation. The book is compiled and edited by Nirmita Narasimhan. Preface by Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union. Introduction by Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D. Foreword by Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict.

UNIC Moscow (United Nations Information Centre - Moscow) has translated the English version of the kit to Russian. For more information on the translation initiative by UNIC Moscow, click here.

Download the Russian version here (PDF, 1045 kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/e-accessibility-kit-in-russian

Analysis of DIT's Response to Second RTI on Website Blocking

pranesh — 2011-12-02T09:26:11Z

In this blog post, Pranesh Prakash briefly analyses the DIT's response to an RTI request on website blocking alongside the most recent edition of Google's Transparency Report, and what it tells us about the online censorship regime in India.

What the DIT's Response Tells Us, and What It Doesn't

We at the Centre for Internet and Society had sent in a right to information request to the Department of Information Technology (DIT) asking for more information about website blocking in India. The response we got from the DIT was illuminating in many ways. The following are the noteworthy points, in brief:

Six government officials, and one politician have so far made requests for 'disabling access' to certain online content under s.69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act.
68 individual items have been requested to be blocked, those being 64 websites (domain-level blocking), 1 sub-domain, and 3 specific web pages. Seemingly, none of these requests have been accepted.
The data provided by the government seemingly conflicts with the data released by the likes of Google (via its Transparency Report).
India's law enforcement agencies are circumventing the IT Act, the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and ultimately the Constitution, by not following proper procedure for removal of online content.
Either the DIT is not providing us all the relevant information on blocking, or is not following the law.

Conflicting Data on Censorship Requests

The latest Google Transparency Report, released on October 25, 2011, shows that there were 68 written requests (imaginably taking the form of forceful requests/orders) from Indian law enforcement agencies for removal of 358 items from Google's various. If you take the figures since January 2010, it adds up to over 765.

However, the official government statistics show only eight separate requests having been made to the DIT (which, under the IT Act, is the only authority that can order the blocking of online content), adding up to a total of 64 websites (domain-level), 1 sub-domain, and 3 specific web pages. Of these only 3 are for Google's services (2 for Blogger, and 1 for YouTube).

If classified according to presumable reason for seeking of the block, that would be 61 domains hosting adult content; 1 domain (tamil.net.in), 1 sub-domain (ulaginazhagiyamuthalpenn.blogspot.com), and 2 specific pages (video of a speech by Bal Thackeray on YouTube and Wikipedia page for Sukhbir Singh Badal) for political content; 1 for religious content (a blog post titled "Insults against Islam" in Malay); and 1 domain hosting online gambling (betfair.com). It is unclear for why one of the requests was made (topix.net).¹

Content Removal vs. Content Blocking

Section 69A of the IT Act provides the Central Government the power to "direct any agency of the Government or intermediary to block for access by the public or cause to be blocked for access by the public any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in any computer resource". The only person through whom this power can be exercised is the 'Designated Officer' (currently Dr. Gulshan Rai of the DIT), who in turn has to follow the procedure laid down in the rules drafted under s.69A ("Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguard for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009", the 'Blocking Rules').

Because of this, we see everyone from the Secretary of the Public Law and Order Department of Tamil Nadu to the Joint Commissioner of Police of Mumbai and the State President of the Bharatiya Janata Minority Morcha approaching the Designated Officer for blocking of websites.

However, as the data from Google shows, there are many times more requests being sent to remove content. The only explanation for this is that an order to 'block for access... or cause to be blocked for access by the public' is taken to be different from an order for removal of content. Nothing in the IT Act, nor in the Blocking Rules actually address this issue.²

Thus, there is a possibility that the forcible removal of content is treated separately from blocking of content. That would mean that while blocking is regulated by the IT Act, forcible removal of content is not. Thus, it would seem that forcible removal of online content is happening without clear regulation or limits.³

Role of the Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure

There are existing provisions in the Indian Penal Code that provide the government the power to censor book, pamphlets, and other material on varied grounds, including obscenity, causing of enmity between communities, etc. The police is provided powers to enforce such governmental orders. Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows the State Government to declare (through an official notification) certain publications which seem to violate the Indian Penal Code as 'forfeited to the Government' and to issue search warrants for the same. After this the police can enforce that notification.

It is clear that this is not the case for any of the content removal requests that were sent to Google.

Police Are Defeating the Constitution and the IT Act

Therefore, it would seem that law enforcement agencies are operating outside the bounds set up under the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, as also the Information Technology Act, when they send requests for removal of content to companies like Google. While a company might comply with it because it appears to them to violate their own terms of service (which generally include a wide clause about content being in accordance with all local laws), community guidelines, etc., it would appear that it is not required under the law to do so if the order itself is not legal.

However, anecdotal evidence has it that most companies comply with such 'requests' even when they are not under any legal obligation to do so.

This way the intention of Parliament in enacting s.69A of the IT Act—to regulate government censorship of the Internet and bring it within the bounds laid down in the Constitution—is defeated.

DIT Either Evasive or Not Following Rules

The DIT did not provide answers on:

Whether any block ordered by the DIT has ever been revoked
On what basis DIT decides which intermediary (web host, ISP, etc.) to send the order of blocking to

It also provided the minutes for only one meeting⁴ of the committee that decides whether to carry out a block, when we had requested for minutes of all the meetings it has ever held. That committee (the Committee for Examination of Requests, constituted under Rule 8(4) of the Blocking Rules) has to consider every single item in every single request forwarded to the Designated Officer, and 68 items were sent to the Designated Officer in 6 requests. Quite clearly something doesn't add up. Either the Committee is not following the Blocking Rules or the DIT is not providing a full reply under the RTI Act.

A request was made to block http://www.topix.net, by the 'Commmissioner, Maharashtra State, Colaba, Mumbai—400001', presumably the Commissioner of State Intelligence Department of Maharashtra, whose office is located in Colaba. ↩
However, the Blocking Rules require the person or the hosting intermediary being contacted for a response. This provides the person/intermediary the opportunity to remove the content voluntarily or to oppose the request for blocking.

"Rule 8. Examination of request: (1) On receipt of request under rule 6, the Designated Officer shall make all reasonable efforts to identify the person or intermediary who has hosted the information or part thereof as well as the computer resource on which such information or part thereof is being hosted and where he is able to identify such person or intermediary and the computer resource hosting the information or part thereof which have been requested to be blocked for public access, he shall issue a notice by way of letters or fax or e-mail signed with electronic signatures to such person or intermediary in control of such computer resource to appear and submit their reply and clarifications if any, before the committee referred to in rule 7, at a specified date and time, which shall not be less than forty-eight hours from the time of receipt of such notice by such person or intermediary." ↩
While it is possible to imagine that the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure lay down limits, it is clear from the Google Transparency Report that the requests from removal are not coming based only on court orders, but from the executive and the police. The police have no powers under the IPC or the CrPC to request removal of content without either a public notification issued by the State Government or a court order. ↩
The minutes of the meeting held on August 24, 2010, on the request for blocking of www.betfair.com were sent as 'Annexure III' of the DIT response. This request was not granted. ↩

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysis-dit-response-2nd-rti-blocking

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

Open Government Data in India (v2)

pranesh — 2012-12-14T10:25:25Z

The first draft of the second version of the Open Government Data Report is now online. Nisha Thompson worked on updating the first version of the report. This updated version of the report on open government data in India includes additional case studies as well as a potential policy (National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy) that would create a central government data portal. The report was distributed for peer review and public feedback.

There are additional government case studies regarding e-governance and how they are changing the way data is collected and distributed. The report also looks at the issues around open data at the city and panchayat level and profiles new projects that are working to fill that void. It also includes a deeper account account of the global perspective on open government data and how India's experience with open data will be different from what the west is doing. Please do let us know what you think are deficiencies in the report, corrections that should be made, or even just general comments. Drop in a word even if you just find it useful. Please do write in to pranesh[at]cis-india.org by Friday, September 2, 2011. Download the [draft report].

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ogd-draft-v2-call-for-comments

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T06:00:39Z

Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.

LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.

Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.

Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.
Paradigms of Practice:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.
Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.

Workshop Outcomes

The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.

Participation Guidelines

LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:

Name:
Institutional affiliation and title:
Address:
Email address:
Phone number:
A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)
Statement of interest (max. 350 words)
Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)
Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)
Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)
Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)

Notes:

Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets@cis-india.org
Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation.
Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.
Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.
A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.

Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;

Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University

Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad

Experts:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop