Centre for Internet and Society

Announcing Silicon Plateau #01

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:59Z

We are very pleased to announce that the RAW programme is supporting a new collaborative publishing project led by T.A.J. Residency / SKE Projects and or-bits.com. The first volume of the series titled 'Silicon Plateau' will feature contributions by a group of artists, researchers, and writers, including IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Sunita Prasad, Achal Prabhala and Sreshta Rit Premnath, along with contextual writing and documentation material. Here is an excerpt from the editorial note written by Marialaura Ghidini, the co-editor of the volume.

The scope of the series is to explore the contemporary interaction between the arts and technology as informed by experiences of Bangalore (the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India). Such exploration will be guided by the perspectives of contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, national and international, who have either spent a period of time in the city or crossed paths with its communities whose work and interests — from the creative industry to law and historical research — lie at the intersection between the arts and technology. The approach we have adopted to explore how technology informs the arts and the socio-cultural environment, and how the latter affects usages and understandings of technological tools, is multidisciplinary and hybrid, and uses the city of Bangalore as the starting point for broader reflections and actions.

Advocating for the importance of thinking about digital and web technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, the series will propose across-disciplines narratives about the encounters — fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient — that artists, writers, technologists, lawyers, economists and more have had with the city. The nickname of Bangalore, Silicon Plateau, which derives from its geographical location on the Deccan Plateau in the state of Karnataka, has been used as the title of the series because we think it metaphorically highlights the contradictions inherent to our exploration. Adopting the term plateau, which indicates the reaching of a state of little change, to refer to a city that has transformed at rapid speed over the last few decades results in a linguistic combination that reflects the complexities inherent to discussing arts and technology in relation to local histories and occurrences rather than global narratives and popular beliefs.

This fist edition of Silicon Plateau #01 will focus on the way in which the city is represented in the public realm, from public spaces to those manufactured by the real estate industry. It will look at representations of Bangalore as a set of phenomena triggered by the ways in which the IT industry is reflected in the city, such as its market-driven narratives, and how passers-by and short term residents encounter them in the everyday. The contributors have been invited to reflect on how these modes of presenting and representing often lead to the creation of metaphors and cultural signs that might tell us more about discussing the interaction between the arts and technology.

Silicon Plateau #01 will be about that which lies behind first ‘impressions’ and constructed representations as determined by uses and understanding of technology, the tools and its infrastructures, existing, imagined, or projected.”

Silicon Plateau #01 will be released, in print and online, in May 2015 and launched soon after.

Image Credit: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Projections (1964/2014), photocopies on corrugated plastic and chroma key paints.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/announcing-silicon-plateau-01

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:41:15Z

My paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015. The final paper will be shared by second week of May. Here is the accepted abstract.

Where are the NGOs?

On February 04, 2013, several members of the DataMeet group <http://datameet.org/> were invited by the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Project Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU) – the nodal agency responsible for developing, implementing, and managing the Open Government Data Platform of India <https://data.gov.in/> – to share thoughts on the status of the implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), the open data policy of India, and discuss potentials for collaboration. A key proposal made by the NDSAPPMU team regarding how DataMeet can contribute to the implementation process, involved DataMeet mobilising the developer community connected to the group to build applications that use the opened up data and demonstrate the value of open government data to drive greater contribution by government agencies and greater utilisation by citizen groups. For DataMeet, a network of open data users and advocates, this invitation to collaborate sets up a slightly different problematic than that in most of the cases of free and open source software development project. The task here is to develop projects that use already available data, which may not offer significantly return to investment at present, but will accellerate the process of opening up of more valuable government data.

However, building an application that effectively utilise government data to foreground a compelling argument or story requires more than a team of developers – it also require domain experts with a deep sense of the context from which the data is emanating. With a vibrant scene of nongovernmental organisations involved in monitoring, analysis, and implementation of developmental projects, many of such domain experts in India are located within such organisations, with some being in the academic institutes too. Reporting from an open data community meeting organised by the World Bank at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on December 10, 2014, Isha Parihar asks: “Where are the NGOs?” She points out that “[t]he discussions around open data [in India] also highlight the absence of nonprofit organisations among the technologyfocused groups, entrepreneurs, and businesses [1].” This observation is especially critical as the meeting was organsied by World Bank not only to gather public responses to be presented to Government of India, but also to take stock of the open data community in India. The absence of NGOs, although, does not indicate at the lack of interest of the nongovernmental research and advocacy organisations in India to work with government data. Such organisations, on the contrary, have a long history of accessing, using, sharing, and communicating government data obtained through both proactive and reactive disclosure mechanism. While surveying such practices in a recent report, Sumandro Chattapadhyay argues [2] that the lack of a common understanding of the open data community in India emerges from both the lack of an established forum where commercial and non-commercial reusers of data discuss and articulate their requirements and demands, and the existence of an established range of actors accessing, using, and resharing government data for commercial and noncommercial purposes who are still uncertain regarding how open government data will exactly transform and augment their existing practices.

Whose Open Data Community is it?

In the context of the emerging open data ecosystem in India, thus, the notion of the open data community comes forward as both the problem – in terms of the community not yet being there to effectively take forward the open data agenda – and the solution – as the component of the ecosystem that can successfully bridge gaps between interests and capacities of various stakeholders. Given the gap and the stakeholder concerned, the open data community is expected to perform various critical functions. This paper tracks these conceptualisations of open data community in India. Based upon conversations with fourteen organisations working across four cities in India, the question of 'whose open data community is it' is explored in this paper following three pathways – (1) by documenting how the understanding of the open data community, and the location of the organisation concerned in reference to that, changes across these organisations, (2) by describing how the idea of who all are included in the open data community in India changes across these organisations, and (3) by identifying how different organisations formulate the intended audiences of the open data community in India. In doing so, I argue that a range of critical challenges being experienced by the open data ecosystem in India often gets articulated as things that can be resolved by a more active and effective open data community. This distorts the distribution of responsbilities across various kinds of stakeholders for contributing to the open data ecosystem. In conclusion, I note the need to stop using open data community as a solution-for-all-open-data-evils, and for a pragmatic approach to understand the kinds of open data challenges it can address, and those that it cannot.

Endnotes

[1] Parihar, Isha. 2015. On the Road to Open Data: Glimpses of the Discourse in India. Akvo. January 14. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://akvo.org/blog/on-the-road-to-open-data-glimpses-of-the-discourse-in-india/

[2] Chattapadhyay, Sumandro. 2014. Opening Government Data through Mediation: Exploring Roles, Practices and Strategies of (Potential) Data Intermediary Organisations in India. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/report/sumandro_oddc_project_report.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/whose-open-data-community-is-it-abstract

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:40:49Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001-2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon. The sections will discuss the activities and experiences of civil society organisations in Asia and India, respectively, in national, regional, and global Internet governance processes. The draft outlines of the sections are shared here. Comments and suggestions are invited.

In the (draft) Foreword to the Asia Internet History – Third Decade (2001-2010), Prof. David J. Farber writes:

One of the early attempts to extend the reach of the Internet to Asia was via the “Johnny Appleseed” approach. That is a set of people responded to queries by people in Asian countries asking how they could connect with the growing Internet by offering to supply tapes to key people in the requesting countries, often by physically going with the tapes, as well as providing access points to the USA Internet. The people that we, I was one of the seeders, worked, with became the leaders in their nation and founded the initial national networks that blossomed with time and often formed the basis of commercial Internets. The traditions that these network frontier pioneers established lead to the eventual spread of the benefits of Internet access to not only their nations but became models for the spread to the rest of Asia…

I am honoured to contribute to the pioneering series titled Asia Internet History, edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon, by foregrounding a range of other individuals and organisations that often worked outside but in engagement with the national governments, and technical and academic institutions that govern the connecting tapes of the Internet, to ensure mass access to and effective usages of Internet in Asia.

The two sections, to be authored me, provides an overview of ‘civil society organisations’ working across Asian countries that have played a critical role in the shaping of policy-making and discourse around Internet governance during 2000-2010, and then undertakes a closer look at the organisations working in India and their interventions at national, regional, and global levels.

Please read the draft outlines of the overview section and the section on Indian organisations, and share your comments. The comments can be posted on the GitHub page where the outlines are hosted, on this page, or over email: sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

The outlines can also be directly downloaded as markdown files: the overview and the India section.

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

Here is a tentative list of key civil society organisations from Asia that have participated and intervened in Internet governance processes during 2001-2010. Please suggest organisations missing from the list.

Bangladesh

Cambodia

China

Indonesia

EngageMedia, Australia and Indonesia
ICT Laboratory for Social Change (iLab)
Indonesian CSOs Network for Internet Governance
Indonesian ICT Partnership Association (ICT Watch)
Internet Society Indonesia Chapter [website is under construction]

India

Iran

Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Centre (ICTRC) [URL is not working]

Japan

Centre for Global Communications (GLOCOM) [Academia?]
Internet Society Japan Chapter
Japan Computer Access for Empowerment (JCAFE) [URL is not working]
Japan Computer Access Network (JCA-NET)

Kuwait

iJMA3 - Kuwait Information Technology Society (KITS)

Lebanon

Lebanese Center for Civic Education (LCCE)

Malaysia

Internet Society Malaysia Chapter

Myanmar

Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO)

Nepal

Internet Society Nepal Chapter

Pakistan

Philippines

Democracy.Net.PH
Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) [URL not working
Internet Society Philippines Chapter

Regional

Singapore

Internet Society Singapore Chapter

South Korea

Sri Lanka

Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter

Thailand

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-and-india-outlines

NETmundial: Tracking Multistakeholder across Contributions

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:53:37Z

This set of analysis of the contributions submitted to NETmundial 2014 is part of the effort by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, to enable productive discussions of the critical internet governance issues at the meeting and elsewhere.

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Data compiled by Sumandro and Jyoti.
Download the data .

This scatter plot shows the number of times the word *multistakeholder* (including *multi-stakeholder* and *multistakeholderism*) appears across contributions submitted to NETmundial.

X axis (horizontal) gives the serial number of contributions and Y axis (vertical) gives the number of times the word appears on a contribution.

Click on the types of organisation below the chart to highlight the corresponding organisations on the chart.

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

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Panday, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-tracking-multi-stakeholder-across-contributions

NETmundial - Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:51:51Z

Created by Sumandro using R.
Download the R code .
Download the data.

These word clouds show the hundred most frequently appearing words in the aggregated contribution text of each type of organisations.

The size of the words in these diagrams refer to their frequency of appearance. A larger size refers to higher frequency of appearance. The colour of the words have been differentiated to group the words according to their freuqency of appearance. The color hierarchy is as follows: Green, Pink, Blue, Red.

While creating these word clouds, certain common English words (like, 'the' and 'and') and obvious words for the contributions (like, 'internet' and 'governance') have been ommitted. The full list of ommitted words have been documented in the R code used to generate the diagrams.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-word-clouds-of-contributions-by-types-of-organisation

NETmundial - Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:47:53Z

Created by Sumandro using Datamaps.

The map shows (in *green*) all the countries from where no government agency has submitted any contribution to NETmundial. Governments of the countries appearing in *white* have contributed to the NETmundial process.

Inter-governmental and international bodies that have submitted contributions to NETmundial -- such as OECD and UNESCO -- have not been considered while creating the above map.

To see the map of all the countries from where there have been no contributions (by any kinds of organisation) to NETmundial, click here.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Panday, and with data entry support from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-governments-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial

NETmundial - Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:40:03Z

Created by Sumandro using Datamaps.

The map shows (in *green*) all the countries from where no contributions (by any kinds of organisation) have been submitted to NETmundial. Countries appearing in *white* are those from where contributions have been submitted.

Organisations that have indicated (in their submitted contribution) that they are either 'global' or 'international' organisations with headquarter in a specific country(ies), or a coalition of several organisations from different countries, have not been considered while making the above map. Such organisations (not considered while making this map) include African ICT/IG Stakeholders, Association for Progressive Communications, Best Bits, Just Net Coalition, OECD, etc.

To see the map of all the countries from where the respective governments have not submitted any contributions to NETmundial, click here.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-countries-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial

NETmundial - Contributions by Types of Organisation

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:57:11Z

This Sankey diagram shows all the countries/regions from where contributions have come in on the left side, and all the various types of organisations on the right side. Use the mouse cursor to hover over a country to see what proportion of the submissions from that country has come from which type of organisation, or hover over an organisation type to see what proportion of submission from such organisations have come in from which countries.

The height of the blue bars next to the country/region names and organisation types indicate at the respective proportions among all the contributions.

Certain submissions have been contributed by global organisations, such as Internet Society, ICANN and Commonwealth agencies. These submissions have been included in the 'Global' division in the above chart.

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Download the data.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-types-of-organisation

NETmundial - Contributions by Countries of Origin

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:55:43Z

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Download the data.

This treemap chart divides up contributions submitted to NETmundial 2014 into their countries of origin, which are also clustered into regional divisions. The size of the rectangles indicate the total number of submissions from the respective region/country.

Right click on the regions to see the division of submissions from the countries within that region. Left click to go back.

Certain submissions have been contributed by global organisations, such as Internet Society, ICANN and Commonwealth agencies. These submissions have been included in the 'Global' division in the above chart. Also, Russia has been included within Europe, and China has been included within East Asia.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-countries-of-origin

NETmundial - Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:59:13Z

Image above: Comparing Absolute Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

Image above: Comparing Relative Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

Created by Sumandro using R.
Download the R code.
Download the data.

These heatmaps compare the appearance of fifty most frequently appearing words (for all 187 contributions) across the contributions made by different types of organisation. Click on them to see the larger images. Hit *escape* to come back to this page.

The first heatmap shows the absolute appearance of the words -- that is the total number of times each word appears in contributions by a type of organisation.

The second heatmap shows the relative appearance of the words -- that is the ratio of the word's appearance in contribution by a type of organisation divided by total number of contributions by that type of organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-comparing-appearance-of-fifty-most-frequent-words

researchers@work

sumandro — 2019-03-13T01:14:21Z

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society produces and supports pioneering and sustained trans-disciplinary research on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society; organise and incubate networks of and fora for researchers and practitioners studying and making internet in India; and contribute to development of critical digital pedagogy, research methodology, and creative practice.

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society undertakes and supports research, incubation, and pedagogic works at the intersections of internet and society.

We take ‘internet’ as a shorthand for the unevenly implemented and governed global communication system that uses internet protocol suite (including TCP/IP and others) for networking devices and networks worldwide, and the ecosystem of socio-technological practices, institutions, and industries that constitute it.

We undertake grounded investigations and strategic interventions to document, analyse, and respond to transforming social realities and challenges emerging from entanglement of digital devices, data, and networks with various aspects of everyday lives.

We are interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between internet and digital technologies on one hand, and socio-material and geo-political structures on the other.

Research

Our research engagements are structured through five clusters:

Incubation

We recognise the urgent need do imagine and organise networks of people and groups toward forming enabling organisational structures and mobilising resources for practice-oriented research, archival, and creative works. We are committed to explore and realise possibilities of incubating new formations and practices of collaborative critical research, as well as strategic groupings to undertake applied research on urgent socio-technical concerns.

Pedagogy

Questions of pedagogy in the digital era on one hand, and those of learning about the digital on the other, are of key interest to the researchers@work programme. Our pedagogic engagements have two focus areas:

Creating communities and fora for research and teaching about topics related to internet and digital media
Creating free, open, multilingual, and reusable resources for teaching and learning about such topics

Towards operationalising the first area of focus, we have initiated an annual conference series - titled Internet Researchers' Conference - to create an annual temporary space (across India) for internet researchers to gather and share their works and experiences. We have also launched a Medium-based blog - r@w blog - to serve as a publishing venue for short- and long-form reflections on internet and society, as well as of critical media works and recordings of presentations and discussions.

Connect

E-mail: raw@cis-india.org

Mailing List: researchers@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-front

Centre for Internet and Society

Announcing Silicon Plateau #01

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

Where are the NGOs?

Whose Open Data Community is it?

Endnotes

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

NETmundial: Tracking *Multistakeholder* across Contributions

NETmundial - Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation

NETmundial - Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

NETmundial - Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

NETmundial - Contributions by Types of Organisation

NETmundial - Contributions by Countries of Origin

NETmundial - Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

researchers@work

Research

Incubation

Pedagogy

Connect

NETmundial: Tracking Multistakeholder across Contributions