Centre for Internet and Society

Other Advocacy

radha — 2015-03-30T13:35:49Z

CIS sometimes is a part of advocacy related initiatives that do not fall in any of the above categories (accessibility, openness, Internet governance or intellectual property). More information about such activities can be found in this weblog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy

R2R - Delhi

radha — 2010-04-21T05:56:11Z

Photos

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/r2r-delhi

Worries voiced over ID project

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:50Z

An article in The Hindu - 17th April

The Government of India's Unique Identification (UID) Project came under flak at a workshop organised jointly by the Citizen Action Forum (CAF), the People's Union of Civil Liberties - Karnataka, the Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society.

At the workshop "UID Project: A Debate on Fundamental Rights", held on Friday, members from civil socities expressed their apprehension over the project. Dissenters said the potential dangers to privacy and other civil liberties need to be discussed also.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/worries-voiced-over-id-project

UID: A Debate on Fundamental rights

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:44Z

UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights - was jointly organized by the Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties - Karnataka, Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society on April 16th at IAT, Queens Road, Bangalore - An article in the Prajavani news paper - April 17th.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-a-debate-on-fundamental-rights

UID is an invasion of privacy: Experts

radha — 2011-04-02T12:33:19Z

The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday - Deccan Chronicle, April 17th.

Bengaluru, April 16: Legal experts and several ordinary people find the move to give all citizens of the country an identity number an invasion of their privacy. The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday.

Participants found the idea of concentrating so much power in one authority frightening. One of the panelists Usha Ramanathan of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies said that in two or three years people would not be able to travel without carrying their identity numbers on them. "The logic behind this is that if you don't have a number, you don't exist. Our personal information will be fed into the systems of various agencies with a certain set of people handling that data. Allowing so much power in the guise of security is handing too much control to the State," Ms Ramanathan said.

Malavika Jayaram of the Centre for internet and Society, described the UID as “a technological solution to a problem that isn't even technological in nature.”

Gautam John of Pratham Books, however, felt that a mechanism such as the UID could help identify school dropouts and in tracking quality of education.

But most complained about a lack of clarity on the issue

Link to the original article.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-is-an-invasion-of-privacy-experts

Experts debate on UID and rights

radha — 2011-04-02T12:32:54Z

Bangalore, Apr 16, DHNS: A debate on ‘UID and Fundamental Rights’ organised by several city-based organisations, discussed the social, ethical issues, economic and legal issues that accompanies the UID.

Noted law researcher Usha Ramanathan said that according to available information, UID would tap into National Population Registry and gather data and biometrics of the whole population. “UID by itself would not result in profiling, but will act as a bridge between silos of information that will help profile the individual,” she noted.

She also said that lack of answers for issues that were raised six months ago were disturbing. “It is not just about privacy, but the power of the state as the UID will be feeding off many registers,” she added.

Speaking on the economics side of it, R Ramkumar from the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai, said claims of financial inclusion or elimination of corruption in Public Distribution System and the rural employment guarantee scheme was not enough justification. “Service delivery cannot justify the violation of freedom. It is a misplaced emphasis on benefits of technology,” he remarked.

He criticised the government’s thinking that technology could substitute social transformation, commenting that technology could only aid social development in the presence of conducive circumstances and it would be erroneous to assume a linear relationship between development of technology and development of society.

Col Thomas Mathews of the Citizens Action Forum said that UID could not prevent corruption as technology has to be used by people and new ways would be devised to deprive deserving people of the services.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/experts-debate-on-uid-and-rights

They fight for the visually challenged

radha — 2011-04-02T12:48:45Z

Times News Network - A report on the press conference held at the Press Club, Bangalore on 15th April, 2010.

Bangalore: The National Access Alliance (NAA) on Thursday opposed the Centre’s move to amend the Copyright Act 1957, which will prevent NGOs, educational institutions and persons with disabilities from converting reading material into audio, digital and other formats.

Nirmita Narasimhan, programming manager for the Centre for Internet and Society, on Thursday said: “Roughly, one lakh books are published every year, but only 700 are available to the blind in an accessible format. And most of these are illegally converted by NGOs. But what else can these organizations do?”

Converting texts into formats involves applying for a licence, which takes about three months; still it may take many more months for actual conversion to happen. Any student would lose a year by then, she explained.

Executive director of the centre, Sunil Abraham said: “It is important to remember that everyone is only temporarily visually-enabled. The issue affects all of us. Unlike American students, print-disabled Indians cannot freely convert their study books into MP3 format.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/they-fight-for-the-visually-challenged

Amendment to Copyright Act opposed

radha — 2011-04-02T12:49:15Z

A report on the press conference held on 15th April, at the Press Club, Bangalore : The Hindu

Bangalore: The proposed amendment to the Copyright Act 1957 will deprive over 70 million persons with disabilities in India from exercising their Right to Education, according to the National Access Alliance.

The amendment, being introduced in the budget session of the parliament will prevent non-governmental organisations, educational institutions and persons with disabilities from converting reading material, including textbooks and reference material, into audio, digital and other formats.

“The licence procedure for the conversion of these formats is cumbersome, restrictive and lengthy. This will deprive students with print disabilities of their Right to Education,” Sunil Abraham, executive director, The Centre for Internet and Society, told presspersons here on Thursday.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/amendment-to-copyright-act-opposed

Mozilla DevDay 2010, Bangalore

radha — 2011-04-05T04:12:42Z

Mozilla, Mahiti & The Centre for Internet and Society are joining hands to organize an informal developer-oriented conference in Bangalore on Saturday February 27, 2010.

The Mozilla DevDay will be an opportunity for developers, open source enthusiasts, and web aficionados who live in and around Bangalore, to meet Mozilla staff and learn about the Mozilla Project and its technologies. The DevDay is a free conference open to the general public.

For more information please visit: http://j.mp/BLRMozDevDay

All interested participants are requested to register by following this link: http://j.mp/MozDevDayBLR

For the event poster, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-devday-2010-bangalore

Art and Social Media

radha — 2011-04-05T04:17:50Z

Art Resources and Teaching Trust in collaboration with The Centre for Internet and Society, is organizing a workshop titled "Art and Social Media" on January 16th-17th 2010, to be conducted by Anita Garimella.

Art, Resources and Teaching Trust (A.R.T.) Bangalore and The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore invites you to a two days workshop, “Art and Social Media” by Anita Garimella.

Anita Garimella (http://www.linkedin.com/in/anitagarimella) is an internet and software product management and marketing consultant. After graduating from Stanford University’s Human Computer Interaction Program in 2000, she has worked on several projects in the industry including the creation and design of applications for Wallop, Facebook and Bebo.

The schedule of the workshop is as follows:

Day 1
Social Media, Web 1.0 and 2.0, and Art 11.00 AM - 1.00 PM
•    What is Social Media – and how does it connect with Web 2.0?
•    How is Social Media measured?
•    Virality, and the dangers of this new yardstick
•    Brief overview of Art & Social Media

Lunch 1.00 PM - 2.00 PM

Deep Dive – Case Studies of Art and Social Media 2.00 PM - 4.30 PM
•    Art blogs & discourse
•    Facebook & art
•    Art-making
•    Art marketing
•    Art pedagogy

Day 2
Opportunities & Challenges for Art using Social Media 11.00 AM - 1.00 PM
•    What is art in this context?
•    What are good ways to use social media for art?
•    Importance of defining goals in social media usage
•    Copyrights and public domain
•    Democratization of art – is that really possible?

Lunch 1.00 PM - 2.00 PM

Future of the Internet and technology and their impact on Art 2.00 PM - 3.30 PM
•    Web 3.0: Surf to Search to Subscribe
•    How to penetrate in an increasingly aggregated world
•    New technologies

Find attached a registration form. You can also download the registration form from www.artscapeindia.org. Interested participants can complete the registration form and send it along with a DD of Rs.1800/- (per participant and includes lunch and handout material) to the address given in the form.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-social-media

Drawing maps for change

radha — 2011-04-04T06:49:53Z

Digital maps can hold immense academic value – an article by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, 3rd Jan, 2010.

BANGALORE: The mash-up story is an old but compelling one, particularly when used for advocacy as in Tunisia where exile Sami Ben Gharbiais used a GoogleMaps mash-up to paint a different kind of landscape.
So random net surfers were startled to find the Tunisian map dotted with a string of prisoner’s names, their biographies, and videos of their family members telling the story of the human rights situation in the country.
Closer home, rights activist K. Ramnarayan is trying to do something similar. Using GPS and simple mapping technologies, Mr. Ramnarayan maps the location and extent of damage that will be created by proposed hydro-electric projects in Uttarakhand.

“We knew that many projects were announced. But it was only when we began mapping, we found that the 550-odd projects were concentrated in three valleys, and could potentially ruin all the State’s rivers,” he says.

Detailed perspectives

Mr. Ramnarayan believes that mapping technology can provide detailed perspectives, enable analysis — GPS devices are easy to use and collated data can be simply added as layers to existing maps — and create better awareness by sharing data online. Using the more accurate GIS mapping can also hold immense academic value.

It is this potential that “Maps for Change,” a collaborative project hosted by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Tactical Tech, endeavours to tap into. Anja Kovacs, a CIS fellow, believes maps are powerful, as they provide the larger picture. For instance, she says, news reports lead one to believe that protests against SEZs are isolated today. Now, put all those protests on a map, and you get the real picture! “Maps for Change” participants are involved in a slew of fascinating projects such as mapping land acquisition patterns in Bangalore, tribal displacement issues and dissident sexualities in Delhi.

Layer of information

So mapping is not a complex cartographer’s job anymore. With cheaper and more efficient GPS devices, in the market and on your cellphones, anybody can map. Pradeep B.V. of MapUnity.org, a site that lets you create your own map, says that ‘neogeographers’ are redefining online maps.

Neogeographers use available online maps such as Google MyMaps or Open Street Maps to add layers of information to a typical mashup.

GIS adds that critical layer of accuracy, and is essential in remote areas which are not mapped by these services. So you collect data (typically latitude, longitude and altitude information), mark your points of interest and upload this on a map, Mr. Pradeep explains.

Using attributes these simple maps can be used, accurately, to tell a story and document several layers of information.

Tracking changes
Say you wish to record access to health facilities in a backward district. A GPS device helps you collate info and create a ‘schema’ of data that can be uploaded directly to any mashup. Open source tools such as JUMP or UDIG can help you work easily with GIS datasets. The map can be interactive, you can track changes and can be as dynamic as you want it to be — for instance, you upload videos of health care facilities or highlight patches of social exclusion.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/drawing-maps-for-change

Native plays

radha — 2012-01-03T11:08:46Z

Online activist groups are helping change perceptions about the internet generation, says Shweta Taneja, Time Out Bengaluru.

In May 2008, Anivar Aravind, a Bangalore-based software consultant, came up with a strategy to petition for the release of Binayak Sen, the human rights activist who had been jailed by the Chhattisgarh government exactly a year before, in May 2007. Sen, who is known for his efforts in defending the rights of tribal and underprivileged people, had been held for alleged unlawful activities, and the detention was declared in breach of international Amnesty laws. Aravind’s ploy, to hasten Sen’s release, was entirely based in the online sphere. He created the website www.binayeksen.net, where he sought to bring together different groups of people protesting against the arrest. “By that time, it had been a year since Sen had been in jail,” said the 26-year-old, “and activists had exhausted all strategies to no avail. The movement needed to be reintroduced imaginatively.”

The website, said Aravind, was a way of using the digital space and creating an information channel to reactivate people towards the cause of freeing Sen. The website’s team went on to populate pages on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, to call for nationwide protests on specific dates. “We even provided posters and updates on local protests to facilitate people getting together,” said Aravind. Two years after the activist’s arrest, the online movement had resulted in over 60 different protest events. Sixteen of these protests were held outside the country, observed by NRIs outside various Indian embassies. On May 25 this year, Sen was released on bail. “It was the combination of mobilisation of audiences on the web and taking that protest offline and onto the streets that worked,” reflected Aravind.

For Nishant Shah, director of research at the city’s Centre for Internet and Society, Aravind is one among a strain of online users who fall under the banner of “digital natives”. “People like Aravind, who claim to live within, on, through and by the internet and digital technologies are [called] digital natives,” explained Shah. “You might be connected online, but still not be a person whose crucial social, cultural, political and economic activities, as well as imaginations, are informed by new technologies.”

In an attempt to unravel the concept, the CIS recently conducted an extensive research on the subject. “The available definitions of the term ‘digital native’ were simply based on age – children born after the ’80s, or young power-users of technology from a particular class-bracket,” explained Shah. But that was clearly not the case, realised Shah. To help with the study, CIS collaborated with The Knowledge Programme, led by the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation, a Dutch organisation. The study aimed to examine the identity of digital natives and to understand the manner in which these natives had turned into “e-agents” of change, constantly finding new ways of engaging with different socio-cultural and political crises through digital technologies.

To explore concerns of such web usage in India, CIS recently conducted a workshop at Ranga Shankara, which involved school children, parents, teachers, activists and artists, before releasing a paper titled “Digital Natives with a Cause?” While the study attempts at busting the perception that digital users are a privileged, upper-class, English-speaking group of people who use the internet only for pleasure, it also helped subvert the idea of a generation that is believed to be largely disconnected from reality and lives in bubbles of social networks and online groups. “This new generation is not being taken seriously enough,” said Shah.

CIS has now announced an international conference – to be held next year – that will invite scholars, academics, NGOs, practitioners, policy makers and activists to explore the various contexts occupied by digital natives. The plan also includes a book that will document various successful campaigns of the kind from across the globe. “The study is a first resource tool that hopes to help researchers and practitioners formulate projects that work on youth-technology relationships,” explained Shah.

The paper “Digital Natives with a Cause?” is available as a free download at www.cis-india.org.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/native-plays

Pushing Buttons

radha — 2011-04-02T13:56:28Z

The coolest device of the decade – From brick-sized to size zero, the cell phone changed our lives forever – an article by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, 1st Jan, 2010.

Bangalore: Today, it no longer makes news to see your neighbourhood vegetable vendor taking orders on his mobile phone, or for that matter a mason at work as he chatters away on his cellphone.

A decade ago this was unthinkable.

The 10 years which have gone by have found a great leveller in technology, the cell phone being the most ubiquitous of them all. Cellphones crossed over from overpriced, shoebox-sized, upper-class accessory to an affordable easy-to-use gadget for staying connected, getting entertained and, for many, even a way of life. The long queues outside the PCO booth and scrambling for those elusive one-rupee coins is now history. The cellphone is literally in every hand. As of November 2009, India, with the world’s second largest population, registered 506.4 million cellphone connections, (543 million, including landlines), second only to China. Which means half our population has the device.

Tharoor’s take

Twitter-politician Shashi Tharoor regaled the audience at a recent conference, TED India, about this story of a coconut vendor in his home state of Kerala. He wanted a tender coconut and called a vendor he knew, only to discover the man was high up on a coconut palm, still connected to his cellphone!

Old timers still talk about the miles of red tape and the years it took to get a basic landline connection.

So while globally the noughties were about crowdsourcing, micro and macro blogging, e-books, file sharing or the “cloud”, in India, even the internet is only barely there. With a staggeringly low penetration, pegged at around seven to eight percent (over 80 million), the web is not a patch on the omnipresent cellphone.

The next decade

Sunil Abraham, Director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, insists that the cellphone will also define the decade that begins today. And like that clever advertisement, text-to-voice and voice recognition can and will be big in providing access to the unlettered, disabled and forgotten sections, he explains.

“Data services and geographic positioning services (GPS) show great promise in connecting the poor to the state and the market,” he said.

On a more futuristic, and indulgent note, Mr. Abraham says micro-projection systems that will work on walls and mobiles will forefront projects in those rural areas with limited or no electricity. This may be the only way to reach the unbanked with mainstream or community currencies, he adds.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/pushing-buttons

Wired state of mind

radha — 2011-04-02T13:56:55Z

Information technology is the driver of society today — the basic block of innovation and growth in organisations, the mainstay of the 21st century. The decade bygone was only an indicator of the things to come. Whether its ideas or friendships, the future indubitably belongs to linking-up on the web, writes Malvika Tegta , DNA - Digital Edition, Monday - 28th December, 2009.

Did cyberscape make us cogs on a new machinery or liberate us, empower us or make us vulnerable, enrich us with cultural diversity or homogenise us? There isnt a simple answer. Not in a diverse world digitally sewn into a remarkably new pattern. Here what is certain is what is manifest — the emergence of an information society witness to changes in organisation structure, work cultures, community life, lifestyles, medicine, governance, activism, political participation, commercial business, conventional media, spaces for those on the social fringes, emergence of support systems. And a new connected state of mind.

Increased spread of the web and an exponential increase in internet platforms and applications unleashed a world of possibility for the user like never before. You could collaboratively edit a dynamic encyclopedia, collectively write a book on an idea seeded in the US and source ideas for your art project from perfect strangers from across the globe. There were endless ways of connecting with people we never knew existed — an increased consumption of global culture.

A phenomenon that enabled linking up like never before was social networking, invented in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. The Facebook culture that it spawned was drastically going to change our world as we knew it.

Consider how your life changed. A regular college evening in 2000, which was spent on chai, sutta and long walks, was invested in collecting updates about friends living on the same hostel wing on Facebook or Twitter. You were poked if you were being lazy about parting with your current mood update. When you spread out after college, these platforms kept you perpetually in the loop. You knew whod put on weight, whose relationship status had changed, that xyz was feeling crabby today. You, in turn, made sure that you posted one good picture of you in the Jaisalmer deserts for your 369 Facebook buddies to see.

And, all that upload and download of continuous information was negotiated on multiple browser windows, deftly juggled at work, while you waited for your strawberry crop on Farmville to mature.

In short, social lives of the 15% of us (Indians) with internet access were, if not fundamentally altered, certainly uploaded and impacted over the last 10 years. We became comfortable with the idea of trading identities and data about ourselves with companies like Orkut, Facebook or Google in return for the opportunity to realise the last connection on our six degrees of separation map.

Factors that made 24*7 wired lifestyle possible were miniaturisation, therefore portability computers; the smartening up of mobile phones; better broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity, and social media boom. Laptops made way for notebooks, notebooks for netbooks, and cell phone companies rolled out browser-based phones like the Blackberry and Android handsets.

To grasp the changes in the backdrop of the colossal exchange of data was to revisit Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhans line, made famous way before the Internet got big, “The medium is the message”.

Cultural evolution
The Internet grew up fast over the past 10 years, both embodying social values like connectivity, participation, creating, collaborating and self-sufficiency, and in turn affecting them. It went from read-only sites to being driven by user generated content. The user became the creative dynamo, armed with tools like blogs, review forums, and sites like WordPress, Blogspot, Flickr and YouTube.

Then came social media: Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, Twitter. Peer-2-peer file sharing application BitTorrent and music sharing sites like Napster came to represent the new philosophy. Here, the user became an active supplier of movies or music without the need for an intermediary server, as was generally the case before.

“The three cultural turns that social networking has introduced have been peer-2-peer networking, collaborations and new processes of publication and dissemination. These have changed our notion of history, cultural production and consumption, and knowledge production,” says Nishant Shah, director, research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. “Sites like Wikipedia have dismantled the processes of knowledge production and learning and introduced new forms of knowledge-sharing, like crowd sourcing. Collaborations have managed new forms of emotional bonding, creative production and interaction which propel the blogosphere and public opinion. These have an impact on questions of consumption, lifestyle patterns, etc.”

24x7 connectivity
The Internet speeded up time and we “drew gratification from speed”. You wanted to look up a breakfast place, a word meaning or answer to the first thing off the top of your head like why are men the way they are? You wanted Google to turn up an answer, and fast.

Since free social working sites became a landmine of data on consumer behaviour, trends, likes and dislikes, they needed to attract and keep the numbers. A few sites maintained a near monopoly; search was to Google, social networking meant Facebook and realtime synonymous with Twitter. Apart from constant re-invention, the sheer potential for large-scale networking was the reason. “My friends stick to Gmail, Facebook and Twitter because we dont want to manage information on too many sites,” says Saurabh Shrivastava, an MBA student.

It was reported that Facebook users woke up to water virtual crops at 4am just to stay ahead on Farmville, or sign into Twitter to see how far the world had come. Instant feedback was the expectation. The experiences and satisfactions were on multiple windows; to be out of that pattern caused anxiety. That was also in part because people fell back upon structures of social support online, which were earlier unavailable; BlackBerry/smartphones to the rescue.

Though the network grew stronger, it essentially comprised weak ties. Technology consultant Atul Chitnis feels that wider reach… reduced real-world interactions are unnatural in the social perspective, and have made social interactions more competitive. “Its more about getting more comments and reactions.”

What writer James Harkin portrayed as the new crack cocaine, professor Clay Shirky saw as not the case of information overload but of “filter failure”.

Virtual & physical
While we became human nodes spending a large part of the day on the network, the physical fed into the virtual world and vice-versa. Shortened attention spans created an attention economy, leading conventional media to get increasingly visual and in some cases sensational.

The response to crisis speeded up and social mobilisation became easier. In Tsunami-hit South and Southeast Asia, people mobilised resources for the disaster-affected. A pub attack on women in Mangalore snowballed into the nationwide Pink Chaddi campaign.

While its constantly said that the Internet connects us virtually and isolates physically, Shah says: “Contrary to popular perception, studies have shown that interface time increases peoples face time because new friendships, alliances and interests are anchored in the physical world.” The quality of interaction, however, will go down, says Chitnis, “due to current social patterns created by loss of cultural distinctiveness, and reduced real-world interaction”. This will especially be true for young adults “who will grow up not knowing a world without social networking”.

Language blends
Shah sites the change in language as the most visible and dramatic. “Easy access to writing and publishing tools has led to the development of new forms of speech and articulation. In countries, where English is not the majority first language, new blends like Singlish (Singapore), Hinglish (India) and Chinglish (China) have emerged as Western contexts, cultural products and ideas proliferated in new vocabularies on the information superhighway. These changes are associated with other changes in terms of new linguistic identities and nationalities,” he says.

Niche goes pop
The growth of the Internet revolutionised the economics of distribution of the media and the entertainment industry, a trend Chris Anderson tracked in his book, The Long Tail. Once it would have been unthinkable to get a copy of a Skinny Puppy CD in the music store because it simply wasnt worth the stocking cost — it wasnt popular enough. And if it wasnt stocked, it was as good as non-existent for a buyer who had never heard of it. That was the era of the blockbuster: what was profitable sold. The Internet changed this: with virtually no space constraints, and the low manufacturing and distribution cost of digital content, a hit became just as good as a miss. Both constituted sales: larger the number the better. Today, Google, Rhapsody, Apple iTunes and Amazon, all operate on that business model. The result: niche worlds have become much more visible and mainstream.

So, as we slow-waltz to the buzz of information, an online etiquette evolves. We gradually learn to turn noise into substance, come to terms with the blurring of private and public, mobilise in crisis, hone the skill of swimming through information to come up with the right find, and learn to direct at least some part of leisure time spent surfing and chatting to tap into the Internets true potential.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wired-state-of-mind

Want to bring social change? This map shows the way

radha — 2009-12-21T07:55:15Z

By siliconindia news bureau, Tuesday,08 December 2009, 14:13 hrs

Bangalore: A group of 40 people in Bangalore including techies and activists, are creating digital maps called 'Maps for Making Change' that will be used to bring social change in India. The Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, a social organization that studies the connection between the Internet and society, and the NGO Tactical Tech Collective (Bangalore and UK) are creating a map of India that will show hotspots where social change can be brought about.

Individuals working with groups and organizations working for social change across India, including grassroots activists, NGO workers, artists and researchers, sent in 70 high quality and detailed additions to the digital map, reports Renuka Phadnis of Bangalore Mirror. These places across India highlighted issues such as: the socio-economic aspects and consequences of the construction of Bangalore's Metro, fighting for clean rivers, people's rights to livelihoods in the Himalayas, monitoring the national implementation of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), mobilizing slum dwellers to engage with Mumbai's new Development Plan, human rights violations in Kashmir, identifying land where internally displaced people can be resettled in the North East.

"You don't have to be a professional cartographer. With new technologies such as GPS and the Net, anyone can easily add to digital maps," says Dr. Anja Kovacs, Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
In a city like Bangalore, the potential of using digital maps is tremendous. For instance, such maps could be used to show which Metro routes and stations Bangaloreans want. The maps could tell us where migrant labor enter the city, where they live and where they move on. Bangalore based techie B.V. Pradeep, who provided technical support to the map team says, "In a map, every person draws what is important to him. One person may draw a mall, another may mark the school and hospital. This map will give visibility to invisible people."

Anyone can access Maps for Making Change. See email list (http://groups.google.co.in/group/maps-for-making-change). The wiki will be up and running in a few days time (maps4change.cis-india.org), said Dr Kovacs. To follow on Twitter, use the hash tag #maps4change.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/want-to-bring-social-change-this-map-shows-the-way