Centre for Internet and Society

What is the Open Data Movement & Why Does it Matter?

sumandro — 2015-06-18T01:12:49Z

I gave a talk at this event organized by Phandeeyar on May 13, 2015 in Yangon. About 25 delegates attended the event.

My presentation focused on talking about the key qualities of open data, the process of opening up data, and its benefits. I mentioned various examples from across the world regarding usages of open data to describe and find patterns in how the various governmental processes function (elections, parliament, judiciary, and media outreach), and different topics related to flows of finance and resources (government budget and expenditure, international aids, financial information about corporates, allotment of oil concessions, and global investments in land). The discussion following the presentation focused on questions of how privacy concerns can be protected while opening up data, how protecting the (human) sources of published data is also important in sensitive situations (especially in the context of reporting incidents of hate speech and religious violence), how the capacity of grassroot organisations to collect, use, and share open data can be increased, and if open data can become a public resource during the upcoming national election later this year. At the end of the event, I was interviewed by a journalist of Myanmar Times on these topics.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/phandeeyar-event-what-is-open-data-movement-and-why-does-it-matter

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts

sumandro — 2015-08-28T06:53:33Z

We received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' Here are the ten selected abstracts. The final essays will be published from June onwards.

Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights gives rise to the multitude of issues such as right to privacy, freedom of expression, accessibility. Pertinent socio-political and legal issues related to Internet which was widely debated upon in the past one year in India includes lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000. The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal accessibility to Internet and to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ law of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. Interestingly all these issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.

This paper is an attempt to understand and analyze theses issues from the human rights angle and also how they have contributed in evolving an understanding and perspective amongst the digitally conscious Indian’s to ensure the democratic nature of “Internet” is perceived. Moreover, analysis of these three issues would also help in emphasizing upon the need for a right-based approach in studying Internet in India.

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Whereas the status of the internet in India is similar to the status of the internet in similar economies with low-penetration and a primarily mobile-based future, an alphabetically diverse nation such as India has its added worries. Whereas the 1990s saw an overdomination of English given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the internet, by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.

What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multilingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English. In this essay, I shall attempt to study the effects this has on the internet population of India, some of which are as follows.

The kind of mimetic desire it causes
The degneration in spelling skills caused due to transliteration
The effacement of non-digitised Indic verbal texts

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

The first mention of the 'Internet' in the vocabulary of Indian judicial system was a fleeting reference to its radical capability to allow access to knowledge. In one of its most recent references, it expounded upon and upheld the idea of the Internet as a radical tool for free expression, announcing its constitutional significance for free speech.

The judicial imagination of the Internet – the understanding of its capabilities and limitations, its actors and constituents, as reflected in the judgements of Indian courts – plays a major role in shaping the Internet in India, both reflecting and defining conceptions of the Internet and its relationship with society, law, and public policy.

This essay is an attempt to use legal and literary theory to study the archives of judicial decisions, tracing the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and also to look at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet. It attempts a vital study of how courts in India have conceptualized and understood the Internet, and how these conceptions have, in turn, impacted the influence of the Internet on Indian society.

Ipsita Sengupta

The proposed essay will make observations of a specific kind of conversation that takes place on the social media platform of YouTube. The conclusive argument is imagined along questions of high versus low culture, as described below.

Under study are two objects- one, particular YouTube videos which play Rabindra-Sangeet, i.e. songs penned and composed in the late 19- early 20th centuries by the Bengali writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore, the body of work which today has become a genre of Indian music; and the second, comments that these videos receive from users of the site.

Visuals of YouTube song videos of Rabindra-Sangeet are of many kinds. So are renditions, with solitary or duet or band performances, and with varying pace and instrumental accompaniment.

The videos which have visuals from contemporary cinema, like images of urban youth, and the remixed renditions have often been found to receive comments which reflect/ reveal hurt sentiments of people trying to preserve some kind of sanctity of Rabindra-Sangeet, comments which state how the ethics of presenting the genre have been violated, via their notation and design, by either makers of the film in the song’s incorporation, or by the way young pop stars have been placed in particular montages.

Some examples:

In such a scenario, YouTube as medium of user-generated expression becomes interesting to analyse individual and group dynamics- given the space for commenting (below the video), and statistical data such as “Likes”, “Dislikes”, and “Views”. The debate here is that in Tagore’s “Nationalism”, when he himself is seen to have an imagination of the human race beyond patriotic groupings and consequent othering, does this apparent need to avoid “insulting” his compositions by preserving an intangible art form in a particular way, become then a type of jingoism of region or identity? And what is this Benjaminian “aura” of the “original” that listeners look for in their experience of these videos?

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Three hours after regulations governing public access to WiFi in India were changed in 2005 the first router went up in Dharamsala. It was homemade, open source, and eventually, “monkey proof.” Something unimaginable had happened: high-speed Internet access in one of India’s most difficult physical geographies. Dharamsala has also become one of India's interesting information networks and has a burgeoning, unlikely 'tech scene’. But is it so unlikely?

Since 1959 Dharamsala has been home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan people and, government in exile. This single, significant incident possibly set in motion a number of factors that made it possible for the mountain-town to become a political, global, communications. However, much like the rest of India, the region struggles for human and environmental rights against fractured ideas of 'development'. This essay will draw on archives and interviews to unpack this microcosmic tale of Internet access, its histories and economics and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Everyone around us is connected to the Internet through some or other electronic devices, phones, laptops, and tablets. However, not everyone use Internet for the same purpose. Through an ethnographic account of the usage of WhatsApp messages by the traders in three electronic bazaars in Delhi, Palika Bazaar, Nehru Place and Lajpat Rai Market, we see how Internet on the phone is used predominantly for business purpose. The paper seeks to examine how Whatsapp messages, which are for most of the users a medium for social communication, for the traders in Delhi, become a mode to establish business contact with their counterparts in China. From sharing of pictures of new tools to quoting prices of different products, Whatsapp messages become the lifeline of what many has termed as ‘globalization from below’. This paper argues what has started as economic exchanges through Whatsapp messages may start a new political alliance of similar mass markets in Asia. With the electronic bazaars in Delhi facing stiff competition from formal business actors both online and offline, the WhatsApp messages that is a space of new innovations and trade alliances could sustain the mass markets in India.

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Suddenly it seems internet data package on mobile phones is the reply to the problems in India. As mobile phones remain with us most of the time, it is as if we are ready to face the world if our mobile phones have a data package. Yes, several television commercials in India are gleefully harping on the notes of knowledge, empowerment and freedom. Moreover, internet is being identified as a virtual institution.

The essay proposes to look into those advertisements which talk about the internet to promote data packages, mobile phones or apps. Through this, the essay firstly, would like to construct the idea of the internet using the Indian citizen who is depicted as smart and almost infallible. Secondly, on the other hand, the essay would analyse how an affirmative and constructive view of using the internet in the minds of citizens has been generated by these advertisements, like the virtual world of the internet can save you from any drastic situation.

Advertisements are creative constructs, which have a strong aptitude to entice target consumers. While studying the internet in India, studying the ‘texts’ of Indian advertisements which refer to the act of ‘consuming’ the internet could result in an interesting study.

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

From the humblest mobile phones to the most sophisticated computers, the Internet is everywhere and nowhere in India. The boundaries, the contours of the space remain nebulous and opaque. When engaging with social media in urban India in particular, we are bound to the conventions of corporations which demand quantity over quality creating a new class system of the Internet: those who are “active” – and therefore a “better” user – and those who have seemingly failed to keep up with the demands of the medium, buried in the ever‐growing noise and chaos. The creation of a new class system on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, has shaped who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Based on fieldwork in New Delhi which examines the impact of the Internet on offline social movements – including the anti corruption movement in 2011 and the Delhi Rape Case in 2012 – I will argue that the study of the Internet in India can reinforce Western corporate conceptions of how to use the Internet properly among various users involved in the movements. By challenging these preconceptions, this essay will engage with issues of Western corporate notions of Internet use and how we engage with and find participants, how we evaluate what is “good” use of the Internet, and the creation of a new class system on the Internet in India.

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

In the privatised spaces of the World Wide Web and the internet, how does one make sense of speech? Should speech in such a space be understood as the product of a marketplace of ideas? Or should its role in democratic participation be recognised by contextualising the internet as part of the Habermasian public sphere? These questions have interesting implications for the regulation of speech on the internet, as they employ different principles in understanding speech. Recent scholarship has argued for the benefits of employing the public sphere approach to the internet and thus recognising its democratic potential. But taking into account that all speech is inherently made in private spaces on the internet, the application of this approach is far from simple.

This creates a tension between the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere approaches to speech on the internet in policymaking. I propose to explore how legal and regulatory mechanisms manage these tensions by creating governance frameworks for the internet: I argue that through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet. I propose that this less-than-perfect reconciliation then manages to modify the very idea of the public sphere itself in the Indian context, by infusing participation of the "other" on the internet through indirect means.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts

Humanitarian OSM: Mapping Nepal

sumandro — 2015-04-27T07:46:16Z

To support the disaster relief work in progress in Nepal, the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) is busy mapping roads, settlements, and buildings in Nepal. Creating a detailed map of the area in OpenStreetMap will give the relief workers much valuable open data that can be used for planning their efforts. Contribute to the efforts of the Humanitarian OSM to map features in Nepal to support relief work.

Please join the efforts wherever you are.

The pending tasks are listed here: http://tasks.hotosm.org/.

Documentation to help you through the tasks is here: https://datameet.hackpad.com/Nepal-Earthquake-Mapping-YDjLauUK0Ek.

If you are in Bangalore, head to MapBox office: https://goo.gl/maps/bkqKF.

The DataMeet Delhi chapter will start organising mapping sessions in different offices in Delhi from today 14:00. Follow the DataMeet list for information about that: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/datameet.

Or, you can stay where you are and work on this remotely.

If you need support, please feel free to write to Sajjad [sajjadkm@gmail.com], Shashank [srinivasan.shashank@gmail.com], or Sumandro [sumandro@cis-india.org].

A big thanks to Sajjad for putting it all together and leading the efforts.

Image credit: MapBox.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/humanitarian-osm-mapping-nepal

Featured

sumandro — 2015-04-10T10:54:23Z

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

Posts

sumandro — 2015-09-13T10:41:28Z

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

Networked Expressions

sumandro — 2015-08-28T06:21:21Z

Networked expressions refer to our daily practices, habits and experiences of self-articulations in and through digital media, online spaces and virtual networks. This cluster is configured to focus our studies on the networked lives of human, non-human, and cyborg being in the digital era; the questions of expressions of body, sexuality, gender, caste, class, abilities, religion, and power as mediated by digital conditions and virtual contexts; the practices of art, representation, instrumental communication, and self-making through digital artifacts, interfaces, technologies, and networks. We are especially interested in foregrounding the networked technologies that shape the socio-material context of such expressions. Also, this cluster is specifically driven by applied and curatorial works.

Projects

Maps for Making Change (2009-2010)
Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects (2012)
Interface Intimacies (ongoing)

Publications

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries by Nishant Shah
Silicon Plateau Vol. 01 edited by Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton (forthcoming)

Web Politics

sumandro — 2015-08-28T06:21:38Z

In the recent years, the Indian cyberspace has experienced a rising volume of political content, communication, and interactions. This cluster focuses on questions arising from the various forms that social, cultural, economic, and technological power takes in its online articulations, such as web-based political practices of social activists, policy advocates, change-makers, marginalised groups, and mainstream political parties in India. We are especially interested in the political expressions and activities of 'digital natives' and young users of the Internet; and the conceptualisations, articulations, and actualisations of 'change,' and the related emerging visions of political forms and social transformation, in the online discourse in India.

Projects

Digital Natives (2009-2012)
Making Change (2014)

Publications

Digital Natives without a Cause?, a book series edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers edited by Nishant Shah, Josine Stremmelaar and Fieke Jansen
Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report by Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham
Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
Digital Activism in Asia Reader (ongoing)

Internet Histories

sumandro — 2015-10-25T03:59:40Z

The RAW programme has been interested in the histories of computing and Internet in India from its very inception. This cluster addresses the making of Internet in India – from questions of communication infrastructures, regulatory practices and formation of expertise, labour and industries of connecting India to the Internet, integration of Internet and computers into the functioning of the public and private sector agencies in India, coming of Internet-based solutions into the human development topics and practices, to early net cultures and netizens in India, roles of Internet in media and device cultures in India, spaces and geographies of Internet in India; and the making of the Indian cyberspace in terms of contents, users, and real/virtual practices. It is also interested in excavating the longer history(ies) of electronic communication in its various forms in India, and locating its implications and remnants in the contemporary experiences of Internet in India.

Projects

Histories of Internets in India (2008-2011)

Publications

Rewiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan
Archive and Access by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran, and Abhijit Bhattacharya
Porn: Law, Video and Technology by Namita Malhotra
The Last Cultural Mile by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2015-08-28T07:09:39Z

As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – and even in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore what it means to study Internet(s) in India today.

We are interested in the many experiences of Internet(s) in India; its histories and archaeologies; how we use it to read, write, create, relate, learn, and share; the data that is produced, and the data that is consumed; the spaces that are created, and the spaces that are inhabited; the forms that political expressions take on the Web; and of course, where and how should one be studying Internet(s) in India?

This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org by Sunday, April 26, 2015. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'

We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, May 01, 2015.

The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (2,500-3,000 words) by Sunday, May 31, 2015. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 5,000.

We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the Internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an argument – through text, or otherwise.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india

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

Centre for Internet and Society

What is the Open Data Movement & Why Does it Matter?

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts

Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

Ipsita Sengupta

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

Humanitarian OSM: Mapping Nepal

Featured

Posts

Networked Expressions

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Web Politics

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Internet Histories

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

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?

Centre for Internet and Society

What is the Open Data Movement & Why Does it Matter?

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts

Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

Ipsita Sengupta

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

Humanitarian OSM: Mapping Nepal

Featured

Posts

Networked Expressions

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Web Politics

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Internet Histories

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

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: Tracking Multistakeholder across Contributions