Centre for Internet and Society

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16) - Selected Sessions

sumandro — 2016-01-18T09:23:06Z

We are proud to announce that the first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16), organised around the theme of 'studying internet in India,' will be held on February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for generously supporting it. Here are the details about the session selection process, the selected sessions, the Conference programme (draft), the pre-Conference discussions, accommodation, and travel grants. The Conference will include a book sprint to produce an open handbook on 'methods and tools for internet research.'

Session Selection Process

We received 23 superb session proposals for the IRC16. All the teams that submitted sessions were invited to vote for their eight favourite session in a double-blind manner - the teams did not know the names of the people who proposed other sessions, and we at CIS did not know which team has voted for which particular set of sessions. After receiving all the votes, we could not help but change the format of the Conference (as planned earlier) to accommodate 15 sessions in total. All Discussion and Workshop sessions of the Conference are double track, except for the three Discussion sessions that received most number of votes.

Selected Sessions

#DigitalDesires: Received 8.15% votes. Proposed by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.
#FollowTheMedium: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.
#STSDebates: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.
#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.
#InternetMovements: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.
#FutureBazaars: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.
#MinimalComputing: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.
#WebOfGenealogies: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.
#WikiShadows: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.
#LiterarySpaces: Received 5.43% votes. Proposed by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.
#ArchiveAnarchy: Received 4.34% votes. Proposed by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.
#AFCinema2.0: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.
#ManyPublicsOfInternet: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.
#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Rinku Lamba and Rajarshi Dasgupta.
#SpottingData: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are delighted to announce that the Conference will be hosted by the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU, and will be generously supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

Conference Programme

Access the draft programme (v.2.1): Download (PDF).

Pre-Conference Conversations

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in the pre-conference conversations: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers.

Accommodation

CPS and CIS will provide accommodation to all non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference.

Travel Grants

We will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. The following non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions have been selected for travel grants: Aakash Solanki, Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Neha Mujumdar, Purbasha Auddy, Rahmanuddin Shaik, Rashmi M, Rohini Lakshané, Sailen Routray, P.P. Sneha, and Zeenab Aneez.

The travel grants are made possible by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions

Approaching Open Research via Open Data - Presentation at TERI, December 22, 2015

sumandro — 2016-01-12T14:37:38Z

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, organised a seminar on 'Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach' on December 22, 2015. We supported the seminar as a knowledge partner. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited to deliver a special address. Here are the notes and slides from the presentation.

The brief presentation foregrounded open data as a crucial part of open research, and also as an instrument of opening up research for public consumption, discussion, and scrutiny.

The presentation started with reference to the Open Access Dialogues organised by The African Commons Project and the Centre for Internet and Society during November 2012 to March 2013 that explored the global open access agenda from a developing world perspective.

I noted that one of the key findings from the Indian participants of the online consultations organised as part of the Open Access Dialogues was the need for a broader vision of open access. Open research data is a key component of this broader vision of open access and open research.

There was a brief discussion of how to start doing and thinking about open data as an approach to open research. I highlighted the need to get started on 1) getting government to open up data relevant to research, 2) opening up academic research data, and 3) sectoral conversations on data standards (technical and semantic); as well as the need to think about 1) open data as bridge across disciplinary communities, 2) quantification of life and the widening sphere of research data, and 3) academic research and public life.

In next slides, I quickly mentioned the international processes going on in the open data landscape - the conversation on open data and Sustainable Development Data, the possibility of using big (social and telecom) data for purposes of development monitoring, and the International Open Data Charter as a set of global principles for open data.

More about the seminar: http://cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/approaching-open-research-via-open-data-2015

Pre-Budget Consultation 2016 - Submission to the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance

sumandro — 2016-01-12T13:34:41Z

The Ministry of Finance has recently held pre-budget consultations with different stakeholder groups in connection with the Union Budget 2016-17. We were invited to take part in the consultation for the IT (hardware and software) group organised on January 07, 2016, and submit a suggestion note. We are sharing the note below. It was prepared and presented by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with contributions from Rohini Lakshané, Anubha Sinha, and other members of CIS.

It is our distinct honour to be invited to submit this note for consideration by the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, as part of the pre-budget consultation for 2016-17.

The Centre for Internet and Society is (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. We receive financial support from Kusuma Trust, Wikimedia Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, IDRC, and other donors.

We have divided our suggestions into the different topics that our organisation has been researching in the recent years.

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the Basis for Digital India

We congratulate the policies introduced by the government to promote use of free/libre and open source software and that of open APIs for all e-governance projects and systems. This is not only crucial for the government to avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to critical software systems for governance, but also to ensure that the source code of such systems is available for public scrutiny and do not contain any security flaws.

We request the government to empower the implementation of these policies by making open sharing of source code a necessity for all software vendors hired by government agencies a necessary condition for awarding of tenders. The 2016-17 budget should include special support to make all government agencies aware and capable of implementing these policies, as well as to build and operate agency-level software repositories (with version controlling system) to host the source codes. These repositories may function to manage the development and maintenance of software used in e-governance projects, as well as to seek comments from the public regarding the quality of the software.

Use of FLOSS is not only important from the security or the cost-saving perspectives, it is also crucial to develop a robust industry of software development firms that specialise in FLOSS-based solutions, as opposed to being restricted to doing local implementation of global software vendors. A holistic support for FLOSS, especially with the government functioning as the dominant client, will immensely help creation of domestic jobs in the software industry, as well as encouraging Indian programmers to contribute to development of FLOSS projects.

An effective compliance monitoring and enforcement system needs to be created to ensure that all government agencies are Strong enforcement of the 2011 policy to use open source software in governance, including an enforcement task force that checks whether government departments have complied with this or not.

Open Data is a Key Instrument for Transparent Decision Making

With a wider set of governance activities being carried out using information systems, the government is increasingly acquiring a substantial amount of data about governance processes and status of projects that needs to be effectively fed back into the decision making process for the same projects. Opening up such data not only allows for public transparency, but also for easier sharing of data across government agencies, which reduces process delays and possibilities of duplication of data collection efforts.

We request the 2016-17 budget to foreground the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and the Open Government Data Platform of India as two key enablers of the Digital India agenda, and accordingly budget for modernisation and reconfiguration of data collection and management processes across government agencies, so that those processes are made automatic and open-by-default. Automatic data management processes minimise the possibility of data loss by directly archiving the collected data, which is increasingly becoming digital in nature. Open-by-default processes of data management means that all data collected by an agency, once pre-recognised as shareable data (that is non-sensitive and anonymised), will be proactively disclosed as a rule.

Implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy has been hindered, so far, by the lack of preparation of a public inventory of data assets, along with the information of their collection cycles, modes of collection and storage, etc., by each union government agency. Specific budgetary allocation to develop these inventories will be crucial not only for the implementation of the Policy, but also for the government to get an extensive sense of data collected and maintained currently by various government agencies. Decisions to proactively publish, or otherwise, such data can then be taken based on established rules.

Availability of such open data, as mentioned above, creates a wider possibility for the public to know, learn, and understand the activities of the government, and is a cornerstone of transparent governance in the digital era. But making this a reality requires a systemic implementation of open government data practices, and various agencies would require targeted budget to undertake the required capacity development and work process re-engineering. Expenditure of such kind should not be seen as producing government data as a product, but as producing data as an infrastructure, which will be of continuous value for the years to come.

As being discussed globally, open government data has the potential to kickstart a vast market of data derivatives, analytics companies, and data-driven innovation. Encouraging civic innovations, empowered by open government data - from climate data to transport data - can also be one of the unique initiatives of budget 2016-17.

For maximising impact of opened up government data, we request the government to publish data that either has a high demand already (such as, geospatial data, and transport data), or is related to high-net-worth activities of the government (such as, data related to monitoring of major programmes, and budget and expenditure data for union and state governments).

Promotion of Start-ups and MSMEs in Electronics and IT Hardware Manufacturing

In line with the Make in India and Digital India initiatives, to enable India to be one of the global hubs of design, manufacturing, and exporting of electronics and IT hardware, we request that the budget 2016-17 focus on increasing flow of fund to start-ups and Medium and Small-Scale Manufacturing Enterprises (MSMEs) in the form of research and development grants (ideally connected to government, especially defense-related, spending on IT hardware innovation), seed capital, and venture capital.

Generation of awareness and industry-specific strategies to develop intellectual property regimes and practices favourable for manufacturers of electronics and IT hardware in India is an absolutely crucial part of promotion of the same, especially in the current global scenario. Start-ups and MSMEs must be made thoroughly aware of intellectual property concerns and possibilities, including limitations and exceptions, flexibilities, and alternative models such as open innovation.

We request the budget 2016-17 to give special emphasis to facilitation of technology licensing and transfer, through voluntary mechanisms as well as government intervention, such as compulsory licensing and government enforced patent pools.

Applied Mathematics Research is Fundamental for Cybersecurity

Recent global reports have revealed that some national governments have been actively involved in sponsoring distortion in applied mathematics research so as to introduce weaknesses in encryption standards used in for online communication. Instead of trying to regulate key-length or mandating pre-registration of devices using encryption, as suggested by the withdrawn National Encryption Policy draft, would not be able to address this core emerging problem of weak cybersecurity standards.

For effective and sustainable cybersecurity strategy, we must develop significant expertise in applied mathematical research, which is the very basis of cybersecurity standards development. We request the budget 2016-17 to give this topic the much-needed focus, especially in the context of the Digital India initiative and the upcoming National Encryption Policy.

Along with developing domestic research capacity, a more immediately important step for the government is to ensure high quality Indian participation in global standard setting organisations, and hence to contribute to global standards making processes. We humbly suggest that categorical support for such participation and contribution is provided through the budget 2016-17, perhaps by partially channeling the revenues obtained from spectrum auctions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom'

sumandro — 2016-02-09T08:43:57Z

Anil Menon will give a talk on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the Centre for Internet and Society's office in Bangalore on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 6 pm. Please join us for tea and coffee before the lecture at 5.30 pm.

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

The RAW Lectures series was initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Anil Menon will present the second lecture of the series on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, at 6 pm.

Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

Story-telling, like the internet, depends on the existence of fixed protocols between the sender and the receiver. However, by manipulating ambiguity and contexts, speculative fiction constantly creates new and ever-changing protocols of reading. This makes it hard to define what exactly speculative fiction is. Spec-fic may be described as a catch-all term to describe genres such as magic-realism, fabulist fiction, slipstream, science-fiction, fantasy and various fusions thereof. In my talk, I will outline the history of spec-fic on the subcontinent, and show how it was used by authors such as Kylas Chundar Dutt to undermine imperialist narratives. In the last decade, the internet, which may be conceived as a speculative network, has emerged as another such tool. Internet access in India is growing at an extraordinary rate, but less well-known is the fact that Indian spec-fic is also undergoing a rather remarkable renaissance. I will show that these two threads of development are related, mutually reinforcing, and point to an interesting metaphor of speculative sovereignity, perhaps unique to India, and that serves to undermine any would-be tyrant’s protocols.

Anil Menon

Anil Menon’s research work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Intl J. of Neural Networks, Neural Proc. Letters, IEEE Trans On Evolutionary Computation, Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, British J. of the History of Science, and Small Business Economics. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Jaggery Lit Review, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His stories have been translated into German, French, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Brandon Society's 2011 Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Website: http://anilmenon.com/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon

Seminar on Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach

sumandro — 2015-12-22T05:37:44Z

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, is organising a seminar on open access in research on Tuesday, December 22, 2015. The seminar will focus on: 1) wider access to scientific publications and research data, 2) access to scientific information, and 3) challenges and opportunities of research data. The Centre for Internet and Society is supporting the event as a Knowledge Partner.

Background

Open Access has become central importance to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, business, and the public as well as librarians. Increasingly, research institutions require researchers to publish articles that report research findings openly accessible in open domain.

Open Access pursues to yield scholarly publishing to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not stop researchers from getting access to research data. Open Access, and the open availability and search ability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the research practice in various fields.

To explore why Open Access is so important to a number of groups, TERI Library along with The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as Knowledge Partner is organizing a half day seminar on Open Access in Research Areas: a Strategic Approach on December 22, 2015 at TERI Seminar Hall, IHC, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.

The Seminar will focus on:

wider access to scientific publications and research data
access to scientific information, and
challenges and opportunities of research data.

Schedule

No registration is required to attend the seminar. Seats are limited, and will be provided on first-come-first-served basis.

13:45 - 14:00		Registration and Networking
14:00 - 14:10		Welcome Address - Mr. Prabir Sengupta, Distinguished Fellow and Director, Knowledge Management Division, TERI
14:10 - 14:20		Special Address - Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society
14:20 - 14:35		Keynote Address - Dr. K.R. Murali Mohan, Advisor, Big Data Initiatives Division, Department of Science and Technology
14:35 - 14:50		Inaugural Address - Dr. Chandrima Shaha, Director, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi
14:50 - 15:00		Setting the Theme and Vote of Thanks - Dr. P.K. Bhattacharya, Fellow and Area Convenor, Knowledge Management Division, TERI
15:00 - 15:30		Tea and Refreshments
15:30 - 17:15		Plenary Session Chair: Dr. Ramesh Sharma, Director, CEMCA Puneet Kishor, Researcher and Independent Consultant - "Science, Data, and Creative Commons" Dr. Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, Associate Dean of Libraries and Professor University of Illinois - "Developing Services, Infrastructure, and Best Practices to Conserve and Provide Access to Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities" Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi, Librarian, Indian institute of Public Administration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research

GLAM

sumandro — 2015-12-15T08:26:04Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/glam

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #PoliticsOnSocialMedia

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:51:03Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dr. Rinku Lamba and Dr. Rajarshi Dasgupta, with Dr. Mohinder Singh, Professor Valerian Rodrigues and Professor Shefali Jha as co-members.

Session

Indian politics had witnessed the entry of new social movements in the 1970s, adding a whole set of new issues, actors, and ways of activism to the older nationalist tradition. We suggest a similar change is now taking place, as different ways of governance and interventions aided by latest technologies are emerging in the social media. Websites, blogs, tweets, emails and online petitions are creating a new virtual space for politics, through information, propaganda, debates, appeals and mobilizations.

The proposed session will discuss this emerging field of power, critically considering its democratic potential and interrogating the political issues and ideas at stake in it. The aim is to tackle the new forms of civic and public-political engagements witnessed in the domain of social media, and analyze their implications for the theory and practice of democracy. In the process our papers would explore conceptual notions such as agency, political act and participation as well as notions of selfhood and subjectivity.

Plan

We will present four papers, with a question-answer and discussion session at the end. The papers will be addressing broadly three kinds of concerns.

The first concern is to identify novel understandings of the political and political acts in the social media. We ask the following questions in this regard: What are the political issues and ideas at stake and how do they affect conventional understandings of democracy? Who are the new actors outside the fray of party-centered politics and how do they see what is political in the acts of internet-users? How are political institutions including parties reacting to the phenomena?
The second concern relates to probing the new forms of political subjectivity that are emerging in this process. The questions here include: What kind of political actor is getting shaped by the forms of political participation engendered by the social media? How does the virtual nature of practice impact on questions of location and identity as determinants of political membership and political action? Is this nature of virtual participation too fluid for the state to control?
The third concern relates to the forms of exclusion and inclusion that virtual participation entails. This involves questions like: What kind of social capital is necessary for talking part in the process and does it cut across cultural and economic divisions? What kinds of interest drive the social media? How does it shape the meaning of political concepts like representation and rights, accountability and political agency?

It is likely that we will raise more questions than we can answer at this point. However, we think it is important to raise them all the more in keeping with the questions that make up the focus of the conference, especially, the first question of how do we conceptualize, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #KnowledgeCommunity (Computing, Community and Knowledge Production: Problems and Prospects)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:54:54Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravikant.

Session

Our session will approach the history of digital knowledge production and dissemination in India from the standpoint of community-oriented experiments and practices in tool making and resource-sharing in the vernacular domain, mainly Hindi. It will attempt to demonstrate that Hindi public domain represents a depth and diversity that is normally not visible to the monolingually-trained, English-only mode of cognition. We wish to argue that the diversity of content is symptomatic of a culture of deeply-ingrained culture of sharing in South Asia. Free software movement, especially its localisation units, Wikipedia and Web 2.0 platforms in general have played a stellar role in handing us the tools of creation, consumption and sharing beyond scripts. But the full potential of how much we can produce and share has not been realised.

Plan

We will try and present successful and unsuccessful cases in order to understand why certian efforts worked and not others, and try and suggest a few possible strategies of creative engagement with bhasha communities in general.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-knowledgecommunity

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WikiShadows (Techno-Political Contours of Knowledge Production on Wikipedia)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:02Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.

Session

Wikipedia is a group project, and people in the group need to have separate pages to discuss changes and improvements to Wikipedia's content, be that an article, a policy, a help page, or something anything else. Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience. Sometimes reading Wikipedia can ruffle feathers.

E.g. 1:

The song, Jana-gana-mana, composed originally in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem of India on January 24, 1950. It was first sung on December 27, 1911 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. [1]

Whereas Wikipedia entry of National anthem mentions thus:

"Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Written in highly Sanskritised (Tatsama) Bengali." [2]

E.g. 2:

Are these beautiful waterfalls on the Kaveri River located in Tamil Nadu – or on the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka – or in Tamil Nadu on its border with Karnataka? Or is it really the Cauvery river, and Hogenakal Falls? [3]

Whatever you believe, be sure to bring a (Google) map to the debate, and point out that your opponent's sources are not RS or NPOV!

E.g. 3:

Born of Serbian parents in a part of the Austrian Empire, which a short time later became a part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary and is now in Croatia. He eventually became a naturalized citizen of the US. [4]

So was he Serbian? Croatian? Austrian? Austro-Hungarian? Istro-Romanian? Jewish? American? Martian? You decide! But don't forget to leave an edit summary saying how pathetic it is to choose any other version. (Guess who are we talking about?) Clue: He is inventor par excellence.

In this day and age where information is often a touch and go process, a forgotten mode, a solitary quest towards creating knowledge sounds romantic (almost). Networked collaborations (such as Wikipedia) which have created Knowledge sites have led to democratic interpretation and assimilation of such knowledge. They also as a basic necessity have sprung up various modes of annotation, verifiability of the Knowledge thus produced and utility quotient of the same. After all, why create and hold on to information that no body really cares about.

Plan

In this discussion session, the co-leaders of the session shall attempt to peel out the benign face of the visible Wikipedia page(there is a hidden world out there) and discuss the political, technological and social contours of information available on Wikipedia. We shall take the participants through the various stages of discussion about a Wikipedia page and how discussions tend to alter the course of an article. How false consensus is proposed, consent is manufactured and how these efforts are usually defeated by 'Answer People' and 'Vandal Fighters'. It is no less of a war than the one between information and mis-information. The discussion on, calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

This discussion session brings to the table questions of legitimisation of knowledge and the inherent hierarchies that operate even within open networks of collaboration and offers a critique on consumption oriented knowledge production. The session also aims to ask questions around knowledge as an agent that has levelled some of the earlier existing contours but has introduced some of its own and how that has changed our usages and shapes our experiences.

The session will involve an edit-a-thon on a topic that will be selected by the co-leaders of the session and live commentary on the discussion pages will be tracked for further analysis. The session intends to build a dialogue towards attempting to problematise the questions of the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences that have played a significant role in production of knowledge in the era of new knowledge practices. The session also will question the 'best practices' in building consent in the present global techno-economic contours of the internet, and its effect on academic spaces, creative practice and intervention.

Readings

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #MinimalComputing

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:20Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.

Session

The triumphal mythic narrative of India’s relatively high and rapid rates of Internet penetration is underpinned by the country’s access to data via mobile devices. The black box proprietary technology of the iPhone, or the less explicitly restrictive nexus (pun unintended) between the Android OS with device manufacturers, has meant we have large swathes of technology users whose only encounter with online content has been via these closed ecosystems. Minimal computing is both an intellectual intention and pragmatic response that seeks to disrupt these systems by subverting existing frameworks and creating new infrastructures, acknowledging the ground realities that exist in India, such as lack of resources and access. This position essentially privileges “ease of use, ease of creation, increased access and reductions in computing—and by extension, electricity” (Gil). The intention of this workshop is to explore, discover, discuss and build resources that observe these tenets, under different heads, such as physical computing, archives, interface, database.

One of the obvious outcomes of the growth of digital technology in the region is the increasing intersection with the scholarly record – be that a theorizing of these new contexts, as is the case at this conference, or in the building of dissemination tools for memory institutions or academic scholarship. As such scholarship (which would be considered under the rubric of the digital humanities) is still in its early stages, it is incumbent upon us to set an example for other scholars when we build these resources; fast to load, easy to build and administer, which can function in low-bandwidth areas – especially as we embark on larger scale projects that are now possible through advances in digitization of different forms of content, as well as of Indic language character sets. Uses of technology in India are often anarchic, and the digital is constantly imbricated with the analogue and these grassroots, informal practices could usefully inform scholarship in this area, and possibly be transposed to other similar environments, such as those found in the global south.

The other crucial exploration that will be undertaken in this workshop will be how to use guerilla computing and other methods to safeguard our fundamental human rights both online and offline, strategies increasingly essential in a country where censorship against individuals and misuse of personal data is rapidly on the rise. The online citizen must be encouraged to think about the virtual space in which s/he works and plays, and learn how to navigate it responsibly, by being alert to the dangers of the networked world being overly regulated, and this workshop will also discuss surveillance and collection of personal data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers, and how to circumvent it using relatively simple methods.

Plan

At the outset of the workshop, participants will be introduced by the co-leaders to some examples and concepts in #minimalcomputing, and then to a range of tools and resources such as Markdown, Jekyll, Pan.do/ra, Pandoc etc., as well as simple encrypting methods. Participants will also be encouraged to share examples of good practice that they might have encountered in their own contexts.

Participants will then be asked to consider a digital project that they might be in the process of building, or envisioning, or to reflect on their personal digital footprint and be facilitated by the co-leaders on how to rebuild and reimagine these using a minimal computing perspective, and to document these ideas so they might be shared with the rest of the group, and promote more discussion.

The aim of the workshop is to draw upon collective expertise to create a handbook of sustainable, scalable resources that can be created without over reliance on third party infrastructures, in order to retain agency over projects initiatives and digital identities; and provide a roadmap for an alternative Internet that meets the needs of users in both personal and professional contexts.

Readings

Budish, Ryan and West, Sarah Myers and Gasser, Urs. Designing Successful Governance Groups: Lessons for Leaders from Real-World Examples (August 2015). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2015-11. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2638006.

This reading sets out how an effective multistakeholder governance group might be structured, convened and operate and its stated values of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and effectiveness might serve as a useful guide to how we might envision a #minimalcomputing community.

Gil, Alex. The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make. Minimal Computing website. (May 2015). Available at: https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.

This reading sets out some of the underlying concepts of #minimalcomputing and raises important questions that might be flagged up for discussion during the workshop.

https://github.com/xpmethod/dhnotes/

A growing resource for relevant material and information on #minimalcomputing – start here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SmartThings (Conceptualizing Internet/Digital Technologies in the Age of "Smartness")

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravi Shukla and Bharath Palavalli.

Session

With the increasing focus on making things - devices, services, cities, even planets - smart, there is a need to engage with the idea of smartness. What constitutes it? Who decides? Is there a need to re-conceptualize our understanding of these increasingly pervasive technologies and if so, how do we begin to do so?

The session engages with two inter-related questions - a) What constitutes a smart city? and b) How can we approach internet/digital technologies as enablers of basic, urban public services?

Plan

The session is broken up into three sections of half an hour each.

Content Overview

The first section involves the presentation of the findings of a survey across different social groups of what constitutes a "smart city". This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The second section involves presenting the findings of a pilot project using SMS technology as an enabler for public services within a community. This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The third section involves asking people in the audience to list 5 characteristics that constitute (or in some cases, *don't* constitute) public services in a "smart" city. Depending on the size of the audience, either these responses can be collected individually or it can be broken into groups of 3-5 people. The responses are then collected and shared with the audience - either during the session (if time allows) or over email/website.

Expected Outcomes

At the end of the session we expect a set of responses on what characterizes public services in a "smart" city. These are seen as helping in drawing out a research/practice agenda on how internet/digital technologies may act as enablers of public services.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings

Consultation on 'Digital Futures of Indian Languages'

sumandro — 2016-01-15T06:10:57Z

A consultation on 'digital futures of Indian languages' will be held at the CIS office in Bangalore on December 12, 2015, to generate ideas and structure the Indian languages focus area of the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF). It is being led by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), and Tanveer Hasan, A2K programme at CIS; and is supported by CDIF.

A Consultation to Generate Ideas for the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

We at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, have between us more than a decade-long experience in the field of Indian languages for higher education and Indic language computing. Together we have, over the past ten years, produced new research and incubated innovative pilot projects to stimulate the use of Indian languages in higher education, especially in the context of a widening linguistic divide in that sphere.

As a new phase in this process, we would like to explore the possible digital futures of Indian languages. Already, there have been many interesting but sporadic attempts at digitization of Indian language text resources and development of software for translation between Indian languages and a host of Indian language support platforms for web-based services. While this momentum is impressive, a lot more remains to be done, when seen against the backdrop of the surging demand for Indian language computational tools, especially those with potential for knowledge-use, that is, tools which could be used by students, teachers, researchers, media analysts, self-learners, bibliographers, librarians, archivists, collectors and the public at large.

The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund is looking to help set up new platforms that aid in generating, processing and making available a wide range of born-digital content. Under the CDIF, the Indian Languages initiative will support the development of new technological aids, apps, software programmes, websites, DYI digitisation devices, and any other project which will enrich the digital use of Indian languages.

We are organising this national consultation with the intention of bringing together people who have been or would like to be involved in such initiatives. We expect each participant to make a short 10-15 minute presentation on an idea they would like to develop, to take part in the general discussions, and to offer feedback to other speakers. We hope to learn from these conversations so that our own research and initiative development will benefit from the inputs as also to contribute to the conversation in such a way that isolated practices, innovations and opportunities are given a platform for greater generalisation and scalability.

- Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar AP, and Tanveer Hasan

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-futures-of-indian-languages-2015

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

sumandro — 2015-12-02T07:54:26Z

For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Here is the podcast. We are grateful to Fields of View for producing and sharing this recording.

Podcast

If the audio player is not visible above, please download the MP3 file.

Source: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/2015/11/1126/.

Smart Cities podcast series: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/category/smartcitiespodcast/.

Fields of View

Issues in urban systems and public safety and security are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Such problems require a diverse set of actors to come together and collaborate. We need government, academia, industry, and civil society to question, debate, discuss, and ideate together. In short, we need a dialogue in diversity. Our goal at Fields of View is to design spaces to enable such dialogues using games and simulations – tools based on research at the intersection of social sciences, art, and technology.

Website: http://fieldsofview.in/.

Twitter: @fovlabs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/fov-podcast-data-people-and-smart-cities

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #LiterarySpaces (Online Literary Spaces in India)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:25Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.

Session

The last decade has seen a slow but steady emergence of online literary spaces in India, marked by the ubiquitous nature of the internet and digital technologies, growing mobile phone penetration and increased access to devices such as tablets and e-readers. By literary spaces we refer to online journals, magazines and blogs, as well as reading groups and discussion spaces focused on writing in English and Indian languages. These range from those exclusively focusing on contemporary literature to others that feature writing on news, culture and arts. These spaces raise some intriguing questions about the growth a new online or digital literary culture, which may be mapped through the evolution of reading and writing practices as very explicitly technologized practices, and the changes in the notion of text and textuality, scholarship and pedagogy, among other things.

Some examples of such spaces that have come up in the recent years are The Little Magazine [1], Muse India [2], Kritya [3], Coldnoon: Travel Poetics [4], Kindle [5], Almost Island [6], The Indian Quarterly [7] and among several others. Many of these journals have both an online and print presence, while some are purely online and seek to reach a diverse audience featuring different genres of writing. While many carry an eclectic mix of creative and critical writing, perceptions about readership on the internet often dictate the form and manner of writing that is featured. The much anticipated and debated ‘disappearance’ of long form writing is one of the questions that may be asked of the emergence of these literary journals, which have in some way re-imagined this form in the digital sphere and have been instrumental in its growth. So even as there are books on twitterature [8], there are interesting ways in which online literary journals have tried to define the space of contemporary writing on the internet in India.

Plan

This panel discussion proposes to examine this phenomenon of the growth of online literary journals to understand the imagination of the ‘digital’ in their practices of writing and publication, whether as medium, content or context, as a way to explore how writing and reading practices today have been shaped by these changes. This also includes questions on methods of literary analysis that may have changed with the advent of the digital, and from a broader perspective, the production of literary scholarship and pedagogy in India. Some questions that could be points of discussion are as follows:

What is the pedagogical role, if any of digital/online journals? Are they simply cost-effective modes of production of knowledge or are they indicative of some other form discrimination? Perhaps a discrimination between what gets read and what does not? Is a voluminous archive of nineteenth century writings of the same pedagogical merit as a list of 100 Hollywood romantic comedies? If the former is arguably much more educational, why then is the latter the source of the greatest traffic? Is pedagogy then a misnomer, and a non-entity in the world of online magazines?
Can the rise of online magazines be related with the rise of print culture and the subsequent rise of the novel? The novel was educational and, while English was still a very evolving language in the 17th and 18th centuries, the form helped both shape the language and educate the masses, bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy about the nuances of the still-nascent English language. Can a similar function be said to have been fulfilled by online journals? Or have they failed in playing this radical role of disseminating new language and new vocabulary, which is required to articulate new modes and conflicts within modernity--sexualities, queerness, televised elections, middle-eastern (Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi) mayhem in times of democracy, globalization, urbanization, travel, genocide, partition, terrorism, and so on? Are there any exceptions among the journals in being able to somehow fulfil the criteria of engendering a new language? What are the examples, if any? How popular are they?
Is online literature less literary than print? Is it more amenable to news, while print continues to be literary? Or is this only a misconception? Is online literature prone to non-serious, or populist sources of pedagogy, which serve more to titillate through trolling, humour, half-baked information, gossip, or is it playing a serious role too in portions? Apart from those newspapers and journals/magazines which also have print components, which are possibly the portals that create viable, meritorious, and universal categories of knowledge? Or, invocation of 'merit' and 'universal' essentially a flawed mechanism to judge online literatures?

Addressing some of above questions through a study of two or more online journals, this session will attempt to open them up to a broader discussion on the nature and growth of an online literary culture in India, and the need for and significance of research in this area.

Readings

None.

Notes

[1] See: http://www.littlemag.com/.

[2] See: http://www.museindia.com/.

[3] See: http://www.kritya.in/.

[4] See: http://coldnoon.com/.

[5] See: http://kindlemag.in/.

[6] See: http://almostisland.com/.

[7] See: http://indianquarterly.com/.

[8] See: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexander-aciman/9780143117322/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptiveTransport (Aggregators, Ownership, Tracking, Space, Internet Models)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:00:57Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Srinivas Kodali and William F. Stafford Jr.

Session

Transportation has been seeing disruptions through Internet aggregators using complex models which nobody understands in detail. This is primarily being seen in the space of urban transport, but is not limited to them alone. 1960`s saw disruptions in airline industry when each airline was fighting for it's own space in flight reservations and aggregations. This disruptive trend is now being observed globally in other transport modes. Aggregators are playing an important role in transporting people and disrupting markets globally. Internet Models are varying within aggregators who are not limiting themselves to ticket reservation, but are also providing information about the availability of transportation options. With increasing demand and surge pricing taking up the market, what is the role of the state. What are the ownership rights of an aggregator? What are licensing/lease models of a provider? What about un-fair practices and consumer rights? What forms of labour and regulation are imagined? What is the role of state run aggregators like IRCTC in this changing landscape?

Many of the platforms that have been created, primarily in the beginning concerning tracking or making complaints, were accessed through websites and have since been migrated either to a combined website/ app structure, or wholly to smartphone apps. This raises interesting and important questions concerning the imagination of an increased reliability and accesibility of services, as well as a power to hold public institutions accountable, as they relate to the question of access to these technologies and the habits of their use, especially demographically and linked to class.

Furthermore, both the near and far future promise an reworking of the internet as a system with which commuters and others interface to consume or deliver a service, to transport as one part of a mobility ecosystem, which is currently being tooled (both in regulatory frameworks and industrial planning) as a microcosm of the internet of things. With internet being connected to personal transport at every intersection of the road, what is the scope of privacy and accountability, the role of encryption layer and also the importance of governance in the fragile/disrupting space. How will the internet impact personal transport of citizens and the economy? Cashless payments, driver-less cars, surge-congestion pricing with disruptive internet models need regulation before they over-run and create chaos with the system.

Plan

The session will focus on Delhi as a case study.

Discussants will present their current work around these questions, and then open a discussion among those present on the issues raised therein.

The first discussant will present on the changing architecture of the auto-rickshaw meter as a regulatory platform, from the recent introduction of GPS to the creation of various surveillance and business models which either exploit its native GPS or duplicate and substitute it through the use of smartphones, and the folding of autos into the emerging e-hailing environment and the possible implications of changes being sought in the regulatory framework for connected vehicles. These include technological treatments of questions of class, trust and accountability, as well as significant policy and material changes in the classification of what is owned, by whom, and its conditions of transfer.

Srinivas will continue the presentation on transport data by showing use cases and potential harms about the data. How big data is changing the landscape of transportation systems and privacy concerns with the future of autonomous vehicles and intelligent traffic management systems. Data driven decisions are a big concern when data can also be used to lie at a scale. Data ownership and rights are a challenge the state and the citizen need to think about before forcibly submitting data.

The discussion will be primarily around:

Digital Ownership and Physical Ownership
Scope of Internet Governance on Aggregators
Pricing Models and Service Availability
Future of On-Demand Transportation Services vs Public Transportation

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-disruptivetransport