Centre for Internet and Society

Internet Researchers' Conference

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:43:56Z

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

Events

sumandro — 2015-10-25T04:16:13Z

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

Publications

sumandro — 2015-10-25T03:49:47Z

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

Crowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India

sumandro — 2015-10-16T10:49:17Z

In the context of several ongoing threads of debates and policy discussions, we are initiating this effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital/online/telephonic privacy of persons and organisations in India. The full list of submitted incidents is publicly shared, under Creative Commons Attributions-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please contribute and share with your friends and colleagues.

Report an incident: http://goo.gl/forms/8Xcf0zcWZW

Collected incidents: http://bit.ly/privacy-violation-india (CC BY-SA 4.0)

You are welcome to cross-post this to your website or other online forum. Please provide attribution, and link back to this page. For any clarification, write to Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, CIS, at sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/crowdsourcing-incidents-of-communication-privacy-violation-in-india

Sumandro C - Open Access Dialogues - Strategic Issues Emerging from the Comments of Indian Participants

sumandro — 2015-10-11T04:34:19Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/sumandro-c-open-access-dialogues-2013

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India- Call for Sessions - Poster

sumandro — 2015-10-07T19:11:01Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:48:17Z

With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.

Call for Sessions document: Download (PDF)

Call for Sessions poster: Download (PNG)

Internet Researchers’ Conference

The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

This conference series is founded on the following interests:

Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.
Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.
Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.
Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Studying Internet in India

The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (to be confirmed) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.

The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:

How do we conceptualise, 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?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?
What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?
Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?

Sessions

The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.

Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.

In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.

In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but not speaking.

Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.

Writing Sprint

At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.

Final Round Table

This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.

IRC Reader

The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.

Proposing a Session

To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:

The name of the session: It should be created as a hashtag, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.
A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.
If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.
If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.
Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.
CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.

We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the researchers@cis-india.org mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to raw@cis-india.org.

All session proposals must be submitted by Sunday, November 22 (extended), 2015, via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Selection of Sessions

All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by November 30. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before December 15. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on December 31, 2015.

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on February 25-27, 2016. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by December 31, 2015.

The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.

Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by December 31, 2015.

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

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions

sumandro — 2015-10-07T10:31:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions

Practice

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:13:26Z

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

Learning

sumandro — 2015-10-05T14:55:54Z

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Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:16Z

We are very excited to be contribute to a join submission with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." Please go to the submission page and support our project. The text of the proposal is available below. It was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and I. The 'Where's My Data' banner is created by Nisha using icons from the Noun Project.

Please support our project by visiting and 'applauding' it on the Knight News Challenge website: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data. You will have to log in to the website though, apologies for that.

Where's My Data? Search, Demand, and Collect Data

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

An application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises.

Full Description

The proposed application aims to solve two key problems in accessing reliable data faced by citizens, journalists, and researchers. The first problem is knowing where a required data set can be found, and the second problem is collecting the required data set if it does not exist in the first place.

Many individual initiatives have been developed to collect specific data. For example, Powercuts (http://powercuts.in/) was a Ushahidi installation to crowd-source data using Twitter, Kiirti (http://www.kiirti.org/) was used to map complaints about auto drivers, IChangeMyCity (http://www.ichangemycity.com/) is a platform that collects general complaints from around Bangalore. However, these apps were either short lived because they could not sustain their one premise or they do not give insight into what people want to know and what data is important to them. Also, they often did not open up this data to be used by others, beyond visualisations offered on the sites.

Citizens have many questions regarding their urban surroundings - how much water is coming to the neighbourhood daily, where are the waste pick up trucks, what is the status of a road repairing process, etc, the answers require data that either is difficult to get or doesn't answer their query in the way they want. Journalists and researchers are also interested in collecting and analysing these same data sets. A one off platform for one issue won't properly represent the demand for information in modern day (data starved) India.

For example, a local residents’ group wanted to impress on their elected rep the seriousness of the incidence of a disease, as the local government was not taking concrete steps to manage the emerging epidemic. In the absence of official data on suspected cases of illness, this application could help them to reach out through e-mails and social media networks to do a quick survey on how many residents or their family members have got affected.

The application will not only make it easier to undertake such crowd-sourcing efforts, but also to share the data back and make it open for usage by others, including journalists and researchers.

We are already building an Urban Open Data Platform for Bengaluru, India. The application will allow searching this portal and any other such portal, especially if any is developed by the municipality. It will also pipe the crowd-sourced data to this Urban Open Data Platform.

This tool will reduce duplication of data gathering, gives data a longer shelf life and acts as a source of public data that feeds into a city-wide urban Open Data Portal under development by a consortium that we are part of.

How will the Application Work?

The application will allow the user to search for data across the data catalogues connected to the application.
If the data is not found, the user can post details about the required data, which other users in her/his networks can see and comment on. They can either point the person towards an existing data set, or support the need to collect the data being demanded.
When the user finds out that the data set s/he needs does not exist, the application will allow her/him to start a crowd-sourcing exercise, using various channels such as e-mails, social media posts, web-based questionnaires, etc.
For each of these channels, a separate plug-in will be developed so as to open up the software development process. For this project, we will focus on developing plug-ins for two channels: 1) questionnaires integrated with the Citizen Matters website, and 2) use tweets to collect replies using a unique hashtag.
User can share the crowd-sourcing request within her/his own social networks, or use one of the groups (say, the Citizen Matters group focusing on local journalism, or the DataMeet group focusing on open data enthusiasts in the city) to share their calls for data collection.

Briefly Describe the Need that You're Trying to Address

A common cry in Indian cities is the lack of datasets required to understand issues, either at local or at national scales. This tool will be the place to voice demands, ask others about potential sources, or an easy way to create data sourcing activities.This will enable journalists, advocacy organisations, and researchers to search for data and help others to find the data they are looking for. It also records demands for non-existing data and helps take initiatives to collect such data.

What Progress have You Made so Far?

The team is already working on an Urban Open Data Platform, that will host public data, and a data catalog. We have already executed a few crowd-sourcing projects, and helped develop tools for journalists and researchers interested in civic issues.A data source search tool has been in development in the form of Open Data JSON <https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json>. A Bangalore focused data catalog has been in use for awhile as well and provides a base of data to use for people’s search <http://openbangalore.org>.

What would be a Successful Outcome for Your Project?

Success for this project means having a better understanding of what information is needed most by people and what data is required. We will gain detailed evidence regarding what kind of data people want. This entails a collection of questions, who is asking and from where, and what data gaps exist. The number of crowdsourcing projects initiated shows the intensity of the need, and how comfortable citizens are asking for data and proactively starting a data collection project.

Please List your Team Members and their Relevant Experience/Skills

Meera K, Oorvani Foundation, a media group who will provide editorial support to curate data, dissemination of data or queries, and audience reach. Nisha Thompson and Thejesh GN, from DataMeet, open data community, who will provide the technology and community aspects of the tool. Sumandro Chattapadhyay of the Centre for Internet and Society, will help planning the project and linking the effort with other Indian and global initiatives in open data and development.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015

APU Grant Proposal 2015 - Isochrene

sumandro — 2015-10-01T05:53:20Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/apu-grant-proposal-2015-isochrene

International Open Data Charter: Comments by CIS

sumandro — 2015-09-08T11:01:01Z

The second meeting of Stewards of the International Open Data Charter is in progress in Santiago, Chile, where the revisions made to the Charter based on the comments received during the public consultation period that ended on July 31, 2015, are being re-discussed and finalised by the Stewards. Here we are sharing the comments submitted by us on the first public draft of the Charter published during the International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, in May 2015. The comments include those submitted by Sumandro and Sharath Chandra Ram.

The draft International Open Data Charter and all the submitted comments can be accessed here: http://opendatacharter.net/charter/

Comments on the Public Draft

Note: The text below contains excerpts from the public draft of the Charter, followed by submitted comments in bold.

1) The world is witnessing the growth of a global movement facilitated by technology and digital media and fuelled by information – one that contains enormous potential to create more accountable, efficient, responsive, and effective governments and businesses, and to spur economic growth.

The word ‘movement’ can perhaps be replaced by ‘transformation.’ ‘Movement’ tends to suggest some kind of unity of purpose or objective, which is not perhaps what is meant here. Also, is it possible to add ‘transparent’ to ‘accountable, efficient, responsive, and effective’?

Open data sit at the heart of this global movement.

Perhaps ‘transformation’ and not ‘movement’.

2) Building a more democratic, just, and prosperous society requires transparent, accountable governments that engage regularly and meaningfully with citizens. Accordingly, there is an ongoing effort to enable collaboration around key social challenges, to provide effective oversight of government activities, to support economic development through innovation, and to develop effective, efficient public policies and programmes.

Perhaps insert ‘sustainable’ before ‘economic development’. In the second sentence, none of the action phrases (‘enable collaboration’ and ‘effective oversight’ and ‘innovation’ and ‘develop effective, efficient’) are speaking about either democracy or justice. The focus seems to be completely on effectiveness. Phrases like ‘transparent’, ‘accountable’, and ‘participatory’ should be introduced here.

Open data is essential to meeting these challenges.

The above point clarifies why ‘data is essential’ but not why ‘open data is essential’. The connection between democracy and justice on one hand, and open data on the other is not yet articulated clearly.

3) Effective access to data allows individuals and organisations to develop new insights and innovations that can generate social and economic benefits to improve the lives of people around the world, and help to improve the flow of information within and between countries. While governments collect a wide range of data, they do not always share these data in ways that are easily discoverable, useable, or understandable by the public.

Along with allowing ‘insights’ and ‘innovations’ to develop, can it also be highlighted that open data make decisions and processes transparent?

This is a missed opportunity.

I agree with above comments that it is perhaps better to articulate this not as ‘missed opportunity’ but to highlight this as the very ‘opportunity’ that the open data agenda is interested in capturing.

4) Today, many people expect to be able to access high quality information and services, including government data, when and how they want. Others see the opportunity presented by government data as one which can provide innovative policy solutions and support economic and social benefits for all members of society. We have arrived at a point at which people can use open data to generate value, insights, ideas, and services to create a better world for all.

This point may also mention that some people are interested in using government data to open up government decisions and processes and make them transparent, which is a necessary condition for making the government accountable.

6) Providing access to government data can drive sustainable and inclusive growth by empowering citizens, the media, civil society, and the private sector to identify gaps, and work toward better outcomes for public services in areas such as health, education, public safety, environmental protection, and governance. Open data can do this by:

Perhaps ‘democratic participation’ can be added after ‘sustainable and inclusive growth’. That is: ‘Providing access to government data can drive sustainable and inclusive growth, and democratic participation, by empowering citizens…’

7) Open government data can be used in innovative ways to create useful tools and products that help to navigate modern life more easily. Used in this way, open data are a catalyst for innovation in the private sector, supporting the creation of new markets, businesses, and jobs. These benefits can multiply as more private sector and civil society organisations adopt open data practices modelled by government and share their own data with the public.

The incentive for private sector and CSOs to open up data is not clear. Overall benefit may rise with them opening up data, but how does a private company / CSO benefit by opening up its data?

8) We, the adherents to the International Open Data Charter, agree that open data are an under-used resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.

Along with ‘stronger’ and ‘more interconnected’, please mention ‘more transparent’ and ‘more democratic’. Also it is not clear what is meant by ‘stronger’. ‘[B]etter meet the needs of our citizens’ does not necessarily suggest a more democratic or just society, but a more effective welfare distribution system. Please add ‘… and empower the citizens to ensure accountability of the government.’

9) We therefore agree to follow a set of principles that will be the foundation for access to, and the release and use of, open government data. These principles are:

Open Data by Default;
Quality and Quantity;
Accessible and Useable by All;
Engagement and Empowerment of Citizens;
Collaboration for Development and Innovation

Does it makes sense to remove the ‘Quantity and Quality’ point and merging it with ‘Accessible and Usable by All’? Data quantity and quality issues, along with those related to publication of data, can all logically follow under the topic of data access and use. For example, highly aggregated data published once a year without documentation is not really usable data.

10) We will develop an action plan in support of the implementation of the Charter and its Technical Annexes, and will update and renew the action plan at a minimum of every two years. We agree to commit the necessary resources to work within our political and legal frameworks to implement these principles in accordance with the technical best practices and timeframes set out in our action plan.

We (at CIS) strongly feel that the Charter should also prescribe that along with the national Action Plan, Open Data Citizen’s Charters are created for various levels and verticals of the government. This will clarify data publication responsibilities and targets at ministerial and sub-national (including city) governmental levels, and will allow for much more effective monitoring (national and international) of the Action Plan implementation process.

‘[A]t a minimum of every two years’ reads a bit unclear. Does it mean that the Action Plan should be renewed only after two years and not before, or that the Action Plan should be renewed every two years or before that?

11) We recognise that free access to, and the subsequent use of, government data are of significant value to society and the economy, and that government data should, therefore, be open by default.

Along with clarifying the scope of ‘government data,’ the idea of ‘open’ in the context of data needs a clear definition as an independent point. The document is getting into ‘open by default’ without clarifying what is ‘open’, including both necessary and sufficient conditions.

12) We acknowledge the need to promote the global development and adoption of tools and policies for the creation, use, and exchange of open data and information.

I agree with Mike Linksvayer. This is a great opportunity for the Charter to connect the open data agenda with the wider open agendas, especially that of free and open source softwares. It is very important that this point promotes ‘global development of free and open source tools’.

Extending the comment by Jose Subero, along with ‘tools’ and ‘policies’, it will be great to have a mention of ‘standards’ here, which is critical for ensuring ‘interoperability’ and thus ‘harmonisation’.

13) We recognise that the term ‘government data’ is meant in the widest sense possible. This could apply to data held by national, federal, and local governments, international government bodies, and other types of institutions in the wider public sector. This could also apply to data created for governments by external organisations, and data of significant benefit to the public which is held by external organisations and related to government programmes and services (e.g. data on extractives entities, data on transportation infrastructure, etc).

It is wonderful that the point promotes a wide understanding of ‘government data’ but at the same time it should also define a necessary core understanding of data, just to ensure that governments do not interpret this point too narrowly.

Further, a focus only on data created by public agencies can perhaps be too narrow (for the necessary/core understanding of ‘government data’). With public services delivered increasingly by private agencies and public-private-partnerships, it is crucial that ‘government data’ should explicitly include any data coming out of a process funded by public money (the process may be carried out by a public agency or not). This is an extremely important point from a developing country perspective.

14) We recognise that there is domestic and international legislation, in particular pertaining to security, privacy, confidentiality, intellectual property, and personally-identifiable and other sensitive information, which must be observed and/or updated where necessary.

From a developing country perspective, it is very important that the Charter does not keep this critical point dependent on domestic and international legislations. International legislation may not be very developed for all of the mentioned topics, and many countries may not have existing domestic legislations on these topics either. The Charter should mention an internationally acceptable list of concerns / criteria for not opening up data. The list may include the topics mentioned here, like privacy and national security. This need not be a list of sufficient criteria, but of necessary ones.

15) We will:

develop and adopt policies and practices to ensure that all government data is made open by default, as outlined in this Charter, while recognising that there are legitimate reasons why some data cannot be released;

'Administrative reforms’ are most often crucial to make government data ‘open by default, and the same should be mentioned along with ‘policies’ and ‘practices’.

provide clear justifications as to why certain data cannot be released;

This is a great point. Perhaps it can be added that all government agencies should produce a list of all data assets maintained by them, point out the ones that cannot be made open, and provide clear justification as to why those cannot be released. This comment pre-empts 19.1. Perhaps this point about providing justification for not releasing data can be merged with 19.1.

develop the leadership, management, oversight, and internal communication policies necessary to enable this transition to a culture of openness.

Along with ‘leadership, management, oversight, and internal communication’, is it possible to add ‘incentives’? This is often overlooked in implementing open data policies.

16) We recognise that governments and other public sector organisations hold vast amounts of information that may be of interest to citizens, and that it may take time to identify data for release or publication.

17) We also recognise the importance of consulting with citizens, other governments, non-governmental organisations, and other open data users, to identify which data to prioritise for release and/or improvement.

18) We agree, however, that governments’ primary responsibility should be to release data in a timely manner, without undue delay.

Points 16-18 seem to suggest that the ‘quantity and quality’ issue is mostly one of prioritisation. This can be misleading. This is perhaps the ‘quantity’ issue, but not at all the ‘quality’ issue.

19) We will:

...
release high-quality open data that are timely, comprehensive, and accurate in accordance with prioritisation that is informed by public requests. To the extent possible, data will be released in their original, unmodified form and at the finest level of granularity available, and will also be linked to any visualisations or analyses created based on the data, as well as any relevant guidance or documentation;

Please add ‘human- and machine-readable’ along with ‘timely, comprehensive, and accurate’.

Put ‘, and’ between ‘, and accurate’ and ‘in accordance’.

‘Relevant guidance or documentation’ should be mentioned before, and not after, ‘visualisations or analyses’.

ensure that accompanying documentation is written in clear, plain language, so that it can be easily understood by all;

Add that the documentation should be ‘comprehensive’, along with being written in plain language.

make sure that data are fully described, and that data users have sufficient information to understand their source, strengths, weaknesses, and any analytical limitations;

Regarding ‘Full description of data’ — Aggregate data must be accompanied by low level raw data along with details of analytical methods used to arrive at figures. This allows for verification as well as alternate views and detection of statistical anomalies.

ensure that open datasets include consistent core metadata, and are made available in human- and machine-readable formats under an open and unrestrictive licence;

Is this the necessary definition of ‘open data’? If so, it should be much higher up.

allow users to provide feedback, and continue to make revisions to ensure the quality of the data is improved as needed; and

This point should clarify if it is talking about making revisions of the data itself (its content), or how it is being published (its form), or both?

apply consistent information lifecycle management practices, and ensure historical copies of datasets are preserved, archived, and kept accessible as long as they retain value.

The ‘as long as they retain value’ part seems vague. Who is going to take this decision about value? Is it possible to rephrase this as ‘as long as they are demanded by data users’?

21) We recognise that open data should be made available free of charge in order to encourage their widest possible use.

Maybe ‘government data’ and not ‘open data’ (open data already means it is available gratis). Also, along with ‘free of charge’ maybe add ‘under open license’, as that is a critical requirement for ‘widest possible use.’

22) We recognise that when open data are released, they should be made available without bureaucratic or administrative barriers, such as mandatory user registration, which can deter people from accessing the data.

I strongly believe that this point should be removed. Registration of the data user can also be very useful for the government agencies to track demand and actual usage of their datasets. Instead of the government agencies doing such kind of tracking as a background process, it is much better if the data usage monitoring of all users is done transparently. Along with perhaps a public dashboard of data usages of the users of an open data portal. As long as the registration barrier does not involve an approval process by the government agency, it can be allowed.

A more general point should be added as part of this principle, regarding no-discrimination (or approval process) among data users interested in accessing and using of open government data.

23) We will:

release data in open formats and free of charge to ensure that the data are available to the widest range of users to find, access, and use them. In many cases, this will include providing data in multiple formats, so that they can be processed by computers and used by people; and

Please add ‘open license’ along with ‘open formats’ and ‘free of charge’.

24) We recognise that the release of open data strengthens our public and democratic institutions, encourages better development, implementation, and assessment of policies to meet the needs of our citizens, and enables more meaningful, better informed engagement between governments and citizens.

Perhaps add ‘, and makes them transparent’ after ‘strengthens our public and democratic institutions’. Please also add ‘monitoring’ along with ‘development, implementation, and assessment’.

25) We will:

implement oversight and review processes to report regularly on the progress and impact of our open data initiatives;

The functioning of these ‘oversight and review processes’ must be open and transparent themselves. The reporting should be public.

engage with community and civil society representatives working in the domain of transparency and accountability to determine what data they need to effectively hold governments to account; encourage the use of open data to develop innovative, evidence-based policy solutions that benefit all members of society, as well as empower marginalised groups; and

This must also include a point regarding the government proactively seeking data demands from citizens, CSOs, academics, and the private sector.

‘as well as empower marginalised groups’ is too vague. Perhaps it can be made into a separate point, and qualified with what kinds of empowerment is needed – from demanding data, to accessing and using data, to be aware of the data collected from such groups by the government agencies.

be transparent about our own data collection, standards, and publishing processes, by documenting all of these related processes online.

This should be part of point 19.

26) We recognise the importance of diversity in stimulating creativity and innovation. The more citizens, governments, civil society, and the private sector use open data, the greater the social and economic benefits that will be generated. This is true for government, commercial, and non-commercial uses.

The diversity point is almost already made with points 20-21 – widest possible users lead to widest possible use.

28) We will:

...
engage with civil society, the private sector, and academic representatives to determine what data they need to generate social and economic value;

This is also covered under the Principle 3.

provide training programs, tools, and guidelines designed to ensure government employees are capable of using open data effectively in policy development processes;

This should be part of Principle 1.

encourage non-governmental organisations to open up data created and collected by them in order to move toward a richer open data ecosystem with multiple sources of open data;

I agree with ABS. Why not ‘non-governmental organisations and the private sector’?

Also the document shifts back and forth between ‘civil society organisations’ and ‘non-governmental organisations’. If both mean the same in this document, then it should use only one.

General Comments on the Charter

1. Why not merge the Principle 4 and 5 so as to describe an overall situation of engagement and collaboration. The ends can be commercial acts or towards democratic practices, but the existing principles do not make much a difference between the two types of acts.

2. Further, can a new principle be added at the end that would address the implementation process of the Action Plan? Specifically, it should clarify how the implementation itself be an open process, with not only the Action Plan but annual reports regarding the status of implementation. This principle may connect to the work being done by the Implementation WG.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/international-open-data-charter-comments-by-cis

Blog

sumandro — 2015-08-30T06:52:42Z

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

Research

sumandro — 2019-12-30T17:39:31Z

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