Centre for Internet and Society

India's Identity Crisis

malavika — 2014-01-09T07:56:08Z

Malavika Jayaram's article was published in 2013 Internet Monitor Annual Report: Reflections on the Digital World, published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

India’s Unique Identity (UID) project is already the world’s largest biometrics identity program, and it is still growing. Almost 530 million people have been registered in the project database, which collects all ten fingerprints, iris scans of both eyes, a photograph, and demographic information for each registrant. Supporters of the project tout the UID as a societal game changer. The extensive biometric information collected, they argue, will establish the uniqueness of each individual, eliminate fraud, and provide the identity infrastructure needed to develop solutions for a range of problems. Despite these potential benefits, however, critical concerns remain about the UID’s legal and physical architecture as well as about unforeseen risks associated with the linking and analysis of personal data.

The most basic concerns regarding the UID project stem from the fact that biometric technologies have never been tested on such a large population. As a result, well-founded concerns exist around scalability, false acceptance and rejection rates, and the project’s core premise that biometrics can uniquely and unambiguously identify people in a foolproof manner. Some of these concerns are based on technical issues—collecting fingerprints and iris scans “in the field,” for instance, can be complicated when a registrant’s fingerprints are eroded by manual labor or her irises are affected by malnutrition and cataracts. Other concerns relate to the project’s federated implementation architecture, which, by outsourcing collection to a massive group of private and public registrars and operators, increases the chance for data breaches, error, and fraud.

Perhaps even more vexing are concerns regarding how the UID, which promises financial inclusion (by reducing the identification barriers to opening bank accounts, for example), might in fact lead to new types of exclusion for already marginalized groups. Members of the LGBT community, for instance, question whether the inclusion of the transgender category within the UID scheme is a laudable attempt at inclusion, or a new means of listing and targeting members of their community for exclusion. More fundamentally, as more and more services and benefits are linked to the UID, the project threatens to exclude all those who cannot or will not participate in the scheme due to logistical failures or philosophical objections.

It is worth noting that the UID is not the only large data project in India. A slew of “Big Brother” projects exist: the Centralised Monitoring System (CMS), the Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS), the National Population Register (NPR), the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), which is working to aggregate up to 21 different databases relating to tax, rail and air travel, credit card transactions, immigration, and other domains. The UID is intended to serve as a common identifier across these databases, creating a massive surveillance state. It also facilitates an ecosystem where access to goods and services, from government subsidies to drivers’ licenses to mobile phones to cooking gas, increasingly requires biometric authentication.

The UID project was originally vaunted as voluntary, but the inexorable slippery slope toward compulsory participation has triggered a series of lawsuits challenging the legality of forced enrollment and the constitutionality of the entire project. Most recently, in September 2013, India’s federal Supreme Court affirmed by way of an interim decision that the UID was not mandatory, that not possessing a UID should not disadvantage anybody, and that citizenship should be ascertained as a criteria for registering in order to ensure that UIDs are not issued to illegal immigrants. This last stipulation is particularly thorny given that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI, the body in charge of the UID project) has consistently distanced the UID from questions of citizenship under the justification that it is a matter beyond their remit (i.e., the UID is open to residents, and is not linked to citizenship). The government moved quickly to urge a modification of the order, but the Supreme Court declined to do so and will instead release its final decision after it reviews a batch of petitions from activists and others. The UIDAI approached the court, arguing that not making the UID mandatory has serious consequences for welfare schemes, but the court recently ordered the federal government, the Reserve Bank of India, and the Election Commission to delink the LPG cooking gas scheme from the UID. This is a considerable setback for the project, given that this was one of the most hyped linkages for the UID. It remains to be seen whether the court will similarly halt other attempts to make the UID mandatory.

In the meantime, the UID project is effectively being implemented in a legal vacuum without support from the Supreme Court or Parliament. The Cabinet is seeking to rectify this and has cleared a bill that would finally provide legal backing for the UID program—its previous attempt was rejected by the Standing Committee on Finance in 2010. This bill is scheduled to come up for debate during the winter session of Parliament. The bill’s progress, along with the final decision of the Supreme Court, will have far reaching consequences for the UID project’s implementation and longevity, as well as for the relationship between India’s citizens and the state.

If fully implemented, the UID system will fundamentally alter the way in which citizens interact with the government by creating a centrally controlled, technology-based standard that mediates access to social services and benefits, financial systems, telecommunications, and governance. It will undoubtedly also have implications for how citizens relate to private sector entities, on which the UID rests and which have their own vested interests in the data. The success or failure of the UID represents a critical moment for India. Whatever course the country takes, its decision to travel further toward or turn away from becoming a “database nation” will have implications for democracy, free speech, and economic justice within its own borders and also in the many neighboring countries that look to it as a technological standard bearer.

The Indian government seems to envision “big data” as a panacea for fraud, corruption, and abuse, but it has given little attention to understanding and addressing the fraud, corruption, and abuse that massive databases can themselves engender. The government’s actions have yet to demonstrate an appreciation for the fact that the matrix of identity and surveillance schemes it has implemented can create a privacy-invading technology layer that is not only a barrier to online activity but also to social participation writ large.

The lack of identification documents for a large portion of the Indian population does need to be addressed. Whether the UID project is the best means to do this—whether it has the right architecture and design, whether it can succeed without an overhaul of several other failures of governmental institutions, and whether fixing the identity piece alone causes more harm than good—should be the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. Only through rigorous threat modeling and analysis of the risks arising out of this burgeoning “data industrial complex” can steps be taken to stem the potential repercussions of the project not just for identity management, fraud, corruption, distributive justice, and welfare generally, but also for autonomy, openness, and democracy.

Click to download the article published in the annual report of Berkman's Center for Internet and Society (PDF 7223 Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-monitor-2013-malavika-jayaram-indias-identity-crisis

December 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-02-25T13:51:47Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2013 can be accessed below.

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2013:

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Highlights
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The National Resource Kit team has published a draft chapter highlighting the state of laws, policies and programmes for persons with disabilities in the state of Gujarat.
Government of India has passed the National Electronic Accessibility Policy. CIS had worked with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to formulate this policy. We bring you a brief analysis of the policy and provisions therein in a blog post.
Nehaa Chaudhari on behalf of CIS submitted comments on the Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations to the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
CIS-A2K team has published a report highlighting the key accomplishments about the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.
Vipul Kharbanda has provided an analysis of the laws and regulations that apply to Bitcoin in India concluding that government can regulate Bitcoin.
We released the first documentary film (DesiSec) on cyber security in India in Bangalore on December 11.
In the module on Global Histories of the Internet (part of the Knowledge Repository on Internet Access project) Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.
The second "Institute on Internet and Society" will be held in Yashada, Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014.
As part of the Making Change project, Denisse Albornoz provides an analysis of the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

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Jobs
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CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge) and Program Officer (Internet Governance): http://bit.ly/1aA57K6. There are two vacancies each for these posts and these are full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapter:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Gujarat Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/Kxbg3b.

Note: All of the chapters published so far in this project are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

►Other

# Media Coverage

An “Advocacy” Saga and the Inspiring Legacy of Rahul Cherian (by Shamnad Basheer, Spicy IP, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a5B7sU.

# Blog Entry

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility – An Analysis (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dfCW3I.

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Access to Knowledge
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The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

# Submission

Comments on Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (by Nehaa Chaudhari, December 7, 2013). CIS submitted its comments to the Ministry of Human Resource Development: http://bit.ly/1hpWeuu.

# Events Participated In

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa (organized by University of Cape Town, December 9-13, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum (http://bit.ly/1dH1WEM). Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event: http://bit.ly/1bJArFJ.
Twenty-Sixth Session of the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights (organized by WIPO, Geneva, December 16 – 20, 2013). CIS gave its statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7) and on Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a speaker. India and the United States introduced 6 proposals on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: http://bit.ly/1edqvr3.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 workshops in the month of December, published a detailed report of key accomplishments of the work done in Konkani Wikipedia, a report on Train the Trainer Program held in the month of October and published an article in DNA.

►Wikipedia

# Article

Telugu Wikipedia completes 10 years (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, DNA, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/19OAvUV. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshané.

# Report

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/1l6ttmp. The report throws some light on the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.

# Blog Entries

First ever Train-the-Trainer Program in India (by Nitika Tandon, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1euwSXt.

The following are videos of participants from the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization project (jointly organised by CIS-A2K and Goa University) speaking on their experiences with Wikimedia projects.

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hldNM8. We are featuring this here as we didn’t carry this in the last newsletter.
Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator (by Nitika Tandon, December 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/KmxyFo.
Darshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process (by Nitika Tandon, December 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cqKyQ2.
Darshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1keWyya.
Pooja Tople on Wikimedia Projects (by Nitika Tandon, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hlbubU.

# Events Organised

You Too Can Write on Wikipedia! — Training workshop (National Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1edmx1z.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (KBN College, Vijaywada, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i8ScnL.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Alvas Vishva Nudisiri Virasat (Moodabidre, December 19 – 22, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation about Kannada Wikipedia and also conducted a workshop on Kannada Wikipedia as a parallel track. The event was covered by Prajavani (December 22), Hosadigantha (December 22), and Deccan Herald (December 22): http://bit.ly/1dGTBkw.

# Events Co-organised

Wikipedia Orientation Workshop (organised by CIS-A2K and Christ University, Bangalore, December 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lrkwEy.
Wikipedia Training Session @ Tiruvur (organised by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, Srivahini College, Tiruvur, December 19, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik conducted the workshop: http://bit.ly/1e3oQX7. It was covered by Andhraprabha (http://bit.ly/1bU5VsQ), Eenadu (http://bit.ly/19fsttf), Sakshi (http://bit.ly/1e3pQdU), and Prajasakthi (http://bit.ly/JJs7ja) on December 19, 2013.

# Event Participated In

A Wikipedia Workshop at IISC (organised by the Assamese Wikipedia community, Bangalore, December 1, 2013). CIS-A2K team and Wikipedian Shiju Alex supported this event: http://bit.ly/1dSutY2.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

A Feature on Telugu Wikipedia (Namaste Telengana Newspaper, December 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/19Yjwj6.
Odisha: Odia Wikipedia reaching 5000 article mark! (Odisha Diary Bureau, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGU2vc.

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Internet Governance
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CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you an analysis on whether Bitcoin can be banned by the government and a blog post on misuse of surveillance powers in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia a film DesiSec: Episode 1was screened. We also did an interview with Pranesh Prakash on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 13 video interviews so far:

# Analysis

Can Bitcoin Be Banned by the Indian Government? (by Vipul Kharbanda, December 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJrnGF.

# Blog Entries

Misuse of Surveillance Powers in India (Case 1) (by Pranesh Prakash, December 6, 2013): http://bit.ly/1donbaJ.
Brochures from Expos on Smart Cards, e-Security, RFID & Biometrics in India (by Maria Xynou, December 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f714fN.
India’s Identity Crisis (by Malavika Jayaram, December 31, 2013 Internet Monitor Annual Report: Reflections on the Digital World, published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society): http://bit.ly/1lTRuuz.

# Upcoming Events

Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression (CIS, Bangalore, January 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/KucEU5. Michael Oghia will give a talk.
CPDP 2014 Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective (Brussels, January 22 – 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/KsgCws.
Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.

# Events Organised

Big Democracy: Big Surveillance - A talk by Maria Xynou (CIS, Bangalore, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/19YnA31.
DesiSec: Episode 1 - Film Release and Screening (CIS, December 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJt2fm.
Legal Issues pertaining to Cloud Computing (NLSIU Campus, Bangalore, December 14-15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cvcmGq.
Biometrics or Bust? Implications of the UID for Participation and Inclusion (CIS, Bangalore, January 10, 2014). Malavika Jayaram will give a talk: http://bit.ly/1lJZhuK.

# Events Participated In

Convention on Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on Democracy (organized by INSAF, December 6, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated as a speaker: http://bit.ly/1gAxmNy.
International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice (IV) (jointly organized by Microsoft Research India, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, December 6, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panellist: http://bit.ly/1eAXl5t.
Technology in Government and Topics in Privacy (organized by Data Privacy Lab, CGIS Cafe, Cambridge Street, Harvard University Campus, December 9, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker on Biometrics in Beta – India's Identity Experiment: http://bit.ly/1bJDqht.
Cyberscholars Working Group at MIT (organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, December 12, 2013): Malavika Jayaram made a presentation on Biometrics or Bust - India’s Identity Crisis: http://bit.ly/1eIpHef.
Seventh NLSIR Symposium on “Bridging the Security-Liberty Divide” (organised by National Law School, Bangalore, December 21-22). Chinmayi Arun and Bhairav Acharya were speakers at this event: http://bit.ly/1gjsxYe.

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

MongoDB startup hired by Aadhaar got funds from CIA VC arm (by Lison Joseph, Economic Times, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f77bRg.
A Three-Way Race Draws Delhi’s Young, and Everyone Else, Out to Vote (by Betwa Sharma, New York Times, December 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gAxoFf.
India for UN body to resolve internet governance issues (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/JWESqe.
Card transactions with Aadhaar validation need more time: experts (by Kirti V. Rao and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hq35UL.
Indian government wakes up to risk of Hotmail, Gmail (originally published by AFP, December 7, 2013): http://bit.ly/19LrlOS. This was also mirrored in The Times of India (http://bit.ly/1hpYEJu), Reuters (http://bit.ly/1gaHhZk), Dawn (http://bit.ly/1azuV95), NDTV (http://bit.ly/19Ys7lS), Yahoo News (http://yhoo.it/JCSreE), The Malaysian Insider (http://bit.ly/1eAPAMW) and Asia One Digital (http://bit.ly/JWuw9R). A slightly modified version was published by Silicon India on December 11: http://bit.ly/1gAtzjd.

# Announcement

Pranesh Prakash has been elected as the Asia-Pacific representative to the executive committee of the NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) (part of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which is in turn part of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which is in turn part of ICANN): http://bit.ly/KuIVeC.

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Telecom
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Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

For a Telecom Revival (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 4, 2013 and Organizing India Blogspot, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1avRDii.

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Digital Humanities
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CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

# Blog Entry

The Conflict of Konigsberg (by Anirudh Sridhar, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEXhhU.

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Digital Natives
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CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Tactical Technology: Information is Power? (by Denisse Albornoz, December 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEUrcY.
Tactical Technology: Designing Activism (by Denisse Albornoz, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a9IuzH.

►Other

# Newspaper Column

Digital Native (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f7mU2P.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
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CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

# Upcoming Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9. Registrations are closed for this event.

# Modules

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks (by Nishant Shah, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19WRHLb.
Internet Privacy in India (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19SNk6v.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter:https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2013-bulletin

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks

nishant — 2014-01-08T07:56:16Z

In this module Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the Internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.

Introduction: Understanding the Internet

Let’s begin at the beginning. Before we get into the history of the Internet, it might be a good thing to try and figure out what the Internet is and what exactly are we talking about when we say ‘Internet’. Let’s take a moment and figure out what the Internet is. If you pause right now, and try and define the Internet it is going to be tricky. However, if you look at other media and communication technologies you realise that the same is true for all the other technologies that you daily deal with. Try and define what a book is. Or, what is a film? It is one of the signs that a technology has become internal, personal and ubiquitous that it becomes transparent. It doesn’t require us to think about how it works. Almost like magic, the technologies just ease our way into life and perform crucial tasks of everyday living, without really making their internal mechanics transparent. So it is highly possible that unless you are trained in technologies, you have a vague idea of what the Internet is and how it works.

At a very basic level, the Internet is a network of computers that are able to talk to each other using a protocol that is popularly known as the TCP/IP suite. That is it. At a most cursory level, that is all there is to the Internet. An extensive network – even a network of network – that makes it possible for billions of users across the globe, to exchange information using digital data, in asynchronous and distributed forms. And this has been historically the case. The origins of the Internet are in military and state funded research in the United States of America in 1960s, where they were developing robust communication networks that could account for redundancy – which is to say that they wanted a network which would function even when particular nodes fell out of service, or certain flow-lines within the network were blocked. A history of the Internet then, will be a history of its technological development – the different protocols, programmes and innovations that allowed for this network to grow out of the defense research labs in the 1960s, be used extensively in American and European academia in the 1980s and then made available to the public in the 1990s. So that is one history that we might need to look at. It is a technological history of the Internet, that allows us to understand what the challenges, strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Internet technologies have been and how we have constantly innovated to meet these problems and aspirations.

However, as you can imagine, that is a technical history of technology which is well documented, well, on the Internet. A look at the page on Wikipedia[1] will show you all the different technological, institutional and digital innovations that have shaped the Internet from its early days residing on the ARPANET to the global phenomenon that we know now. It is a history of facts and dates, names and numbers and it is easily accessible to anybody who wants to look at the different institutions, technologies and conversations shaped what we understand as the Internet today. You might also want to look at these three different accounts of that history to get the facts,[2] anecdotes[3] and stories[4] in order.

You will realise from the sources that the Internet is the backbone of our digital experience. It hosts a vast range of services, like peer-2-peer networks, voice and text chats, hypertext documents, and indeed, the most prominent of them all – the World Wide Web. We need to understand that the Internet is thus larger than the World Wide Web and what we have access to, using the WWW, is a very small subset of this larger global digital network. To know the structure of the internet, how it is governed, what are the different inequities, vulnerabilities and problems it creates are important to study because they give us an entry point into understanding how the technological and technical choices that are made affect and impact our everyday concerns around questions of privacy, identity, access, usage, affordability, accessibility etc. These are questions that often get addressed under the rubric of Internet Governance[5] and will be dealt with in the subsequent sessions for this Institute that expand upon the Infrastructure and Institutions that govern the Internet[6] In the meantime, I want to begin with the personal. Instead of beginning with the technological, I want to begin with our everyday experiences on the Internet, and particularly of this thing that we call cyberspace.

Pinning down Cyberspace

Let’s take a pause and try and answer a hard question: What is Cyberspace? If you thought that defining the Internet was tough, you will quickly realise that defining Cyberspace is going to be even tougher. We know when we are on cyberspace. We use it across a variety of devices and interfaces. We think of ourselves as connected and online for most of our waking (and sleeping) hours. Cyberspace is right there – You will be able to point to it, give examples, even talk about what it facilitates. For example, cyberspace is a virtual space created by digital communication and connection. Or cyberspace is a repository of information that people create globally using computing technologies. Or cyberspace is a space where people manage their social networks. These are all different instances of cyberspace and indicate the wide variety of things that we do when we are online, but they don’t necessarily tell us what cyberspace is.

Like all good things, the origins of the word cyberspace are actually in Science Fiction. William Gibson in his iconic cyberpunk novel ‘NeuroMancer’ (1984), first coined the word cyberspace and defined it thus:

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

While there are several critiques of Gibson’s description of the word, we must remember that it is fiction and look at it to see what are the conceptual complexities that Gibson is throwing up that are now being discussed in contemporary debates. I want to highlight three things that Gibson’s definition brings up, which might be important to understand how deal and engage with cyberspace.

Consensual hallucination – This is probably one of the strongest and the strangest ways of talking about cyberspace. A hallucination is something that happens in your head. It is a space of virtuality. It is an event that nobody except for the one individual who claims it, can verify. It is thus, categorically the non-real. However, a consensual hallucination is a mystifying thing.

Let’s say that you propose that from this moment on, you are a dog (even though, as the cartoon famously says, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog). If you were to stand up in your social circles and announce that you are a dog, it would lead to some strange reactions. If you persisted in acting like a dog and responding only to a dog, chances are that you might be put into a mental asylum to be treated of this hallucination. However, if everybody else in the room consented that you are a dog, and indeed, they are all, also dogs, then your hallucination becomes real. It gains valence. It has legitimacy. It becomes a norm.

Gibson, in positing cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’ is reminding us that this is indeed, the very way in which our reality is constructed. For instance, think of the colour blue. Now try and figure out how the blue that you are thinking about and the blue that I am thinking about is the same blue. We can’t verify that we are all talking about the same blue. And yet, there is a consensus among us that there is a blueness to the colour blue that we all refer to when we think of the colour blue.

Reality is a process of consensual hallucination. So is Cyberspace. Which mean that instead of making the distinction between the real and the virtual, or trying to figure out what is real and what is not, it is more fruitful for us to engage with the idea that the virtual is a part of the real. There are various processes – social, cultural, political, economic, and governmental – that structure and validate our reality. And hence, reality is always changing. The science fiction futures that were dreamt in the last century are the present times that we live in. The idea of consensual hallucination, takes us away from a debate about Virtual Reality and Real Life (VR – RL) that has been endemic to the conversations around cyberspace. Following Gibson’s lead I would encourage us, not to think of cyberspace in terms of the virtual or the unreal, but as a constitutive and generative part of our reality.
A graphic representation of abstracted data: The use of the term ‘space’ is often bewildering in Gibson’s coinage because it does not really seem to appear in the definition. Space, as we understand it, is a location metaphor. It refers to spatial dimensions of a thing. It gives us a sense of fixity. However, these are all expectations of physical space. The ‘space’ in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract concepts of space in mathematics and metaphors rather than in terms of geography and location.

We need to understand that even in geographical terms, space is an abstraction of sorts. Space is the virtual or perceived usage, volume and experience of place. If you have a piece of land, that is the place of that land. The place is geographically present. It can be materially touched and located. However, the space is what you attribute to that piece of land. It is defined by the intentions and aspirations, by what is allowed and what is not. Space is a philosophical concept. Which is why, in everyday talk, when you say, ‘I need some space’, you don’t necessarily mean that you need geographical isolation, but often refers to the head-space that is less tangible.

Similarly, the space in Cyberspace, even though it has been often used to talk about the space on the network that connects different webpages, or the immersive environments that role playing games offer, or the virtual communities on social networking sites like Facebook, it is important to remember that space is an abstraction. And cyberspace thus is not the actual mechanics and nitty-gritties of technology but what is built because of those interactions.

Bruce Sterling, in his introduction to The Hacker Crackdown quite evocatively explains this: ‘Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”
Non-space of the mind: In the cyberpunk universe of the novel Neuromancer, Gibson makes a difference between cyberspace and meat-space. There is a definite privileging of cyberspace, which is the world of seduction, adventure, excitement and entertainment. The meat-space, where our biological bodies survive and live, is in a state of collapse and disrepair. This bleak vision of the biological as disintegrating and the digital as becoming the primary mode of existence has been espoused by various science fiction and fantasy narratives. For all of us who have seen The Matrix, we are familiar with this idea that slowly and singularly, we are moving towards creating digital lives which are gaining precedence over our ‘real’ lives.[7] Especially when it comes to the discourse around digital objects, this hierarchy of dismissing the biological and the real over the virtual and the digital is often reinforced. However, Gibson was already reminding us, with the ‘non-space of the mind’ that the digital and the biological are not as separate or discrete as we would have liked to imagine. Let us look at what the ‘non-space’ can mean. For this, we might have to look at two different conceptual moves in philosophy.

The first is a distinction between the brain and mind. It is obvious that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain is the biological organ in our cranial cavity. It is made up on cells and neurons, flesh and blood, so to speak. It is what the artificial intelligence scholar Andy Clark calls ‘a skin bag’. The brain performs various functions that keep our body alive and sapient. The mind, is an abstraction of the brain. The mind is our thoughts, memories, associations, feelings, and all the other things that make us human. The brain might support the mind but they are not the same. I hope that this is beginning to sound familiar to us – that the brain-mind relationship is the same as we have mapped out for Internet-Cyberspace. Just like cyberspace is an abstraction of data that we have consented to be real, the mind is also an abstraction that encapsulates the interiority of our selves.
The second is an understanding of binaries and opposites. We are designed, as human beings (even though we attribute this to the digital machines) to think in binaries. Black-White, Good-Bad, Day-Night. This is the way in which our cultures have been built. We think of the positive and the negative and create a spectrum in between to understand our world. These binaries are often confused with being opposites. So we would say that the opposite of Black is white. Or that the opposite of Day is Night. However, in the study of Logics, we are taught that the binary is not the same as opposite. All the way back in history, Aristotle had already posited that it is a fallacy to mistake a binary for an opposite. So, for instance the binary opposition of ‘day’ might be ‘night’, but the logical opposite of ‘day’ is ‘non-day’. Or to make it simpler, the binary opposition of the colour ‘black’ is ‘white’. However, the logical opposite of ‘black’ is ‘non-black’ and hence every other colour that is not black, is its logical opposite. We go through this to realise that in the brain-mind mapping, the brain is the place. The mind is the non-brain, or the space. And then the non-space of the mind, is the brain all over again. Gibson does this recursive negation to remind us that the things that happen in cyberspace have direct consequences on meatspace. What happens in cyberspace directly affects the non-space of our bodies, our lived realities and experiences.

Cyberspace and Everyday Life

It is important to begin with the definition that Gibson offered because it informs a lot of the debates that happened historically, around cyberspace and how we understand it. However, it also allows us to side-step these debates because they are not fruitful. They reinforce the idea that the internet and cyberspace are removed from our reality, that they are technological concerns rather than human, social and political concerns, and they insist that the internet and cyberspace are in opposition to being human. These ideas produce accounts of the internet and cyberspace which, for me, are fruitless. The leads from Gibson’s definition, instead, allow us to understand the internet and cyberspace as deeply implicated in our conditions of being human, being social and being political. They offer us a different way of rewriting the history of the Internet, not merely as a linear narrative of the technological advancements, but as a rich and complex account of how the internet and cyberspace have shaped and been shaped by the social, cultural and political milieu that they have emerged in.

And so, we approach the history of the internet in a different way. Instead of looking at the Internet as a technology, we deal with the Internet in its many forms, through cyberspace and our everyday engagement with it. Or, rather, we formulate the history of Internet & Society, thus trying to look at the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies – Internet and cyberspace – have led to questioning the ways in which understand our personal, social and political lives, and how, in-turn they have been changed through the various contexts that we live in.

Why do we need the history of the Internet?

So here is the million dollar question. Why do we need to study the history of the Internet? And if we do, for what do we need to study the history of the internet? These are both important questions and this is where I am hoping we will be able to start a critical inquiry into our own engagement with the topic.

Let us begin by questioning the very structure of history writing. What does it mean to write the history of an particular object? If we were to write, let’s say, the history of a particular building. How far in time will we go? And in what minutiae shall we record it? Shall we begin by saying, how, once where the building stood, there was a tree. And on that trees, there were leaves. The first leaf fell. The second leaf fell. The third leaf fell. It could fill up pages documenting every leaf that fell, before we even come to the building. So we know that when we write the history of a particular object, person or phenomenon, there is a very clear notion of where the history began. But we also know that if, we had an interest in the ecological history of the building, we might have actually spent time looking at that tree and its falling leaves. Which means that what constitutes history also has to do with our intentions of writing it.

And then the last point about this brief capsule on history writing that I want to make, is that history of things does not mean that we focus only on the thing. If we were to look at the cultural significance of the building under question, for example, we would talk to the society that engages with it, the people who occupy it, and the ways in which it shapes the fabric of the space and time. So history is often a large canvas – it might keep one particular object in question, but it also weaves in the complex structure of processes and flows that surround that particular object of study.

There is a rich scholarship about the problems, structures and processes of history writing. But these three points are important for us to think through why we want to delve into the history of the internet. Where do we begin? What do we study? And why do we study what we study? The minute you put these questions out, you start realising that there can be no definitive history of the internet. There can definitely not be just one history of the internet. And that the history of the internet is as much about the world as it is about the technological, but the technological only becomes a lens or an entry point into unravelling the various questions that are a part of our personal and professional lives. So we are not looking at imparting the one authoritative history of the internet. Instead, I am proposing, for this module to introduce you to different ways of thinking about the history of the internet.

We are going to begin by looking at not the Internet – but cyberspace.

We are going to examine the intersections of cyberspace with three different objects and try and see how the debates at that intersection help us to define and entry point into the rich discourse around Internet & Society.

The body in cyberspace

Perhaps one of the most interesting histories of the cyberspace has been its relationship with the body. Beginning with the meatspace-cyberspace divide that Gibson introduces, the question of our bodies’ relationship with the internet has been hugely contested. There have been some very polarized debates around this question. Where are we when we are online? Are we the person in the chair behind an interface? Are we the avatar in a social networking site interacting with somebody else? Are we a set of data running through the atmosphere? Are we us? Are we dogs? These are tantalising and teasing questions.

Early debates around the body-technology questions were polarized. There were people who offered that the cyberspace is a virtual space. What happens in that make-believe, performative space does not have any direct connections with who we are and how we live. They insisted that the cyberspace is essentially a performance space, and just like acting in a movie does not make us the character, all our interactions on the internet are also performances. The idea of a virtual body or a digital self were proposed, thinking of the digital as an extension of who we are – as a space that we occupy to perform different identities and then get on with our real lives.

Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen, was the first one to question this binary between the body and the digital self. Working closely with the first users of the online virtual reality worlds called Multiple User Dungeons, Turkle notes how being online started producing a different way of thinking about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. She indicates three different ways in which this re-thinking happens. The first, is at the level of language. She noticed how the users were beginning to think of their lives and their social relationships through the metaphors that they were using in the online world. So, for instance, people often thought of life through the metaphor of windows – being able to open multiple windows, performing multiple tasks and identities and ‘recycling’ them in their everyday life. Similarly, people saying that they are ‘low on bandwidth’ when they don’t have enough time and attention to devote to something, or thinking about the need to ‘upgrade’ our senses. We also are quite used to the idea that memory is something that resides on a chip and that computing is what machines do. These slippages in language, where we start attributing the machine characteristics to human beings are the first sign of understanding the human-technological relationship and history.

The second slippage is when the user start thinking of the avatars as human. We are quite used to, in our deep web lives, to think of machines as having agency. Our avatars act. Things that we do on the internet perform more actions than we have control of – a hashtag that we start on twitter gets used and responded to by others and takes on a life of its own. We live with sapient technologies – machines that care, artificial intelligence algorithms that customise search results for us, scripts and bots that protect us from malware and viruses. We haven’t attributed these kinds of human agencies to machines and technologies in the past. However, within the digital world, there is a complex network of actors, where all the actors are not always human. Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science and technology, posits in his ‘Actor Network Theory’ that the emergence of these non-human actors has helped us understand that we are not only dependent on machines and technologies for our everyday survival, but that many tasks that we had thought of as ‘human’ are actually performed, and performed better by these technologies. Hence, we have come to care for our machines and we also think of them as companions and have intimate relationships with them. And the machines, even as they make themselves invisible, start becoming more personal.

The third slippage that Turkle points out is the way in which the boundaries between the interior and the exterior were dissolved in the accounts of the users’ narratives of their digital adventures. There is a very simplistic understanding that what is human is inside us, it is sacred and organic and emotional. Earlier representational technology products like cinema, books, TV etc. have emphasised this distinction between real life and reel life. No actor is punished for the crime they commit in the narrative of a film. It is not very often that an author claims to be the character in a book. We have always had a very strong sense of distinction between the real person and the fictional person. But within the virtual reality worlds, these distinctions seem to dematerialize. The users not only thought of their avatars as human but also experienced the emotions, frustrations, excitement and joy that their characters were simulating for them. And what is more important, they claimed these experiences for themselves.

Namita Malhotra, who is a legal scholar and a visual artist, in her monograph on Pleasure, Porn and the Law, looks at the way in which we are in a process of data-stripping – constant revelation of our deepest darkest secrets and desires, within the user generated content rubric. Looking at the low-res, grainy videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, which have almost no narrative content and are often empty of sexual content, produce all of us in a global orgiastic setting, where our bodies are being extended beyond ourselves. In the monograph, Malhotra argues that the Internet is not merely an extension but almost like a third skin that we wear around ourselves – it is a wrapper, but it is tied, through ligaments and tendons, to the flesh and bone of our being, and often things that we do online, even when they are not sexual in nature, can become pornographic. Conversely, the physical connections that we have are now being made photographically and visually available in byte sized morsels, turned into a twitpic, available to be shared virally, and disseminated using mobile applications, thus making our bodies escape the biological containers that we occupy but also simultaneously marks our bodies through all these adventures that we have on the digital infobahn.

Case Study: A Rape in Cyberspace
A contemporary of Sherry Turkle, Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated account of ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ [8] describes a case-study that corroborates many of the observations that Turkle posits. Dibbell analyses a particular incident that occurred one night in a special kind of MUD – LambdaMOO (MUD, Object-Oriented) – which was run by the Xerox Research Corporations. A MUD, is a text-based virtual reality space of fluid dimensions and purposes, where users could create avatars of themselves in textual representations. Actions and interactions within the MUD are also in long running scripts of texts. Of course, technically all this means that a specially designed database gives users the vivid impression of their own presence and the impression of moving through physical spaces that actually exists as descriptive data on some remotely located servers.

When users log into LambdaMoo, the program presents them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms (the coat closet) in the fictional database mansion. If the user wants to navigate, s/he can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the database replaces the original description with new ones, corresponding to the room located in the direction s/he chose. When the new description scrolls across the user’s screen, it lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that moment – including things (tools, toys, weapons), as well as other avatars (each character over which s/he has sole control). For the database program that powers the MOO, all of these entities are simply subprograms or data structures which are allowed to interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world.

Characters may leave the rooms in particular directions. If a character says or does something (as directed by its user), then the other users who are located in the same ‘geographical’ region within the MOO, see the output describing the utterance or action. As the different players create their own fantasy worlds, interacting and socialising, a steady script of text scrolls up a computer screen and narratives are produced. The avatars, as in Second Life or even on Social Networking Sites like Orkut, have the full freedom to define themselves, often declining the usual referents of gender, sexuality, and context to produce fantastical apparitions. It is in such an environment of free-floating fantasy and role-playing, of gaming and social interaction mediated by digital text-based avatars, that a ‘crime’ happened.

Dibell goes on to give an account of events that unfolded that night. In the social lounge of LambdaMoo, which is generally the most populated of all the different nooks, corners, dimensions and rooms that users might have created for themselves, there appeared an avatar called Dr. Bungle. Dr. Bungle had created a particular program called Vodoo Doll, which allowed the creator to control avatars which were not his own, attributing to them involuntary actions for all the other players to watch, while the targeted avatars themselves remained helpless and unable to resist any of these moves. This Dr. Bungle, through his evil Vodoo Doll, took hold of two avatars – legba and Starsinger and started controlling them. He further proceeded to forcefully engage them in sexually violent, abusive, perverted and reluctant actions upon these two avatars. As the users behind both the avatars sent a series of invective and a desperate plea for help, even as other users in the room (# 17) watched, the Vodoo Doll made them enter into sexually degrading and extremely violent set of activities without their consent. The peals of his laughter were silenced only when a player with higher powers came and evicted Dr. Bungle from the Room # 17. As an eye-witness of the crime and a further interpolator with the different users then present, Dibbell affirms that most of the users were convinced that a crime had happened in the Virtual World of the digital Mansion. That a ‘virtual rape’ happened and was traumatic to the two users was not questioned. However, what this particular incident brought back into focus was the question of space.

Dibbell suggests that what we had was a set of conflicting approaches to understand the particular phenomenon:

Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of *civility* … [R]eal life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any players life, limb, or material well-being…’

The meaning and the understanding of this particular incident and the responses that it elicited, lie in the ‘buzzing, dissonant gap’ between the perceived and experienced notion of Technosocial Space. The discussions that were initiated within the community asked many questions: If a crime had happened, where had the crime happened? Was the crime recognised by law? Are we responsible for our actions performed through a digital character on the cyberspaces? Is it an assault if it is just role playing?

The lack of ‘whereness’ of the crime, or rather the placelessness of the crime made it especially more difficult to pin it to a particular body. The users who termed the event as rape had necessarily inverted the expected notion of digital space as predicated upon and imitative of physical space; they had in fact done the exact opposite and exposed digital spaces as not only ‘bleeding into reality’ but also a constitutive part of the physical spaces. Their Technosocial Space was not the space of the LambdaMoo Room # 17 but the physical locations (and thus the bodies, rather than the avatars) of the players involved. However, this blurring was not to make an easy resolution of complex metaphysical questions. This blurring was to demonstrate, more than ever, that the actions and pseudonymous performances or narratives which are produced in the digital world are not as dissociated from the ‘Real’ as we had always imagined. More importantly, the notional simulation of place or a reference to the physical place is not just a symbolic gesture but has material ramifications and practices. As Dibell notes in his lyrical style,

‘Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VL facts alone can quite account for.’

The eventual decision to ‘toad’ Dr. Bungle – to condemn him to a digital death (a death only as notional as his crime) and his reappearance as another character take up the rest of Dibbell’s argument. Dibbell is more interested in looking at how a civil society emerged, formed its own ways of governance and established the space of LamdaMOO as more than just an emotional experience or extension; as a legitimate place which is almost as much, if not more real, than the physical places that we occupy in our daily material practices. Dibbell’s moving account of the entire incident and the following events leading the final ‘death’ and ‘reincarnation’ has now been extrapolated to make some very significant and insightful theorisations of the notions of the body and its representations online.

Exercise: Based on this case-study, break into small groups to determine whether a rape happened on cyberspace and how we can understand the relationship of our online personas with our bodies.

Cyberspace and the State
The history of body and technology is one way of approaching the history of the internet. However, as we realise, that more than the management of identity or the projection of our interiority, it is a narrative about governance. How does the body get regulated on the internet? How does it become the structure through which communities, networks, societies and collective can be imagined? The actions and transactions between the internet and the body can also help us to look at the larger questions of state, governance and technology which are such an integral part of our everyday experience of the internet. Questions of privacy, security, piracy, sharing, access etc. are all part of the way in which our practices of cultural production and social interaction are regulated, by the different intermediaries of the internet, of which the State is one.

Asha Achuthan, in her landmark work Re:Wiring Bodies[9] that looks at the history of science and technology in India, shows that these are not new concerns. In fact, as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when the architects of India’s Independence movements were thinking about shaping what the country is going to look like in the future, they were already discussing these questions. It is more popularly known that Jawaharlal Nehru was looking to build a ‘scientific temperament’ for the country and hoping to build it through scientific institutions as well as infrastructure – he is famously credited to having said that ‘dams are the temples of modern science.’ Apart from Nehru’s vision of a modern India, there was a particular conversation between M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, that Achuthan analyses in great detail. Achuthan argues that the dialogue between Gandhi and Tagore is so couched in ideology, poetry and spirituality that we often forget that these were actually conversations about a technology – specifically, the charkha or the spinning wheel.

For both Gandhi and Tagore, the process of nation building was centred around this one particular charkha. The charkha was the mobile, portable, wearable device (much like our smart phones) that was supposed to provide spiritual salvation and modern resources to overcome the evils of both traditional and conservative values as well as unemployment and production. The difference in Gandhi and Tagore was not whether the charkha – as a metaphor of production and socio-economic organisation – should be at the centre of our discourse. The difference was that Gandhi thought that the usage of charka, complete immersion in the activity, and the devotion to it would help us weave a modern nation For Gandhi, the citizen was not somebody who used the charkha, but the citizen was somebody who becomes a citizen in the process of using the charkha. Tagore, meanwhile, was more concerned about whether we are building a people-centred nation or a technology-centred device. He was of the opinion that building a nation with the technology at its core, might lead to an apocalyptic future where the ‘danava yantra’ or demonic machine might take over and undermine the very human values and ideals that we are hoping to structure the nation through.

If you even cursorily look at this debate, you will realise that the way Gandhi was talking about the charkha is in resonance with how contemporary politicians talk about the powers of the internet and the way in which, through building IT Cities, through foreign investment, through building a new class of workers for the IT industry, and through different confluences of economic and global urbanisation, we are going to Imagine India[10] of the future. Similarly, the caution that Tagore had, of the charkha as superseding the human, finds its echoes in the sceptics who have been afraid that the human is being forgotten[11] in the e-governance systems that are being set up, which concentrate more on management of data and information rather than the rights and the welfare of people.

This historical continuity between technology and governance, also finds theorisation in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book The Cultural Last Mile[12] that looks at the critical turns in India’s governance and policy history and how the technological paradigm has been established. Rajadhyaksha opens up the State-technology-governance triad to more concrete examples and looks at how through the setting up of community science centres, the building of India’s space and nuclear programmes, and through on-the-ground inventions like radio and chicken-mesh wire-loops, we have tried to reinforce a broadcast based model of governance. Rajadhyaksha proposes that the earlier technologies of governance which were at our disposal, helped us think of the nation state through the metaphor of broadcast. So we had the State at the Centre, receiving and transmitting information, and in fact managing all our conversation and communication by being the central broadcasting agency. And hence, because the state was responsible for the message of the state reaching every single person, but also responsible that every single person can hypothetically communicate with every other single person, the last mile became important. The ability to reach that last person became important. And the history of technology and governance has been a history of innovations to breach that last mile and make the message reach without noise, without disturbance, and in as clean and effective a way as possible.

With the emergence of the digital governance set up, especially with the building of the Unique Identity Project,[13] we now have the first time when the government is not concerned about breaching the last mile. The p2p networks that are supposed to manage the different flows of information mean that the State is not a central addressee of our communication but one of the actors. It produces new managers – internet service providers, telecom infrastructure, individual hubs and connectors, traditional media agencies – that help us think of governance in a new way. Which is why, for instance, with the UID authorities, we are no longer concerned about the relay of state information from the centre to the subject. Hence, we have many anecdotal stories of people enrolling for the Aadhaar card without actually knowing what benefits it might accrue them. We also have stories coming in about how there are people with Aadhaar numbers which have flawed information but these are not concerns. Because for once, the last mile has to reach the Government. The State is a collector but there are also other registrars. And there is a new regime here, where the government is now going to become one of the actors in the field of governance and it is more interested in managing data and information rather than directly governing the people.

This historical turn is interesting, because it means that we are being subjected to different kinds of governance structures and institutions, without necessarily realising how to negotiate with them to protect us. One of the most obvious examples, is the Terms of Services[14] that we almost blindly sign off when using online platforms and services and what happens when they violate rights that we think are constitutionally given. What happens when Facebook removes some content from your profile without your permission because it thinks that it is problematic? Who do you complain to? Are your rights as a user or a citizen? Which jurisdiction will it fall under? Conversely, what happens when you live in a country that does not grant you certain freedoms (of speech and expression, for instance) and you commit an infraction using a social media platform. What happens when your private utterances on your social networks make you vulnerable[15] to persecution and prosecution in your country?

These are all questions of the human, the technological, and the governmental which have been discussed differently and severally historically, in India and also at the global level. Asking these questions, unpacking the historical concerns and how they have leap-frogged in the contemporary governmental debates is important because it helps us realise that the focus of what is at stake, what it means to be human, what we recognise as fair, just and equal are also changing in the process. Instead of thinking of e-governance as just a digitization of state resources, we have to realise that there is a certain primacy that the technologies have had in the state’s formation and manifestation, and that the digital is reshaping these formulations in new and exciting, and sometimes, precarious ways.

Cyberspace and Criminality
The history of the internet in India, but also around the world, is bookended between pornography and terrorism. While there has been an incredible promise of equity, equality, fairness, and representation of alternative voices on the internet, there is no doubt that what the internet has essentially done is turn us all into criminals – pornographers, pirates, terrorists, hackers, lurkers… If you have been online, let us just take for granted that you have broken some law or the other, no matter how safe you have been online, and where you live. The ways in which the internet has facilitated peer-2-peer connections and the one-one access means that almost everything that was governed in the public has suddenly exploded in one large grey zone of illegality.

Ravi Sundaram calls this grey zone of illegal or semi-legal practices the new ‘cyberpublics’. For Sundaram, the new public sphere created by the internet is not only in the gentrified, middle-class, educated people who have access to the cyberspaces and are using social media and user generated content sites to bring about active social and political change. More often than not, the real interesting users of the internet are hidden. They access the internet from cybercafés, in shared names. They have limited access to the web through apps and services on their pirated phones. They share music, watch porn, gamble, engage in illicit and surreptitious social and sexual engagements and they are able to do this by circumventing the authority and the gaze of the law.

On the other side are the more tech savvy individuals who create alternative currencies like Bitcoin, trade for weapons, drugs and sex on SilkRoute, form guerrilla resistance groups like Anonymous, and create viruses and malware that can take over the world. These cyberpublics are not just digital in nature. They erupt regularly in the form of pirate bazaars, data swaps, and the promiscuous USB drive that moves around the machines, capturing information and passing it on further. These criminalities are often the defining point of internet policy and politics – they serve as the subjects that need to be governed, as well as the danger that lurks in the digital ether, from which we need to be protected. For Sundaram, the real contours and borders of the digital world are to be tested in an examination of these figures. Because, as Lawrence Liang suggests, the normative has already been assimilated in the system. The normative or the good subject is no longer a threat and has developed an ethical compass of what is desirable and not. However, this ethical subject also engages in illicit activities, while still producing itself as a good person. This contradiction makes for interesting stories.

DPS MMS: Case Study
One of the most fascinating cases of criminality that captured both public and legal attention was the notoriously cases where the ideas of Access were complicated in the Indian context, was the legal and public furore over the distribution of an MMS (Multi-Media Message) video that captured two underage young adults in a sexual act. The clip, which was dubbed in popular media as ‘DPS Dhamaka’ became viral on the internet. The video clip was listed on an auction (peer-2-peer) website as an e-book and as ‘Item 27877408 – DPS Girl having fun!!! Full video + Bazee points’ for Rs. 125. This visibility of the clip on the auction site Bazee.com, brought it to the eyes of the State where its earlier circulation through private circuits and P2P networks had gone unnoticed. Indeed, the newspapers and TV channels had created frenzy around it, this video clip would have gone unnoticed. However, the attention that Bazee.com drew led to legal intervention.

Following the visibility of the video clip, there was an attempt to find somebody responsible for the crime and be held liable for the ‘crime’ that had happened. Originally, Ravi Raj, a student at IIT Kharagpur, who had put up the clip on Bazee was arrested for possessing and selling pornography. He was arrested and kept in police custody for at least three days and so was the male student who made the clip. They were both made to go through proceedings in juvenile court (though he was the last to be arrested). Both the students in the video were suspended from school after the incident. Eventually, the most high profile arrest and follow up from the DPS MMS incident was the arrest of the CEO of Bazee.com – Avnish Bajaj. However, Bajaj was released soon because as the host of the platform and not its content, he had no liability.

This is the beginning of a series of slippages where a punishable body in the face of public outcry had to be identified. We witnessed a witch-hunt that sought to hold the boy who made the video clip responsible, the student of IIT who attempted to circulate the clip and eventually the CEO of Bazee. The string of failed prosecutions seems to indicate that the pornographer-as-a-person was slipping through the cracks of the legal system. As Namita Malhotra argues, it is not the pornographic object which is ‘eluding the grasp of the court’ but that it seems to be an inescapable condition of the age of the internet - that the all transactions are the same transactions, and all users are pornographers.

We can see in the case that the earlier positions that were easily criminalised when it came to objects in mass media – producer, consumer, distributor of obscenity, were vacated rapidly in the DPS MMS case. We have a case where the bodies, when looked at through simplified ideas of Access, could not be regulated. The girl in the clip could not be punished because she was the victim in the case that could be read as statutory rape. In the case of the boy, a stranger argument was posed – ‘that in our fast urbanising societies where parents don’t have time for children, they buy off their love by giving them gadgets – which makes possible certain kinds of technological conditions...thus the blame if it is on the boy, is on the larger society’ (Malhotra, 2011).

Eventually, the court held that the description of the object and the context of its presence indicates that the said obscene object is just a click away and such a ‘listing which informed the potential buyer that such a video clip that is pornographic can be procured for a price’. There is a suggestion that there was nobody in particular that could be fixed with the blame. What was at blame was access to technology and conditions of technology within which the different actors in this case were embedded. Malhotra points out that in earlier cases around pornography, judgements have held pornography responsible for itself.

In the case of the DPS MMS, it seemed that technology – especially access to technology by unsupervised persons – has taken that role. The eventual directive that came out of this case was a blanket warning issued to the public that ‘anyone found in possession of the clip would be fined and prosecuted’. It is as if the attention of the court was on the ways in which the video clip was produced, circulated and disseminated, rather than the content. There was an anxiety around peoples’ unsupervised access to digital technologies, the networks that facilitated access to content without the permission of the state, and modes of circulation and dissemination that generated high access to audiences which cannot be controlled or regulated.

The State’s interest in this case, is not in the sexual content of the material but in the way it sidesteps the State’s authorial positions and produces mutable, transmittable, and transferable products as well as conditions of access. Such a focus on practices and behaviours around the obscene object, rather than the content itself, seems not to disrupt the law’s neat sidestepping of the force of the image itself. These different tropes of access to technology informed the State’ attempt at control and containment of technosocial practices in the country, giving rise to imaginations of the User as being in conditions of technology which make him/her a potential criminal. This idea of access as transgression or overriding the legal regulatory framework does not get accounted for in the larger technology discourse. However, it does shape and inform the Information Technology regulations which are made manifest in the IT Act. The DPS MMS case complicated the notion of access and posited a potentially criminal technosocial subject who, because of access to the digital, will be able to consume information and images beyond the sanction of the law.

The DPS MMS case shows how the ways in which public discourse can accuse, blame and literally hang technology seems to diverge from how the court attempts to pin down an offence or crime and prosecute by constructing a technosocial subject as the pervert, while also accusing pornography as a phenomenon. The court is unable to hold technology to blame but the accused is technology-at-large and modernity, which subsumes practices around technology and separates out the good and ethical ways in which a citizen should access and use technologies to rise from the potentially criminal conditions of technology within which their Technosocial identity is formed.

Summary

We started by making a distinction between Internet and Cyberspace to see how the two are separate objects of focus and have a relationship that needs to be examined in greater detail. It was argued that while the Internet – in material, infrastructural and technological forms – is important to understand the different policies and politics at the local, regional and global level, it has an account that is easier to follow. Cyberspace, on the other hand, because it deals with human interactions and experiences, allows for a more complex set of approaches into understanding our engagement with the digital domain. We began with the original definitions and imaginations of cyberspace and the ways in which it founded and resolved debates about the real-virtual, the physical-digital, and the brain-mind divides which have been historically part of the cybercultures discourse.

It was proposed, hence, that instead of looking at the history of the Internet, we will look at the history of cyberspace, and see if we can move away from a straight forward historical narrative of the Internet which focuses largely on the institutions, numbers, names and technological advances. The ambition was not to just produce a similar history of cyberspace but think of conceptual frameworks through which cyberspace can be studied. The proposition was that instead of just looking at history as a neutral and objective account of events and facts, we can examine how and why we need to create histories. Also, that it is fruitful to look at the aspirations and ambitions we have in creating historical narratives.

It was then suggested that instead of trying to create a definitive history, or even a personal history of the internet, it might be more fruitful to look at the intersections that cyberspace has with different questions and concerns that have historically defined the relationship between technologies and society. 3 different conceptual frameworks were introduced as methods or modes by which this historical mode of inquiry can be initiated.

The first framework examined how we can understand the boundaries and contours of the internet and cyberspace by looking at its relationship with our bodies. The ways in which we understand our bodies, the mediation by technologies, and the extensions and simulations that we live with, help us to understand the human-technology relationship in more nuanced fashions. Looking at the case-study of a rape that happened in cyberspace, we mapped out the different ways in which we can think of a technosocial relationship.

The second framework drew from historical debates around technology and governance to see how the current concerns of e-governance and digital subjectivity are informed by older debates about technology and nation building. Looking at the dialogues between Gandhi and Tagore, and then the imagination of a nation through the broadcast technologies, we further saw how the new modes of networked governance are creating new actors, new conditions and new contexts within which to locate and operate technologies.

The third framework showed how the technological is not merely at the service of the human. In fact, the presence of the technological creates new identities and modes of governance that create potential criminals of all of us. Through the case-study of the DPS MMS, and in an attempt to look at the grey zone of illegal cyberpublics, we saw how at new technosocial identities are created at the intersection of law, technology, governance and everyday practices of the web. The fact that the very condition of technology access can create us as potential criminals, in need to be governed and regulated, reflects in the development of internet policy and governance.

It was the intention of this module to complicate three sets of presumptions and common knowledge that exist in the discourse around Internet and Cyberspace. The first was to move away from thinking of the Internet merely as infrastructure and networks. The second was to suggest that entering the debates around human-technology everyday relationships would offer more interesting ways of looking at accounts of the technological. The third was to propose that the history of the internet does not begin only with the digital, but it needs larger geographical and techno-science contexts in order to understand how the contemporary landscape of internet policy and governance is shaped.

The module was not designed to give a comprehensive history and account of the internet. Instead, it built a methodological and conceptual framework that would allow us to examine the ways in which we approach Internet and Society questions – in the process, it would also help us reflect on our own engagement, intentions and expectations from the Internet and how we create the different narratives and accounts for it.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

[2]. http:\www.sigcomm.org\sites\default\files\ccr\papers\2009\October\1629607-1629613.pdf

[3]. http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html

[4]. http:\www.internetsociety.org\internet\what-internet\history-internet\brief-history-internet

[5]. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Governing_the_Internet/Introduction_to_Internet_Governance

[6]. Recommended reading: Internet Governance: Infrastructure and Institutions eds. Lee Bygrave and Jon Bing http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Governance-Infrastructure-Institutions-Bygrave/dp/0199561133

[7]. Recommended watching material to look at some of these questions: 1. The final flight of the Osiris -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueiBYxI6Eqg 2. The Second Renaissance - part 1 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/n5vpzw/the-second-renaissance-part-i 3. The Second Ranaissance - part 2 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/va807i/animatrix-second-renaissance-part2

[8]. http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

[9]. http://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc/view

[10]. http://www.amazon.com/Imagining-India-Idea-Renewed-Nation/dp/0143116673

[11]. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950

[12]. http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf

[13]. http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/532/

[14]. http://tosdr.org/

[15]. http://www.amazon.com/The-Googlization-Everything-Should-Worry/dp/0520258827

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/history-of-internet-building-conceptual-frameworks

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility – An Analysis

anandi — 2013-12-27T07:49:47Z

Electronics and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are widely used in all areas of life such as education, health care, employment, entertainment, banking and finance management and other aspects of daily living.

They not only make life easier for people in general, but have the potential to revolutionise the lives of persons with disabilities through larger inclusion and participation in these areas and by enabling independent living through use of appropriate assistive technologies (ATs).

In the year 2010, the erstwhile Department of Information Technology, Government of India circulated a draft consultation paper on the National Policy for Electronic Accessibility that sought to regulate the provision of accessible Electronics and ICTs services and products and universal design concepts for persons with disabilities. Post consultation and deliberation, the Government of India has passed the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility (National Policy) in 2013. This is a brief analysis of the policy and the provisions therein.

The draft consultation paper had clearly identified the requirements of persons with disabilities that had to be kept in view while designing electronic accessibility solutions:

Eliminating discrimination on the basis of disabilities and facilitating equal access to Information and Communication Technologies and Electronics (ICTE)
Understanding the diversity of persons with disabilities and creating solutions for their specific needs
Ensuring that accessibility standards and guidelines and universal design concepts are adopted and adhered to.

While the draft consultation paper only sought to provide equal access to ICTE products and services to persons with disabilities, the objective of the National Policy has been expanded to include not just equal but also barrier free access. The category of disabilities has also been expanded to include mental disabilities. Further, the policy seeks to facilitate local language support and sync universal access with barrier free access that should be usable without adaptation.

The scope of the National Policy continues to cover access to ICTE products and services to persons with disabilities in the areas of universal design, assistive technologies and independent living aids as in the draft consultation paper, but the National Policy expands on the broad roles and functions of the major stakeholders.

The National Policy clearly defines the following points that were not discussed in the Draft Consultation Paper:

The Department of Electronics and Technology is named as the nodal authority for monitoring the implementation of the policy.
Recommends constitution of a high level advisory committee of multiple stakeholders – central and state. ministries and department, industry, academia, disabled persons organisations and persons with disabilities for guiding and implementing the policy.
Recommends an amendment in the Information Technology (IT) Act to protect persons with disabilities who inadvertently break the law.
Lays emphasis on providing support in local languages to accessible Electronics and ICTs.

The strategy and Action Plan defined in the Draft Consultation Paper have been augmented and restructured to include the following points described in the National Policy:

Creating awareness on universal electronics accessibility and universal design

The National Policy specifically provides that the Department of Electronics and Information Technology will play the lead role.
Other central and state ministries, departments and agencies will also be responsible.
Carried out through Media, campaigns, conferences, workshops and seminars.
Will also include available and emerging assistive technologies and independent living aids and schemes.
Information to be made available in public domain in local languages in accessible format.

Capacity building and Infrastructure Development

The National Policy requires that schemes for capacity building on accessibility and assistive technologies be taken up within the government and for persons with disabilities.

Education and Assistive Technologies Centres

Accessibility standards and guidelines and universal design concepts to be included in the curriculum of Electronics and ICTs education.
Assistive technologies and independent living aids to be included in the curriculum of Special Education and Rehabilitation.
Model Electronics and ICTs centres to be set up to provide training and demonstration to special educators and persons with disabilities including persons with mental disabilities.

Conducting research and development

To develop assistive technologies and independent living aids based on accessibility standards and guidelines and universal design concepts
To provide incentives for the research and development of such products
To formulate schemes to support research and development organisations for developing such products
To include persons with disabilities and rehabilitation professionals in formulation, implementation and monitoring the schemes.

Accessibility Standards

The draft consultation paper provides that the accessibility standards and guidelines be taken or modified from existing standards and guidelines in accessibility
The National Policy specifically names existing accessibility standards and guidelines such as the following as examples

W3C Accessibility Standards
ATAG (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines)
WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
UAAG (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines)

Accessibility compliance would be monitored for government websites, websites for disability issues, general citizen centric websites and important websites with high traffic or high consumer transaction.

Accessible format for content

Content published in electronic format including text books, journals, publications, multimedia etc are required to be published in accessible format
Support in local languages to be provided for all content

Developing programmes and schemes

The National Policy lays emphasis on schemes for women and children with disabilities

Developing procurement guidelines for Electronics and ICTs for accessibility and assistive needs

The draft Consultation Paper merely states that ICTE procurement guidelines and processes should include accessibility standards and guidelines.
The National Policy requires that Electronics and ICTs procurement policies be evolved to confirm to the requirements of the National Policy.
Higher cost of accessibility compliant hardware and software to be budgeted for at procurement.
Incentives to be provided by the government to assist with the procurement of such products.
Any scheme formulated by the central or state governments for persons with disabilities should be linked with ongoing schemes for universal electronic accessibility.

Affordable Access

The Draft Consultation Paper requires that schemes be formulated to provide access to ICTE services and products to persons with disabilities at affordable costs.
Information about these schemes to be made available in the public domain in local languages in accessible format.
The National Policy promotes open source usage to meet affordable access requirements.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-policy-on-universal-electronic-accessibility-analysis

Information Activism - Tactics for Empowerment (TTC)

Denisse Albornoz — 2015-04-17T10:36:01Z

This is the first of a two-part analysis of information activism for the Making Change project. This post looks at the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

CHANGE-MAKER: Maya Ganesh

PROJECT: 10 Tactics for Information Activism

METHOD OF CHANGE: 
Information activism at the intersection of data, design and technology

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
-Demystify the technology, strategy and tactics behind information activism.
-Train people on how to use them for their projects.
-Empower people and increase political participation at the grassroots

I came into the office today and CIS Director gifted me the Red House edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘We are All Born Free”. Skimming through it, I found a series of graphics and artistic interpretations of Articles 1 to 30:


							Article 5 Photo courtesy of Library Mice blog: http://bit.ly/1cAMpYy


							Article 24 Photo courtesy of Illustration Cupboard: http://bit.ly/1kI5EBd

The purpose of this book is to find “exciting ways to socialize young people to very real issues”, rewrite human rights in a “simple,accessible form” and stimulate imagination to “observe and absorb details in a way that words struggle to express”. While specifically targeted for 12+ children, these images create associations and connections that trump the dullness of black and white texts for any audience; offering an alternative way of presenting complex bodies of knowledge crucial for our survival, such as the Declaration of Human Rights.

Change: information interventions to inspire and facilitate change-making among civil society networks.

In the same spirit, Tactical Technology aims to use information design strategies to create similar associations in the field of activism. The Tactical Technology Collective is an organization dedicated to the intersections of data, design and technology in campaigning. Its has two main programs: Evidence & Action that works with data management in digital campaigning; and Privacy & Expression that provides digital security and privacysupport advice to activists. The collective envisions change as a creative and pragmatic intervention that inspires and facilitates change-making among civil society networks. We interviewed Maya Ganesh, who is part of the E&A program, and our conversation shed light on benefits and the challenges of using visual advocacy strategies to create social change.

On this opportunity, I will explore the potential of information activism to create opportunities and spaces of engagement. Following Saussure’s dyadic model of the sign, it will be split in two parts. The first entry will look at the ‘signified’: the ideas, associations and cultural conventions derived from information and how these could solve crises of civic engagement and citizen action. The second entry will look at the ‘signifier’ -the shapes and sequences that compose the knowledges navigating political activism. These will be viewed from the strategic, design and technological point of view. Both parts will be informed by our conversation with Maya and complemented by literature on political engagement in the digital age. On a less academic note, the posts will also refer to the experience of graphic designers, artists and bloggers who are experimenting with information design to express dissent in transnational platforms.

Part 1: Is Information Power?

‘Transforming Information into Action’ is Tactical Technology’s take on the traditional idiom ‘Knowledge is Power’. The collective’s experience shows there are a number of steps to transform raw data into political power and for the purpose of this analysis, I will only look at information disseminated with this particular intention. This will aid to understand the relationship between increasing information availability and having it trigger civic action in contemporary activism. According to Fowler and Biekart, acts of public disobedience and activism after 2010 share the objective of reclaiming active citizenship through ‘novel ways’ that counter traditional political participation mechanisms (2013). Hence, we want to know if information activism is one of these ‘novel’ strategies enabling citizenship in the digital era.

More power to whom?

Overcoming information inequity
If information activism is “the strategic and deliberate use of information within a campaign”, the first step is to question the type of information used in these campaigns. While many scholars claim that access to political opinion increases participation in the democratic process by fostering debate and inclusive deliberation on policy issues (Dahl, 1989, Bennett, 2003, 2008; Montgomery et al. 2004,) Brundidge and Rice’s exploration of Internet politics shows that strategies that merely increase access to information are flawed by design. They claim that increasing information mainly benefits the middle class, who counts with previous exposure to political knowledge and hence processes it with greater ease. This group ultimately dominates the public discourse widening -what they call- the ‘knowledge gap’ between socioeconomic classes (Brunridge and Rice, 2009, Bimber et al. 2005). This is the ‘information’ version of the gentrification of politics explored by Shah in the Whose Change is it Anyway thought piece, and a definite deterrent of collective action at the grassroots level.

A basic example to show how this manifests in the information environment is this info-graphic on Social Activism created by Column Five and Take Part and presenting the findings on their 2010 study on Social responsibility:

Example 1:
Social Activism Study (2010): How can brands engage Young Adults in Social Responsibility?

Access complete info-graphic here: http://www.2012socialactivism.com/images/infographic.png

The information is clear, the presentation is clean. This graphic could mobilize the middle class citizen who works in a company and has time and money to spare in donations and fund-raising activities. The graphic is informational yet it does not offer alternative participation avenues for groups outside of the politically savvy, young, educated and affluent circle (Brundidge and Rice, 2009) Instead, it reiterates socioeconomic inequalities from the offline community into the information landscape. With this in mind we asked Maya whether gentrification was a barrier for info-activism interventions at the grassroots:

MG: The things we are documenting are by citizens with socioeconomic barriers and obstacles. It is not our mandate to reach out to the ‘common citizen’ but it is very much our mandate to look at what is happening and what is happening to people with socioeconomic barriers who are lower on the ladder. If you look at Syrian info-activism, these are people facing the worst situations you can imagine, and they are doing it [...] and we document what they are doing, trying to understand it, pull out trends and then showing people.

Empowering information communities

Offline networks support information dissemination
In this respect, offline community networks are key to bridging the knowledge gap cited above. The relationship between organizations like Dawlaty, SMEX and Alt City and groups in the Arab region function as a core of ideas and resources from which localized methods and solutions emerge (read more here). This flow of information, coupled with the offline support, makes information from less visible demographics visible, deepens democracy and creates opportunities for these actors to participate and set the public agenda (2009). We asked Maya in what other ways information activism facilitates this process:

MG: We have moved on a lot from information activism. 10 Tactics is quite old for us now but it is still interesting to see how this stuff works. This material was produced in 2008-9 and is very popular with our audience. A lot of our work now is [...] take this material to newer communities of activists or people who have been around for a long time but are getting involved with the digital for the first time. That’s one part of our work and it’s sort of self-sustainable that way.

Therefore the value of information activism, rather than increasing the quantity of available data, is how it enables diversity and visibility of political opinion in the public sphere. One of the better known examples of information design interventions that gloat inclusiveness is:

Example 2
Occupy Design: the collective that builds “visual design for the 99%”:

2011

2011
Images courtesy of Experimenta Magazine: http://bit.ly/1hGpvOP

By presenting income and unemployment statistics about the American middle and lower class in the public space, activists from Occupy Design made the claims of the Occupy Wall Street Movement visual and visible. This enabled this group, the 99%, to reclaim the space not only through physical mobilization but also through the expression of subjectivities and open -graphic- power contestation. According to Pleyers, the pervasiveness of the movement both at the offline, online -and in this case, visual- levels created opportunities of horizontal participation, asserting spaces of democratic experience (2012).

From Information to Action

Is information enough?
Nevertheless, exposure to powerful images does not necessarily guarantee impact and influence, much less civic engagement. We asked Maya what she thought motivated civic action:

MG: External things push you over the edge. A flash-point issue could tip you over to do something different, even if you are that someone that has never been involved in anything. The gang rape in Delhi for example: it has sparked a lot of people who have never been involved and are now pushed to [act]. There are different precipitating factors and that’s why the stories of people: what people do, how they do it and why they do it, matters.

Women protesting in Bangalore after the Delhi gang rape. Photo courtesy of Dawn: http://bit.ly/1cAFLRP

Whether it is ‘external things’, a ‘flash-point issue’ or ‘precipitating factors’; the individual must make a connection between new events and how they affect the current status quo. A set of critical skills must be in place, as well as a desire to participate in civic life. (Brundidge and Rice 2009, as well as Montgomery et al. 2004) Richard Wurman, the american graphic designer, refers to this in his book ‘Information Anxiety’. He posits that there is an ‘ever-widening gap’; a ‘black hole’ between data and knowledge that limits our ability to make sense of information; even if it is vital for our context and survival. “The opportunity is that there is so much information; the catastrophe is that 99 percent of it isn’t meaningful or understandable” (Wurman et. al 2001) How do we reconcile this challenge with Tactical Technology’s mandate? What is the turning point between exposure to information and engagement in civic action?

In this post two issues behind information dissemination have been explored:

The risk of creating homogeneous political discussions by catering only to middle class’ interests; overlooking diversity of political expression in the public discourse.
The need for offline communities to facilitate information dissemination on the ground and mainstream the technical and financial support offered by collectives such as Tactical Technology.

The next question is how info-activism creates the connections between data and information to trigger civic engagement, and on this note, we proceed to analyse the role of the ‘signifier’ in information dissemination on the next post. Part two post will look at the strategy, design and technology behind the symbols and sequences of information, and how these determine the citizen’s perception of its ability to create change.

Access Part 2: Information Design, following this link:

Sources:

Biekart, Kees, and Alan Fowler. "Transforming Activisms 2010+: Exploring Ways and Waves." Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 527-546.
Brundidge, J.S. & Rice, R.E. (2009). Political engagement online: Do the information rich get richer and the like-minded more similar? In Chadwick, A. and Howard, N.H. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (pp. 144-156). New York: Routledge
Bennett, Winston. "Communicating global activism." Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 2 (2003): 143-168.
Bennett, W. Lance. "Changing citizenship in the digital age." Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth 1 (2008): 1-24.
Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and its Critics. Yale University Press, 1989.
Kathryn Montgomery et al., Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation. Center for Social Media, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 20
Pleyers, Geoffrey. "Beyond Occupy: Progressive Activists in Europe." Open Democracy: free thinking for the world 2012 (2012): 5pages-8.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Wurman, Richard Saul, Loring Leifer, David Sume, and Karen Whitehouse. Information anxiety 2. Vol. 6000. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2001.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/tactical-technology-information-is-power

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T05:46:20Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/3rd-global-congress-ip-and-public-interest-open-air-conference-innovation-and-ip-africa.pdf

CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities

nehaa — 2013-12-30T06:17:50Z

Nehaa Chaudhari on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) made this statement at the WIPO-SCCR on December 20, 2013.

The Centre for Internet and Society believes in the universal access to knowledge/education for all, without the barriers of time, distance and costs. We believe that information and communication technologies provide us with the opportunities to achieve this universality for ALL learners, both, through formal and informal institutions and learning environments, in both, digital and non digital formats.

The adoption of limitations and exceptions for education and research is particularly significant from the perspective of developing and least developed nations, where prices of books and other learning material are high not just in absolute terms, but where consumers often have to commit higher proportions of their income to have access to these materials.

We are in agreement with some of the delegations before us, among others with Ecuador, Kenya and the African Group in our belief that the present international legal framework, does not sufficiently address the opportunities presented by these information and communication technologies. The compulsory licensing provisions in the Berne Appendix are complex, narrow, unworkable and of little value to developing nations.

We believe, therefore, Mr. Chair, that there is a need to adopt open ended exceptions for education, teaching and research compatible with the digital environment. In our opinion, Mister Chair, a narrow construction and application of the three step test to these limitations and exceptions would not be the ideal way forward especially for developing and least developed countries. We believe Mr. Chair, that these limitations and exceptions should be those that harmonize national practices; prescribe an international standard, facilitate a cross border exchange of books and other learning material.

Thank you, Mister Chair.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-statement-limitations-and-exceptions-education-training-research-institutions-persons-with-other-disabilities

MongoDB startup hired by Aadhaar got funds from CIA VC arm

praskrishna — 2013-12-13T11:53:32Z

Two weeks ago, Max Schireson, chief executive of MongoDB, a New York-based technology startup, was in New Delhi to sew up a very important contract for his company — with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

The article by Lison Joseph was published in the Economic Times on December 3, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The contract is yet to be announced but what could raise eyebrows is the fact that MongoDB is part-funded by the US' Central Intelligence Agency.

The company is expected to help in capturing and analysing data related to the ambitious plan to issue a unique identity number — Aadhaar — to over a billion citizens.

MongoDB, which makes software that helps manage large databases, especially unstructured data, has raised $231 million (Rs1,400 crore) since being founded in 2007. Some of its funding is from In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture capital arm of CIA.

While MongoDB lists In-Q-Tel as one of its investors on its website, the company has not disclosed the quantum of funding received from it. The fund's stated mission is to identify, adapt and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of CIA and the broader US intelligence community.

Besides CIA, In-Q-Tel works with National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.

"Once an investment is made, IQT (the fund) works with the company and the intelligence community partner agency to complete a work program and facilitate solution delivery," the fund's website said. The quote describes IQT's relationship with any company in which it invests in and is not specific to MongoDB.

Neither UIDAI nor MongoDB responded to queries from ET on whether the CIA link was considered before entering into a partnership. UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani did not respond to emails, messages and phone calls.

A senior UIDAI official confirmed the agency has entered into an agreement with MongoDB and that the company's database software is already being used for analysing the pace at which registration of new beneficiaries is taking place.

It is not clear if MongoDB's vendor relationship would be with UID directly or with one of the system integrators that UID works with. Schireson, the CEO, was also one of the national co-chairs for Technology for Obama, an interest group that campaigned for the reelection of President Barack Obama after his first term.

There is no evidence in the public domain that the firm is controlled or significantly influenced by the CIA in any manner.

But the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower that US intelligence agencies routinely intercepted communication in Europe and Asia, including in India has raised concerns. Experts said the UID's centralised design could pose a risk, where even a single mistake can make the whole system disproportionately vulnerable.

"The risk exposure because of CIA involvement (could be that) if MongoDB is a data controller, then secret courts and secret court orders could be used to get access to the UID data," said Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

He added that even if UIDAI is only using the source code without getting into a commercial relationship with MongoDB, they should audit the source code to check if CIA has introduced any back doors. "This is because Snowden has told us that the army of mathematicians working for the US government has compromised some standards even though they were developed in an open, participatory and transparent fashion." MongoDB, whose name is a play on the word humongous, competes with Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. It has around 320 employees and some 600 customers. At its latest round of $150 million in fund-raising in October, the company was valued at about $1.2 billion, according to Bloomberg. Other investors include Intel Capital, Salesforce-.com, Red Hat and Sequoia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-december-30-2013-lison-joseph-mongo-db-startup-hired-by-aadhar-got-funds-from-cia-vc-arm

Legal Issues pertaining to Cloud Computing

praskrishna — 2022-02-07T15:29:00Z

The Law and Technology Society of National Law School of India University, Bangalore is organizing the 6th edition of its flagship conference ‘Consilience’ on December 14 and 15, 2013 at NLSIU Campus, Bangalore. The Centre for Internet and Society is supporting this event.

The Conference will see some of the best lawyers, jurists and industry leaders in India speak on different issues surrounding the theme. The Conference is co- branded with ‘Salesforce.com’, ‘International Technology Law Association’ and the Centre for Internet and Society (http://www.cis-india.org/). Apart from making an effective contribution towards greater understanding of the subject, the Conference will lead to a recommendatory policy paper to the government of India.

Key speakers for the Conference include:

Senapathy (Kris) Gopalakrishnan (Co-Founder and Executive Vice Chairman, Infosys & President, CII )
Pavan Duggal (Advocate, Supreme Court)
Abhishek Malhotra (Founding Partner, TMT Law Practice)
Azmul Haque (Partner, Shook Lin & Bok, Singapore)
Chris Edwards (Senior Associate, DLA Piper, Singapore)
Prof. Rahul De (IIM Bangalore)
Pamela Kumar (Chair, Cloud Computing Innovation Council of India)
Suhaan Mukherji (Expert advisor, Office of Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations)

Registrations for the Conference are open and fee for the same is as follows:

Students: Rs. 500/-
Professionals: Rs. 750/-

Please find attached the concept note, programme schedule and speakers’ profiles. To register, visit http://www.consilience.co.in/index.php/consilience-2013/register-for-the-conference. For any other queries, please write to ltech.nls@gmail.com .

or contact

Shivam Singla (Ph: +91-9916708701)
Ayushi Sutaria (Ph: +91-8123925725)

Conference Programme

Saturday, December 14th, 2013
Venue: Conference Hall, Academic Block, NLSIU

Lunch
08.30 09.30	Breakfast and Registration
09.45 10.00	Inauguration
10.00 10.30	Keynote Address
10.30 12.30	SESSION 1: INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING How does cloud computing work? - An overview of the basic technical features The current legal regime related to cloud computing in India- Main issues and challenges
13.15 15.15	SESSION 2: THE RELATION BETWEEN PARTIES TO CLOUD COMPUTING- USERS, INTERMEDIARIES AND GOVERNMENT BODIES Legal obligations of the intermediaries towards (i) the government and (ii) the users Cyber security concerns Standards of data protection Government's surveillance powers and privacy issues
Tea Break
15.30 17.30	SESSION 3: REGULATION AND MONITORING OF DATA CONTENT Current data control monitoring systems by intermediaries Data ownership and intellectual property issues- Possible threats and need for regulation Sensitive or critical data- Security concerns relating to their storage
High Tea/Networking Session

Sunday, December 15th, 2013
Venue: Conference Hall, Academic Block, NLSIU

Tea Break
09.00 10.00	Breakfast and Registration
10.00 12.00	SESSION 4: THE INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON CLOUD COMPUTING Jurisdiction and choice of law issues- how do we counter the confusion? International laws applicable to cloud computing Need for a comprehensive international framework to simplify the situation?
12.15 14.15	SESSION 5: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS WITH LEGAL FRAMEWORKS IN OTHER COUNTRIES Legal frameworks in UK and Singapore Beneficial features of these legal regimes and their suitability in the Indian context Lessons to be learnt for India
Lunch
15.00 17.00	SESSION 6: THE WAY FORWARD – SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Overview of the important challenges and suggestions Possible Policy and Legislative steps to improve the Cloud Computing regime in India
High Tea/Networking Session

Click to read the sub tracks for discussion
Access the speakers' profiles here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/legal-issues-on-cloud-computing

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa

praskrishna — 2014-01-05T02:52:03Z

From 9 to 13 December 2013, delegates from national and international governmental governmental entities, the private sector, civil society, and academia gathered for five days of interconnected events in Cape Town.

Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market, User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods, and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum. Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event. Click to read more about the event published on the website of open A.I.R. here. The full programme can be seen here.

Participants will engage with diverse perspectives and future scenarios for intellectual property (IP), innovation and development during the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest and Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa.

The event is now fully subscribed, with only registrations invited by Congress & Conference organisers being accpted. For further details, please visit this website's Cape Town 2013 page.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) Faculty of Law's IP Unit is serving as host of the Congress & Conference. Implementating partners include the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at The American University in Cairo, the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS) at the University of Lagos, the Centre for IP and IT Law (CIPIT) at Srathmore University in Nairobi, the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
at American University in Washington, DC.

Congress and Conference funding is being provided by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Open Society Foundations.

Date: Monday, 9 December, 2013 to Friday, 13 December, 2013
Place: Cape Town
Type of Event: Conference

Sunil Abraham provided a hilarious talk on The Freedom Continuum. An example: “Freedom is like the Kama Sutra – there are many positions one can take.” Mr. Abraham also brilliantly suggested a method for plausible deniability in the world of biometric identification and oppressive government oversight. By posting all of my biometric information (fingerprints, eye scans, etc.) on the internet, I can plausibly deny any crimes or contracts or tracking by the government because, well, it’s all online so it couldn’t have been me, right? So we should (paradoxically) fight incursion into data privacy simply by releasing all biometric data about ourselves.

Also quite amusing was the comparison of the IP debate to Tom and Jerry, that iconic Cat (Kat?) and Mouse duo who are perpetually chasing one another. Tom the Cat represents Big Business, corporate interests, the USTR, etc. Tom is chasing (but can never quite catch) Jerry the Mouse, who represents civil society, human rights activists, the open source movement, etc. An audience member pointedly observed that Jerry typically runs around for a bit and then disappears into a hole in the wall, where he stays for some time before emerging to torture Tom again. The obvious point is that activists (i.e., the audience at the Global Congress) will never make substantial progress until they stop disappearing for long periods of time and start acting more like a cat (or even, perhaps, like a dog).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/3rd-global-congress-ip-and-public-interest-open-air-conference-innovation-and-ip-africa

Konkani Vishwakosh Encyclopedia released under Free License

nitika — 2013-12-31T12:42:35Z

Upon Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K)‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era.

Read the blog post originally published on the Wikipedia page.

Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. The encyclopedia is written in Konkani, a language spoken primarily by people living in Goa and in the neighboring states on the western coast of India (also known as the Konkan belt) – some pockets in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. The Vishwakosh serves as a primary source of information and one of the most important documented texts for a community of nearly 2.5 million Konkani speakers spread across India and worldwide.

Goa University is the first ever Indian University to relicense its copyrighted content under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that the knowledge that they have painstakingly put together is made available freely to all Konkani speakers across the world through Wikipedia and other digital platforms. By doing this Goa University has set a precedent for other public sector institutions in India — such as universities and government departments — to follow. Citing this instance, the Tamil Wikipedia community has begun a negotiation with the Tamil Nadu government to release the Tamil Encyclopedias under CC license. It should be noted that majority of the knowledge production through the 20th century in Indian languages was mostly funded by the State. This victory with Goa University can bring out much more knowledge in the Indian languages into the open and could significantly benefit the Indic Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K is also leveraging this instance in getting other public institutions in India to re-release the content under appropriate CC licenses.

To celebrate and further the movement of open knowledge and open access Goa University (GU) in collaboration with CIS-A2K organized an event on 26th September 2013 at 10am at the Goa University Conference Hall. The event had significant attendance, including Dr. Satish Shetye (Vice Chancellor of GU), Mr. V.P. Kamat (Registrar of GU), Mr. T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director CIS-A2K), close kin of Late. Manoharrai Sardesai (writer of the encyclopedia), Tanaji Halarnkar (editor of the encyclopedia and a long time associate of Konkani Literary movement), Goa University’s staff, faculty and students, members of Konkani speaking community and press. About 250 people attended this event, which received major media attention.

During the event GU Vice-Chancellor Satish Shetye said, “the Konkani Vishwakosh covers all realms of knowledge like any other encyclopedia. The Konkani Wikipedia will act as a digitized repository of knowledge for future generations and Konkani speakers across the world. I look forward to the pleasure of going to the internet and clicking away to access a Konkani Wikipedia.”

Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director CIS-A2K, Satish Shetye, Goa University Vice Chancellor, V.P. Kamat, Registrar of Goa University during press conference of re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC license (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The event was covered by several local and national newspapers. Here are some links:

“Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months“. Jagran Josh. 30 September 2013.
Chaudhary, Apurva. “Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia” Medianama. 30th September 2013
Lobo,Joanna. “For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa’s official language“. DNA. 29 September 2013.
Prakash, Kamat.”Konkani Wikipedia in the making“. The Hindu. 29 September 2013.
“Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months“. Times of India. 27 September 2013.
“Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia“. Navhind Times. 27 September 2013.
“Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow“. The Hindu. 25 September 2013.
Desouza, Vijay. “Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26“. Times of India. 24 September 2013.

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

More details about the event can be found on the Meta Program Page

CIS-A2K’s Accomplishments

MoU between Goa University and Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)

Goa University has entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University has re-launched four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia under CC licence and CIS will help scanning and digitizing Vishwakosh and using it as a foundation for creating articles on Konkani Wikipedia.

MoU between Goa University and Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)

Konkani Vishwakosh available on Wikimedia Commons

The 4 volumes of encyclopedia have already been scanned and made available by CIS on Wikimedia Commons. It can be found here:

Project Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project (KVDP)

CIS-A2K is currently working with 37 volunteers to digitize Konkani Vishwakosh. Thick heaps of the four volumes of Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia), till now available only in hard copy, will now be available for free on the Internet. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized.

“Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help the project for which training will be provided. Information in the Konkani Vishwakosh will also be updated as per the current developments,” said T. Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director of CIS-A2K. Orientation, training and follow-up workshops will also be organised by CIS-A2K.

More about the project can be found on the Meta Program Page

Konkani Wikipedia editors digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Boost to Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K is encouraging Konkani editors to use Vishwakosh as a ready-made source of reference for articles on Konkani Wikipedia, thereby growing Konkani articles not only in numbers but also in quality.

The incubation for Konkani Wikipedia was initiated in 2006 (it could be one of the few projects in incubation for the longest period). During the past 7 years, little progress can be seen on this incubator project.

By way of initiating KVDP, CIS-A2K is hoping to revive the Konkani Wikipedia editing community and give birth to Konkani Wikipedia as a live Wikimedia project in the next couple of months. CIS-A2K has charted out a methodological work plan to achieve this and more.

Copyright notes: "Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC license", "Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0", "Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project 08" by Nitika Tandon, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-vishwakosh-encyclopedia-released-under-free-license

Accessibility

anirudh — 2013-12-06T07:09:44Z

In the current day scenario, it would be impossible for anyone to conceive of a world without the internet. From being the easiest source of news and information to becoming the medium for communications ranging from personal to commercial, to becoming a place for social connectivity and virtual hangouts, the internet has been woven into the fabric of general society.

While the internet seems to be a one-stop shop for all solutions, persons with disabilities find themselves excluded from it due to their inability to either see the screen, use the mouse or keyboard, inability to access content or unfriendly user interface as many of the websites can still be navigated only by using a mouse, most of the audio visuals are not captioned for the use of persons with hearing impairment and web developers use graphics instead of using text, making them unreadable for screen reader users. The internet, however, is a most convenient medium for persons with disabilities as it has made it possible for them to independently access information, transactions and entertainment without having to wait for someone to provide them with the same. While discussing the reach and power of the internet, accessibility is one of the topics that need to be addressed. Even though there are many measures for accessibility currently available, they are not being addressed and worked on aggressively to bridge the gap. In the digital age where the internet is ubiquitous and a platform where more and more economic activity is happening, the lack of initiative and accessibility policy is leading to exclusion.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is a measure of the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability as effectively as it can be used by a person without that disability.[1]

For example, an elevator can be fitted with audio outputs and buttons that also have Braille notations, thus making it possible for persons with visual impairment to use it on their own. Similarly, buildings and public places can be built with ramps along with stairs, making it possible for persons using wheel chairs to access them. When a product or service is created such that it is completely usable by persons with disabilities without external support, the product or service is called accessible. In circumstances when only some of the features are usable for persons with disabilities, or when the product or service is usable by persons with certain types of disabilities, while it is not usable for persons with other types of disabilities, they are termed as partially inaccessible.

The Need for Accessibility

Over a billion of the world’s population has some form of disability. They are the world’s largest minority. This figure is on a constant increase due to increase in the population as well as the medical advances that have decreased mortality due to old age. Studies show that the world’s population is increasingly becoming older and at least one billion people belong to the older aged category. It is expected that older people may acquire certain disabilities due to age related conditions. Making resources and information accessible to persons with disabilities is of great importance in this scenario as more and more people will start requiring accessibility.

As per the World Bank estimates included in the 2011 “World Report on Disability”, 20 % of the poorest people in the world are disabled and occupy the most marginalized and disadvantaged sectors of society. Furthermore, due to discrimination or incapacity to perform certain work, people living with disabilities have a difficult time finding employment, with unemployment rates reaching 80% for disabled people in the working age group.[2]

Persons with disabilities are experiencing a lack of access to technologies due to visual, hearing, mental, and/or other impairments that make it difficult to operate various devices. Other groups facing accessibility issues are illiterate and elderly populations. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) study in 2010, there are 796 million adults in the world that are illiterate, most of whom reside in the developing world.[3] This population faces barriers to text based communication. Elderly persons are also marginalized from access to technologies much the same way as persons with disabilities due to problems of physical access and marginalization.[4]

It is these groups that would most benefit from technological innovations and solutions that can empower and enhance societal inclusion and participation through providing access to knowledge and information, a medium to make one’s voice heard, as well as access to business and administrative processes within the state.[5]

International and Regional Frameworks on Accessibility and Development

Beginning in the 1990’s, accessibility concerning people with disabilities has been prioritized within the global policy framework. The United Nations General Assembly recognized the importance of providing equal opportunities for disabled individuals in the context of development. In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted the Standard Rules on Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. Along with this measure, a five-year review and appraisal of the World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons (1982) was initiated in 1997, 2002 and 2007.

Access to ICT’s is essential for full citizen participation in all the aspects of society and is increasingly becoming essential for the achievement of many development goals. The Biwako Millennium Framework (BMF) and Biwako plus Five, which cover Asia and the Pacific region, have made ICT accessibility one of the seven priority areas as included in its regional policy frameworks adopted in 2003 and 2007 respectively. Under these frameworks, many initiatives to increase ICT accessibility and promote equitable development for persons with disabilities throughout the region have been undertaken.

The global recognition of the right of people living with disabilities to partake fully in all aspects of society, access to ICT’s being an integral part of this right, was further advanced with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. The Convention entered into force in 2008.[6]

Important Points from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Article 1 of the convention defines who is included in the UN category of persons with disabilities, stating that "Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others."[7]

The first section of Article 9, which outlines accessibility priorities of the convention, puts responsibility on the state to ensure that persons with disabilities, along with other essential services and systems, have equal access to "information, communications and other services, including electronic services and emergency services". Section 2 of the article further puts onus on private entities that offer facilities and services to the public to make them accessible to disabled members of the public. Access to information, information technologies and systems, in particular the internet, is also included in this section.[8]

Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information is covered under Article 21 of the convention. The section recognizes that the said freedoms begin with access to appropriate mediums of communication. Information intended for the general public must be accessible to persons with disabilities through accessible formats and technologies in a “timely manner and without additional cost”. The mass media, including internet content providers, have the responsibility to ensure that their services are accessible to all members of society.[9]

Accessibility Policies in India

In India, about 60 million people are disabled and 42.5% of them are women while 75% of people with disabilities come from rural areas. In India, there is a confluence of barriers to accessibility with inaccessible and unaffordable technologies, inaccessible websites and unsupportive laws.

The right to full participation in society and equality of disabled individuals in India was recognized through the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation) Act which was enacted in India in 1995. India is also a signatory to both UNCRPD (2006) and Biwako Millennium framework towards an Inclusive, Barrier-free and Rights-based Society for Persons with Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific (2002).[10]

While there is no specific legislation in India which ensures the right of disabled persons to access ICT’s, The National Telecom Policy 2011 strategizes the need to recognize "telecom and broadband connectivity as a basic necessity like education and health and work towards ‘Right to Broadband’."[11]

The need for accessibility – both in the physical environment and in the use of information technology – is accentuated by the increase in consumption among the general public. As more and more persons with disabilities start utilising public marketplaces, products and services, a demand is generated to make these accessible to be able to reach out to a group of untapped consumers.

This holds true also for the internet. The penetration of the internet has caused many businesses to offer their products and services through the online medium in order to gain a longer reach. However, a 2003 survey on the impact of disabilities on computer technology conducted by Forrester Research found that: approximately one in four (25%) computer users have a visual difficulty or impairment; nearly one in four (24%) computer users have a dexterity difficulty or impairment; one in five (20%) computer users have a hearing difficulty or impairment; and about 16% of computer users have a cognitive difficulty or impairment. It becomes imperative for organisations offering their businesses online to make their facilities accessible to persons with disabilities to be able to tap into a large base of potential consumers.

Key Concepts

While making a case for accessibility and stressing the importance of making all products and services open to the public accessible to persons with disabilities, it is of great importance to understand some of the key concepts attached to accessibility.

Universal design: It is simply a technique of designing a product or service in such a way that it is equally usable by persons with disabilities as well as persons without disabilities. Universal design eliminates the need to create multiple products or services to cater to the same requirement of people belonging to different categories. This is highly useful in not only creating accessible systems, but also curtailing expenses and reducing redundant efforts.

For example, public transport systems such as buses and trains can be modelled keeping in mind wheel chair users. Buses may be created with ramps such that a wheel chair user is able to board and alight from the bus without any inconvenience. Similarly, trains can be constructed such that the door is on the same level with the platform and the door is wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair to enable passengers using wheelchairs to be able to enjoy the public services on par with other passengers.

Reasonable Accommodation: This is defined as the changes and modifications that can be made to a place, system or a process so as to enable persons with disabilities to enjoy the facilities provided without causing undue hardship to the provider of the facilities or to the other users. This could be in the form of changes to the physical environment to accommodate the independent mobility needs of persons with disabilities, or modification in the procedure of performing a task to ensure that a person with disability is able to enjoy equal opportunities.

An example of this would be an organisation employing persons with visual impairment providing them with screen reader software to enable them to work productively. Likewise, employees with disabilities could be granted extra leave in addition to their regular days of leave for attending health care sessions or training camps related to managing their disabilities.

Accessibility to the Physical Environment

One of the major requirements of physical accessibility is the availability of a barrier free environment for persons with disabilities to experience equal opportunities. This includes constructing new buildings and modifying old buildings and other public places with ramps, lifts and accessible signages for persons with disabilities. Accessible physical environment also includes transports and transport systems as well as roads being made accessible for persons with disabilities. This could be done by constructing roads with properly defined sidewalks, ramps at proper intervals for wheelchair users, engraved zebra crossings, beeps at traffic signals and accessible signages at road directions. Public transports such as buses, trains and other applicable options could be modified to allow persons with disabilities including wheelchair users to enter and exit them comfortably through ramps, broad doorways, etc. Places such as railway stations, airports and bus stations should be made accessible by provision of ramps, lifts, accessible signages and accessible enquiry services.

E-accessibility

For the ease of understanding, Persons with Disabilities (PWD) are broadly categorized as:

Persons with visual impairment – includes people with blindness, low vision and colour blindness
Persons with hearing impaired – includes persons with deafness and various degrees of hardness of hearing
Persons with motor disabilities – includes inability to use a mouse, slow response time and limited fine motor control
Persons with cognitive disabilities – includes learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information.

Contrary to common belief, adapting the user interface, content or designing of the internet to suit the needs of users with disabilities is a fairly uncomplicated process that can be managed even while retaining the look and feel of a regular webpage. Also, adaptations benefit not just persons with disabilities but other users also as everyone enjoys well organised content, easy navigation and clear illustrations. Videos with captions benefit not just people with hearing impairments but can also be beneficial to those watching the video without audio or those who find it difficult to follow the accent or voice of the narrator.

Assistive Technology to Aid Accessibility

Assistive Technology has made it possible for persons with disabilities to operate and utilise products and services along with other users without disabilities. To enable universal accessibility, it is important to recognise the key role played by assistive technology and create products and services such that persons using assistive technology are able to make equal use of the facilities provided.

Briefly explained below are some of the technological and non technological solutions that are being utilised by users with disabilities to access the web.[12]

Vision

Problem: For blind and visually impaired people, visual data is not accessible. Therefore, they require audio based solutions, high contrast, magnification and the like. These technologies come in the form of hardware and software.

Hardware
Refreshable Braille Display: This is an electro-mechanical device that displays text outputs while using a computer. It can be used along with speech synthesizers or on its own.

Mobile Features
Screen Readers: These are used by persons with visual impairment. Screen readers are softwares that convert text into synthesized speech, enabling users to listen to the web content. They make it possible for users to access information and navigate through the web by listening and responding to the audio signals. Some of the popular screen readers are JAWS, NVDA, Window Eyes and Home Page Reader.

Software
Screen Magnifiers: These are used by persons who have low vision. This technology enables users with low vision to zoom in on a small portion of the screen and magnify the content so as to be able to read it clearly. Some of the popular screen magnifiers are ZoomText and Magic.

Mobile Features
Tactile Markers: These markers allow the users to orient themselves on the keypad which includes things like a raised dot on number 5 for navigation.

Audible cues: These are specific sounds that indicate things like low battery, caller waiting or missed calls.

Apps
Look Tell Money Reader: This app immediately recognises the currency and speaks the denomination enabling persons with visual impairment to use money quickly. The app supports 21 currencies including the US Dollar, Australian Dollar, Bahraini Dinar, Brazilian Real, Belarusian Ruble, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro, Hungarian Forint, Israeli Shekel, Indian Rupee, Japanese Yen, Kuwaiti Dinar, Mexican Peso, New Zealand Dollar, Polish Zloty, Russian Ruble, Saudi Arabian Riyal, Singapore Dollar, and United Arab Emirates Dirham. The app does not require an internet connection and is available for IPhone 5, 4S, 4, 3GS, IPod Touch 4th Gen, IPad 2 & 3 and Mac OS X.[14]

Hearing

Problem: Those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can’t communicate via telephone or hear automated electronic messages.

Technologies:

Assistive listening devices (ALD): They amplify audio output from other devices like the TV or radio to hear clearly in environments.
Teletext: This offers a range of text based information.
Hearing loop systems: This uses electromagnetic energy to transmit sound. It can be worn on the head like a headpiece.
Mobile Features:
Vibrating Alerts[15]
Visual or tactile indicators on the keypad: Lights or vibrations after actions have been performed or buttons being pushed is a useful indicator.
Captioning: Some phones support closed captioning, open captioning and subtitles for videos.
Apps:
MobileSign: This is a British sign language lexicon that provides information on more than 4000 signs. It is available on both Google Play and Apple Store and is a very useful tool for communication for persons with hearing impairment.[16]
ASL Dictionary: This is an American Sign Language dictionary with more than 4800 signs. The app allows the videos to be slowed down and looped for easier learning. It also has signs for common phrases, idioms and symbols.
My Smart Hands – Baby sign language dictionary: This app has been designed for parents of children with hearing impairment. This app has more than 300 videos of the most common signs for children with verbal description of the motion to ensure that the parent is signing correctly.
Tap Tap: This app is designed to vibrate and flash whenever there is any sound. It has been particularly created for persons with hearing impairment as it would alert them to important sounds in their surrounding such as sudden screaming and shouting or the buzz of the smoke alarm.[17]

Motor Disability

Problem:[18] People who have no or diminished motor capacity will not be able to press buttons or physically navigate through most technology.

Technologies:

Mouth Stick: Though not a technological device, a mouth stick is one of the most popular devices used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating a keyboard. A mouth stick is a hard stick that is held in the mouth by the user and used to type on a keyboard. Some users who have better control on their mouth sticks can also use it to manipulate a track ball mouse.
Head Wand: This device is similar to the mouth stick and is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating keyboard or mouse. The head wand is strapped to the head and the person moves his or her head to type on the keyboard or navigate through web documents.
Single Switch Access: People who have very limited mobility use this type of device. If a person can move only the head, for example, a switch could be placed to the side of the head that would allow the person to click it with head movements. This clicking action is usually interpreted by special software on the computer, allowing the user to navigate through the operating system, web pages, and other environments. Some software facilitates the typing of words by using an auto-complete feature that tries to guess what the person is typing, and allowing the person to choose between the words that it guesses.
Sip and Puff Switch: Similar in functionality to the single switch described above, sip and puff switches are able to interpret the user's breath actions as on/off signals, and can be used for a variety of purposes, from controlling a wheelchair to navigating a computer. The hardware can be combined with software that extends the functionality of this simple device for more sophisticated applications.
Oversized Trackball Mouse: A trackball mouse is not necessarily an assistive technology—some people without disabilities simply prefer it to the standard mouse—but it is often easier for a person with a motor disability to operate than a standard mouse. Someone may, for example, use a trackball mouse in conjunction with a head wand or mouth stick. It is relatively easy to manipulate a trackball with these devices and much harder to manipulate a standard mouse. Someone with tremors in the hands may also find this kind of mouse more useful because once the person moves the mouse cursor to the right location, there is less danger of accidentally moving the cursor while trying to click on the mouse button. A person with tremors in the hands could also manipulate the trackball mouse with a foot, if there is enough motor control in the feet.
Adaptive Keyboard: In cases where a person does not have reliable muscle control in the hands for precision movements, an adaptive keyboard can be useful. Some adaptive keyboards have raised areas in between the keys, rather than lowered areas, to allow the person to first place the hand down on the keyboard, then slide the finger into the correct key. A person with tremors, or spastic movements could benefit from this type of keyboard. Keyboard overlays are also available as an adaptation to standard keyboards, which achieve the same results. In some cases, adaptive keyboards come with specialized software with word-completion technology, allowing the person to type with fewer keystrokes, since typing can be rather laborious and slow otherwise.
Eye Tracking: Eye tracking devices can be a powerful alternative for individuals with no control, or only limited control, over their hand movements. The device follows the movement of the eyes and allows the person to navigate through the web with only eye movements. Special software allows the person to type, and may include word-completion technology to speed up the process. These systems can be expensive—usually in the thousands of US dollars—so they are less common than the less sophisticated devices, such as mouth sticks and head wands.
Voice Recognition: This software is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands to type or navigate through the web using a keyboard. This software allows a person to control a computer through speech.
Apps:
Wheelcrowd: This application helps in searching for wheelchair accessible places such as restaurants, facilities etc. around a neighbourhood. This application is available for both IPhone and Android users. This application is currently developed to provide information in Germany.[19]
City Rollers: This free app is specifically made for wheelchair users to assist in navigating through cities on wheels. It allows users to locate, add and rate important places such as rest rooms, public transportation, restaurants and wheelchair supply and repair shops. Version 1.0 of this app provides support for select American cities. It is compatible with IPhone.
Fast Mall: This free app provides directions to wheelchair accessible routes in malls especially to elevators and rest rooms in malls and shopping districts. It functions even while offline. It is optimised for IPhone 3 and above.
Local Eats: Upon keying in the location, this free app provides information on the local restaurants and indicates whether they are wheelchair accessible. This is optimised for IPhone.[20]

Cognition

Problem: People with cognitive disabilities find it difficult to navigate through normal functions of technologies and hence need technologies that are simpler to compensate for things like diminished analytical skills, reading skills etc.

Technologies:[21]

Predictive text: This makes it easier to compose messages.
Prompting: External cueing systems are useful for people with memory and organization problems as it prompts the next steps of a task and send reminders as in the case of built-in schedule reminders

E-Governance

In 2007, India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). The convention says that “State Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities, access on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including ICTs and systems and to other facilities and services open or provided to the public.” When a party to a convention ratifies it, it means that they have to have domestic legislation or policy passed by the legislative body making it law within the country. Many countries who are signatories to the UNCRPD have also ratified it to ensure equality for those with disabilities. The Indian government as well has recognized that electronics and ICTs are important enabling mechanisms to mitigate the barriers faced by disabled people. In October 2013, the Union cabinet approved the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility[22] that among other things mainly recognizes the need to eradicate discrimination against the disabled and to foster equal access to electronics and ICTs. Various stakeholders including NGOs commented on it and the policy was prepared after incorporating them. The policy attempts to facilitate access to physically and mentally disabled persons as well as local language support thought universal access to electronics and ICT products. The plan of action for this policy is:

Creating awareness on universal electronics accessibility and universal design.
Capacity building and infrastructure development.
Setting up of model electronics and ICTs centres for providing training and demonstration to special educators and physically as well as mentally challenged persons.
Conducting research and development, use of innovation, ideas, technology etc. whether indigenous or outsourced from abroad.
Developing programme and schemes with greater emphasis for differently abled women/children.
Developing procurement guidelines for electronics and ICTs for accessibility and assistive needs.

Under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, there is a Department of Disability Affairs. In 1995, the Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation Act[23] (a.k.a The Persons with Disability Act) was passed as one of the Acts under this department. The Act calls for the education, employment, creation of a barrier free environment, social security and other areas of discrimination for the disabled.

It provides for the evolution of policy in that directly benefits people with disabilities.
It calls for the implementation of the laws and policies of the Act.
It also calls for monitoring the implementation process and the redressal of grievances.

As we can see, there is a dearth of Acts and legislations relating to accessibility in India when compared to other countries in the west and even Asia. It is an even more unfortunate state of affairs that the Acts that are already in place are still not being implemented to the full effect. Even the participation of industries is lacking in terms of web accessibility. On a scale of 10, with 10 being the high quality accessibility, the following chart shows examples of industrial efforts in this matter.


Above: Participation from some prominent companies like TCS, Infosys, Yahoo, etc.

[24]

Websites

The age of the internet has had many unintended consequences in the field of accessibility and most of them have been in terms of information dissemination. There have also been intentional consequences in terms of web based services that help serve the disabled communities. In terms of general services, the internet opens windows for people in professional, educational, consumer, economic and government service aspects. In the social sphere, there is the ability to do social networking, form interest groups, video and text communication. In order for these avenues of living to be accessible to disabled people at the same level changes have to be made in various ICTs so that they accessible when they are released. The guiding principle is that if every ICT or service is made inherently accessible, then no changes need to be made specifically for PWDs. When this isn’t possible, then reasonable accommodation has to be made. When adaptations are required, there are third party accessibility softwares that have to be used. According to the ITU, websites, as the theatres of accessibility have a greater socio-economic and educational impact than any other ICT with the exception of mobile phones for independent living.[25] It is also easy to make websites inherently accessible so there is a great potential for accessibility here.

The different disabilities require different technologies to facilitate access to the internet. People with visual impairments could use a range of technologies from a screen reader, screen magnifier to glasses. People with motor impairments use one handed key boards and the deaf can use cochlear implants. However, the main space for accessible design has to be the websites themselves.

User Interface and Design Considerations for Better Accessibility

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) brought out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) covers a wide range of recommendations to make the web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movements, speech disabilities, photo sensitivity and combinations of these.[26]

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines can be broadly categorised as:

Perceivable:

Provide text alternatives for any non text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, Braille, speech, symbols or simpler language
Provide alternatives for time-based media
Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout) without losing information or structure
Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.
Operable:
Make all functionality available from a keyboard
Provide users enough time to read and use content
Do not design content in a way known to cause seizures
Provide ways to help users navigate, find content and determine where they are understandable:
Make text content readable and understandable
Make web pages appear and operate in predictable ways
Help users avoid and correct mistakes
Robust:
Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents including assistive technologies.

Here is an example of how the WCAG standards of accessible websites has been applied in various countries:

Criteria	US	EU	Korea	Philippines	Australia	Thailand
Type of Policy	Legislation	Council Resolution + Action Plan	Legislation	Working group currently formulating policy	Legislation + Advisory Notes	Policy + guidelines
Effective From	1998, 2010	2002	2007	N/A	1992, 2002, 2010	Not available
Scope of Coverage	Web and other infrastructure as well	Includes other electronic infrastructure	Web and other infrastructure as well	N/A	General legislation with web specific advisory notes	Web accessibility guidelines
Compliance with WCAG	Partly	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	Partially compliant with WCAG 1.0s
Applicability	Only Federal Department and related agencies	Public Sector Websites of the Member States	Both private and public sector gradually by 2015 as per the current roadmap	N/A	Any individual/ organization creating a web page (Government & Private)	Guidelines targeted at both the private and public sectors
Signatory to UNCRPD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, signed and ratified	Yes and also signed and ratified the optional protocol	Yes, signed and ratified

Accessibility of Content

Accessible content is the most vital aspect of e-accessibility. Content that is present directly on the web and that is shared electronically need to be accessible to persons with various disabilities and thus with varying accessibility requirements.

Screen reader users, for example, would not be able to access content in graphical or image format. This is also true for documents in pdf formats as not all content in pdf is accessible through screen readers. While pdf documents that are tagged are accessible through screen readers, those documents that are structured, unstructured or secured are still inaccessible. Document formats that are accessible are listed below:

HTML
MS Word Document
Text Document
Daisy
Epub
Pdf

Content in audio format is inaccessible to persons with hearing impaired. This applies to not only audio files, but also to videos as they usually are accompanied by audio outputs. Additionally, videos are also inaccessible to persons with visual impairment. In order to make audio files and videos universally accessible, videos should be accompanied with narration while both audio files and videos should have captions and sub titles.

A critical step that needs to be taken to make content accessible is to formulate a binding policy that would require all web content developers to ensure accessibility of their content. A good example of this would be the enactment of the Copyright Act, as the various provisions under it made it possible for printed books to be converted into accessible format for persons with print impairment. This in turn made it possible for millions of people to be able to access information that had remained inaccessible before. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) agreed on a Treaty for the Visually Impaired that aims at making millions of printed books and other material available to persons with print impairment by converting them to alternate accessible formats.

In order to make it compulsory for web developers in India to design websites that comply with the requirements for e-accessibility, there is a need to put in place a policy that would mandate strict adherence to norms. The Government of India, through the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, set up a process to formulate a national policy to ensure accessibility of websites and ICT products and services In August 2009. This policy requires that all government websites comply with WCAG 2.0 and with other international accessibility standards for all electronic information and products and services delivery. However, a study conducted by CIS in August 2012 in which 7800 websites were tested, it was found that close to 25% of the websites did not open. Almost all the remaining websites had accessibility issues. The study also highlighted shortcomings of many websites to meet the set accessibility requirements.

Access to physical environment and information is not a privilege but a right. The national policy is the need of the hour, one that is likely to make adherence to accessibility standards a compulsory requirement and in turn make the internet more accessible for persons with disabilities.

As we have seen, accessibility stretches out like a universe and for the purpose of brevity; we will be concentrating on accessibility in the context of ICTs. More specifically, we will be looking at the electronic infrastructure that is most ubiquitous and hence automatically become the objects of accessibility concerns. This will include websites from various interfaces like mobile phones and computers and television. Before we begin looking at the particular technologies, let us look at the administrators and ministries that are responsible for helping the disabled.

Government Websites

Policies like the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 coming forth from the government are attempting to completely transition from manual to electronic delivery of services. In the implementation of all the e-governance goals of the Indian government, website inaccessibility is one of the biggest barriers. In India, there are many groups that don’t are usually marginalized in the mainstream of websites like the illiterate, rural, only fluent in vernacular or the many disabled and website design by the government becomes crucial in the actuation of its services and a marker for the efficacy of its governance. Being an essential interface between the government and its citizenry, websites thus become the lowest hanging fruit in attaining a better democracy. It is rather unfortunate, therefore that when a study was conducted testing 7800 government websites, 1985 of them didn’t even open. [28] Most of the remaining 5815 websites has some accessibility problem. This shows that the government has a long way to go before it can claim to provide services online because even if the services are being shifted, they are not being used by many marginalized demographics in the country due to accessibility issues with the websites themselves.

Mobile Devices

In the gallery of ICTs we have discussed mobile phones are the most crucial to persons with disabilities for independent living, which is the cornerstone of accessibility. At a basic level, the ability to make phone calls and send SMSs ensures that emergency services, personal aides and family members are merely a few buttons away. Added to this, the pervasiveness of mobile phones has made it the most ubiquitous ICT platform in the world with more than 4 billion subscribers. The potential of mobiles goes deeper with the advent of smart phones which can be used to aid the physical, sensory and cognitive needs of the disabled. Hearing aid compatibility is starting to become a mandate in many countries in smart phones like the FCC HAC mandate in the U.S.[29] There are screen readers built into mobile phones along with adjustable font settings, predictive text and voice recognizers that can make mobile phones more accessible.[30] The main feature of a mobile phone that increases independence is the fact that it is small and portable unlike a laptop and can be accessed quickly and from anywhere in the network. Many accessibility technologies are high cost and cumbersome to handle physically but mobile phones are often operator-subsidized, easily customizable and much cheaper than computers. In the current app market, many phones come with built-in accessibility systems and easily downloadable apps. The W3C has a set of standards called Mobile Web Application Best Practices.[31] The goal of these standards is to aid in the development of rich and dynamic mobile web applications by listing out the relevant engineering practices that enable a better user experience and warn against some practices that may be counterproductive or even harmful.

In the evolution of mobile accessibility consciousness, there have been three major factors:

The increased processing power coupled with creative software has lead to useful user interfaces with features like voice recognition or text to speech.
An increased effort on the part of regulators, activists and users to rectify hearing aid compatibility and visually inaccessible handsets.
In many wireless markets that are saturated, the realization has dawned on operators that the disabled and elderly represent an untapped market.

Television and Radio

In the past two decades, the newer ICTs like mobiles and computers have become the primary means of social inclusion and accessibility. However, the older ICTs like TV and radio are not yet obsolete and can play an important role in accessibility. Traditionally, the radio has been an indispensible source of information for the visually impaired and now, the digital radio remains relevant in keeping the visually impaired informed. Whatever the type of radio being used, the listener has to navigate through a range of hardware (displays, dials and buttons) and software (menus, schedule guides, etc) which makes it challenging to use for persons with disabilities. People with visual impairments will probably need labelled buttons that can be read through touch, display settings that can increase the size and different brightness options. People who use internet or mobile radio will need the applications or websites to be compatible with the other assistive hardware and software that they use for along with their computers or mobile devices.[32] The Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, UK (RICA) conducted a consumer study and identified the radio model ‘Roberts RD-8BW Duet’ as user friendly for blind and partially sighted persons.[33]

It has a good reception; it has separate rotary dials, 5 large illuminated presser buttons and a large display.

Even the TV and traditional broadcasting remains relevant as they provide visual, audio and textual information through closed captioning. Digital TV allows for the option of sign language interpretation and voice over audio channels in the signals that are broadcasted. The internet is, however, usurping many of the functions of the TV and the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is an example of that. This is a system through which traditional television services are delivered using the internet instead of the old terrestrial, satellite signal or cable television formats. Time shifted television (catch up TV) and video on demand (VOD) are examples of IPTVs. To make this clear, for cable, satellite/ terrestrial television, the equipments involved are televisions, a separate receiver called ‘set-top box’ is used sometimes and a remote control. For internet or mobile television, the equipments involved are PCs or mobiles with internet access. Here as well, like in the case of radios, regardless of the type of television being used, there needs to be a constant engagement with hardware ( screens, buttons, cables) and software (menus, programme guides, pause/rewind function etc) which can prove difficult for people with sensory and physical disabilities. Accessible equipment is required to use the television itself which is a huge barrier. The second layer of accessibility comes from the content of the television programmes which remain opaque to the visually or hearing impaired. Captions, audio descriptions of video content and sign language are necessary in order to make the content accessible. The ITU-T has been spearheading the standardization in IPTV and has worked out some standards for IPTV accessibility.

Secure
Reliable
Accessible
Open
Green
Global
Interoperable

Additional Reading

Mobile Web Application Best Practices: http://www.w3.org/TR/mwabp/

[1]. http://bit.ly/19kYbjc

[2]. http://bit.ly/1cprnKn

[3]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Adult and Youth Literacy: Global Trends In Gender Parity, UIS Fact Sheet, September 2010, No. 3.

[4]. http://bit.ly/ITXg3i

[5]. Accessibility in Policy Making-need for an International Perspective by Nirmita Narasimhan, see http://bit.ly/1hBBujb

[6]. http://bit.ly/1bLI9VG

[7]. http://bit.ly/1d0wrCY

[8]. http://bit.ly/1gJ1aXZ

[9]. http://bit.ly/ITXTtM

[10]. See note 5 above.

[11]. http://bit.ly/18H95p6

[12]. http://bit.ly/IH4sif

[13]. See more at http://bit.ly/1gJ1rKI

[14]. See more at http://bit.ly/1hBBVKi

[15]. See reference 13.

[16]. See more at http://bit.ly/1f1Knih

[17]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBoHt

[18]. See reference 13.

[19]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYI5C

[20]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb27F

[21]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYRpU

[22]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLJ8VT

[23]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBGOG

[24]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUpvZP

[25]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[26]. http://bit.ly/1bkLuov

[27]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUqh91

[28]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLaVP

[29]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[30]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLKD1

[31]. See more at http://bit.ly/19l18R0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/accessibility

Internet Governance Forum

anirudh — 2013-12-03T10:29:30Z

Anirudh Sridhar provides an analysis of the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), its structure, and the importance of IGF in this unit.

Introduction

IGF can be best described as the Forum which brings "people together from various stakeholder groups as equals, in discussions on public policy issues relating to the Internet. While there is no negotiated outcome, the IGF informs and inspires those with policy-making power in both the public and private sectors. At their annual meeting delegates discuss, exchange information and share good practices with each other. The IGF facilitates a common understanding of how to maximize internet opportunities and address risks and challenges that arise.

The IGF is also a space that gives developing countries the same opportunity as wealthier nations to engage in the debate on Internet Governance and to facilitate their participation in existing institutions and arrangements. Ultimately, the involvement of all stakeholders, from developed as well as developing countries, is necessary for the future development of the Internet."[1]

Creation of IGF

As it has been mentioned, IGF was first conceived in the Tunis Agenda. Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda laid the foundation of IGF. Article 72 lays down the mandate of the IGF. It asks the UN Secretary General to put in place an open and inclusive process and to convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue which would be known as IGF.

Past IGFs

The first IGF was organized in 2006 in Athens. Since then it has been held each year in various locations. In has been held in Rio de Janerio in 2007, Hyderabad in 2008, Sharm El Sheikh in 2009, Vilinius in 2010, Nairobi in 2011 and Baku in 2012. The IGF in 2013 is to be held in Bali.

Overarching themes at IGFs so far:

2006 and 2007 – Internet for development"
2008 – Internet for All
2009 – Internet Governance and creating opportunities for all
2010 – Developing the Future together
2011 – Internet as a Catalyst for Change: Access, Development, Freedoms and Innovation 2012 – "Internet Governance for Sustainable Human, Economic and Social Development".

The 2013 IGF has found strong support for two themes, "Building Bridges" and "Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth, Development and Human Rights".

Apart from the over-arching themes, it focuses on certain themes which have been discussed across all the IGFs:

Human Rights/ Freedom of speech
Security, Cybercrimes
Spam
Data protection and privacy
Consumers Rights, Network Neutrality
Intellectual Property Rights
Development (issues related to digital divide)
Open Standards
Capacity Building
Issues related processes and principles
E-commerce and e-governance

Structure of the IGF

The Secretariat of the IGF is based in the United Nations. The main function of the IGF is to coordinate with and assist the work of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG). The MAG was first set up by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of UN in 2006. The main function of the MAG is to decide upon issues and themes which need to be addressed in each IGF. The MAG comprises of representation from all stakeholders and all regions.

The forum organizes and accommodates plenary sessions, workshops, open forums and best practices forums.

Dynamic Coalitions: The concept of dynamic coalitions was conceived in the first IGF in Athens, which are informal and issue-specific. It comprises of members from different stake holder groups. Currently there are ten active dynamic coalitions, for example, Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, Internet Rights and Principles, and Child Online Safety, etc.

Importance of IGF

One of the main critiques of the IGF is that the outcomes of the IGF do not have any binding effect on the participating governments, industry, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations. But such a process is said to discard the involvement of multi-stakeholder through use of coercive power which is the main feature of government regulation. In this regard, Jeremy Malcolm notes:

"The IGF’s output is explicitly “non-binding,” which means that the participation of states in the IGF process does not involve the use of coercive power as is a typical feature of government regulation. In fact since the process is to be “multilateral, multi-stakeholder, democratic and transparent” with “full involvement” of “all stakeholders involved in this process,” governments do not, at least in principle, enjoy any position of pre-eminence in policy formation through the IGF. Neither should they, if the IGF’s legitimacy and effectiveness are to be assured."[2]

[1]. What is Internet Governance Forun available at http://bit.ly/IIwXNu.

[2]. Jeremy Malcolm, Multi-stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum, Terminus Press, 2008 at pp. 3.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-governance-forum

Internet Engineering Task Force

anirudh — 2013-12-01T02:34:23Z

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open standards body with no requirements for membership and does not have a formal membership process either.

It is responsible for developing and promoting Internet Standards. Internet Standards are technological specifications which are applicable to the internet and internet access. The IETF also closely works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standard setting bodies. It mainly deals with the standards of the Internet Protocol suite (TCP/IP) which is a communication protocol used for the internet.

The mission of the IETF is to, "produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the internet in such a way as to make the internet work better."[1]

Structure

The IETF consists of working groups and informal discussion groups. The subject areas of the working group can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Applications
General Internet
Operations and Management,
Real-time Applications and Infrastructure,
Routing,
Security, and
Transport

The working groups are divided into, areas as mentioned above and they are managed by area directors.

IETF Standards Process

The process of developing Standards at the IETF looks simple but faces certain complications when put into practice.

A specification for a internet standards goes through a period of development followed by reviews by the community at large. Based upon the reviews and experiences, the specifications are revised and then the standards are adopted by an appropriate body after which it is published.

"In practice, the process is more complicated, due to (1) the difficulty of creating specifications of high technical quality; (2) the need to consider the interests of all of the affected parties; (3) the importance of establishing widespread community consensus; and (4) the difficulty of evaluating the utility of a particular specification for the internet community."[2]

The main goals of the Internet Standards Process are:

Technical Excellence;
Prior Implementation and Testing;
Clear, Concise, and Easily Understood Documentation;
Openness and Fairness; and
Timeliness[3]

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

W3C is a multi-stakeholder organization that involves groups from various sectors including multi nationals. W3C is also an international community dedicated to developing an open standard, "to ensure the long term growth of the web". It is led by the inventor of the web — Tim Berners-Lee.

The guiding principles of W3C"[4] are:

Web for All
The W3C recognizes the social value of the internet as it enables communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge. One of their main goals is to make available these benefits to all irrespective of the hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
Web on Everything
The second guiding principle is to ensure that all devices are able to access the web. With the proliferation of the mobile device and smart phones; it has become more important to ensure access to the web irrespective the type of device.
Web for Rich Interaction
The W3C Standards support and recognizes that the web was created as tool to share information and it has become more significant with the increasing demand for platforms such as Wikipedia and social networking platforms.
Web of Data and Services
Web is often viewed as a giant repository or data and information but it is also seen as a set of services which includes exchange of messages. The two views complement each other and how web is perceived depends on the application.
Web of Trust
Interaction on the web has increased and people ‘meet on the web’ and carry out commercial as well as social relationships. "W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence.""[5]

[1]. Mission Statement for the IETF available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt

[2]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[3]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[4].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

[5].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-engineering-task-force

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — November 2013

praskrishna — 2014-02-25T13:41:04Z

The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) newsletter for the month of November 2013:

CIS-A2K Narrative ReportThis narrative report captures the work done by the A2K program during the period of September 2012 to June 2013. It examines projects and activities and its impact and outcomes over a period of the initial Ten months of the Grant. This report will also inform CIS-A2K program’s strategy for the next one year to achieve the goals set out by its donor, Wikimedia Foundation, and goals listed in our Work Plans (which were developed in consultation with the Wikimedia community in India). Importantly, this Narrative Report is critical for the Wikimedia community in India, Global Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation to get a comprehensive overview of A2K’s work and to critically assess the A2K program’s eligibility for further support. The report compiled by by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi can be accessed at http://bit.ly/1dFyjpO.
► Announcements

CIS Signs MoU with Christ University, Bangalore (November 20, 2013): The Access to Knowledge team signed a MoU as part of which CIS-A2K and Christ University will impart Wikipedia education in Indian classrooms: http://bit.ly/1ehr8kz.
We are happy to share with you that Rahmanuddin Shaik has been selected for the role of "Community Communications Consultant" at CIS-A2K! Rahmanuddin is an active contributor on Wikimedia Commons, Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource: http://bit.ly/1bwrEu3.

►Articles

ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ನೆಟ್ಟ ಸಸಿಗೆ ಈಗ ಹತ್ತು ವರ್ಷ (by Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Kannada Prabha, November 1, 2013): http://bit.ly/17LOw4O. The article highlights 10 years of Kannada Wikipedia, the current status of the Kannada Wikipedia vis-a-vis number of articles, number of editors, active editors, and page views per month.
Train The Trainer Programme for Wikipedians (by Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, November 14, 2013):http://bit.ly/ILwLMr. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshane of DNA.

►Blog Entries

Train the Trainer Program (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18hjw0n.
Konkani Vishwakosh Under CC-BY-SA (by Nitika Tandon, November 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gnVV2z.

► Events Organised

Wikipedia Orientation Programme for MA Students (Christ University, Bangalore, November 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/ItxAtu. Syed Muzammiluddin was the trainer. Twenty students participated.

Wikipedia Orientation Programme for the Second Language Students (Christ University, Bangalore, November 12, 13, 16 and 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1bxsOYF. T. Vishnu Vardhan, Syed Muzammiluddin and Dr. U.B.Pavanaja were the trainers. About 1200 second language students participated in the programme.
Documentation and Wikipedia Contribution — A One Day Workshop (Kalinga Institute of Social Studies, Bhubaneswar, November 14, 2013). The workshop was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi: http://bit.ly/1fSvl1v.
Documentation and Wikipedia Workshop (Kalinga School of Management, Bhubaneswar, November 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/Imf0DV. Subhashish Panigrahi conducted the workshop.
Konknni Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Dalgado Konknni Akademi and CIS-A2K, Goa Central State Library, November 16 and 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fSwiH5.
Tenth Anniversary of Wikipedia (H N Multimedia Hall, National College, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1eJ6da9. Dr. U R Ananthamurthy, Prof. G. Venkatasubbiah and Ravi Hegde were the guests of honour. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
First Phase of Odia Wikipedia Workshop (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Bhubaneswar, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18doDer. Subhashish Panigrahi conducted the workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa, November 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fSAUwT. Nitika Tandon conducted the event.
Konkani Vishwakosh: Doubt Solving Session I (Goa Central State Library, November 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gnVV2z. Nitika Tandon conducted the session.
Konkani Vishwakosh: Doubt Solving Session II (Goa Central State Library, November 28, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gnVV2z. Nitika Tandon conducted the session.
Editing Sprint for Vishwakosh (Goa Central, State Library, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gnVV2z. Nitika Tandon conducted the event.

► Event Co-organised

The Relaunch of Creative Commons India (co-organised by Wikimedia India, Acharya Narendra Dev College and CIS, India Islamic Cultural Centre, November 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/HPxrAO. Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for Human Resource Development was the chief guest at the event.

► Event Participated In

Wikimedia Diversity Conference (organized by German Wikipedia Community, GLS Campus, Berlin): http://bit.ly/Ixr9W8. T. Vishnu Vardhan was a speaker at this event and made a presentation on the challenges and opportunities for the Wikimedia movement in India.

► Media Coverage CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Kannada Wikipedia and its Tenth Anniversary (RadioCity, November 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dHEwBI.
Indian Govt to Build Machine Translation System for 22 Indic Languages (by Brindaalakshmi, Medianama, November 14, 2013): http://bit.ly/J4qg7V. CIS MoU with Goa University is mentioned.
10th anniversary of Kannada wikipedia (by ND Shiva Kumar, The Times of India, November 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/IxqDr7.
Tenth Anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia (Udayavani, November 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1aFwqF1.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ಈಗ ದಶಮಾನೋತ್ಸವ. ಅದರ ಪ್ರಯುಕ್ತ ಒಂದು ಆಚರಣೆ (Avadhi Website, November 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/ImiBSy.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಗೆ 10, ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆ ಸಾಲದು: ಪ್ರೊ .ಜಿವಿ (OneindiaKannada, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/19blS17.
Tenth Anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia (Vijayavani, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b7exSa.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ದಶಮಾನೋತ್ಸವ ಸಂಭ್ರಮ (Prajavani, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hWtt9v.
ಕನ್ನಡದ ಆನ್‌ಲೈನ್ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ದುರ್ಬಲ (Vijaya Karnataka, November 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hWtsCy.
Panaji: DKA organizes two day Konkani Wikipedia workshop (Daijiworld, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1inoi03.

Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of six members, four based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi and Muzammiluddin Syed, one member Nitika Tandon in Delhi and one Advisor Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here (http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters). Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications at http://bit.ly/TOcXId.

About CIS
The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.
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Support Us
Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-november-2013