Centre for Internet and Society

dna exclusive: Geeks have a solution to digital surveillance in India: Cryptography

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T06:24:40Z

While you were thinking of what next to post on Twitter, the government has stealthily put an ambitious surveillance programme in place that tracks your every move in the digital world — through voice calls, SMS and MMS, GPRS, fax communications on landlines, video calls and emails.

The article by Joanna Lobo was published in DNA on July 7, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The programme, conceived in 2011, has now been brought under one umbrella referred to as the centralised monitoring system (CMS). It is the death of privacy.

But as concerned citizens argue for the need to formulate policies and laws to protect privacy, there's a simpler solution in sight for now: a CryptoParty.

At this 'party', an informal gathering of people, non-geeks can learn how to legally encrypt their digital communications and how to store data without the fear of anyone snooping in. Encryption is a process of encoding messages so that it can only be read by authorised parties.

What is it?
"A CryptoParty educates people in the domain of cryptography. It's usually about the basics: how to send encrypted email, how to protect your hardware and how to use free and open source software," says Satyakam Goswami, a free software consultant associated with the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), Delhi (remove this). Goswami was one of the 72 participants at the CryptoParty organised on Saturday at Institute of Informatics & Communication (IIC), Delhi University South Campus On June 30, a CryptoParty organised at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore had 30 people in attendance. "We were taught about the what, how and who is watching us. We were also taught how to encrypt emails, chat, video calls or instant messaging,” says Siddhart Prakash Rao, a computer science graduate and a free software and open source enthusiast who is about to pursue a Masters in Cryptography.

The topics may be a mouthful for non-geeks but CryptoParty advocates maintain that all this is taught in the simplest way possible. The choice of subject depends on the composition of the group — if it is a gathering of geeks, like at the Bangalore event, then the topics are more technical.

How can it help?
CryptoParties started in August 2012 by an Australian woman (who goes by the pseudonym Asher Wolf) after a conversation on Twitter about The Australian Parliament's new cybercrime bill that allowed law enforcement to ask Internet Service Providers to monitor and store data.
Attending a CryptoParty is a good way to learn how to overcome government snooping legally.

“Citizens should use encryption to safeguard their private communications against both corporations and the government. Encryption is one of the best ways to react to CMS along with increased civic vigilance and democratic questioning of our government and parliamentarians,” says Pranesh Prakash, policy director, CIS, and one of the frontrunners in the fight to formulate a policy to safeguard privacy in India.

"In India, people tend to be rather ignorant. They are not aware of the kind of surveillance they are subjected to once online. It's a lack of understanding," says Sumandro Chattapadhyay, a researcher with Sarai, a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Bernadette Langle, who also works at CIS has been instrumental in organising the handful of CryptoParties in the country. When dna spoke to her, she was on her way to Delhi after participating in the Bangalore event. Langle will also be part of a CryptoParty being planned for October in Mumbai. "Ten years ago, you had to be a geek to be able to encrypt and protect yourself online. Now, you need software and it's much easier," she says.

The advantage is that the privacy tactics taught at such parties is completely legal. All knowledge is in the public domain. “A government will only deny its citizens basic communications privacy if it is authoritarian,” says Pranesh. “So while it can try social engineering and other means to gain access to what you've encrypted, it simply cannot 'decode' it as long as you have chosen a strong pass phrase and keep that protected, or they create quantum computers capable of breaking your encryption.”

The CIS is currently working on revisions of the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013 with the objective of contributing to privacy legislation in India. Till that bill becomes an Act and till there's a better way to overcome needless government surveillance, attending a CryptoParty could possibly be the wisest solution for those concerned about privacy.

(For more details on CryptoParties, visit www.cryptoparty.in)

How to encrypt:
SMS: Make content secure by using software like TextSecure (Android) or CryptoSMS (Symbian). However, SMS metadata (who you are sending the message to and at what time) can still be tracked.

Instead of Whatsapp, install Jabbir and add off the record encryption.

For email, you can use OpenPGP in conjunction with Thunderbird to encrypt mails you send from Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Live Mail accounts so that even Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can't read them

For web browsing, use a VPN (which will hide your traffic from your ISP), or Tor (which will help anonymise your traffic, but will slow down your connection slower).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/report-dna-july-7-2013-joanna-lobo-geeks-have-a-solution-to-digital-surveillance-in-india-cryptography

DNA Databases and Human Rights

praskrishna — 2012-09-17T05:39:06Z

Using DNA to trace people who are suspected of committing a crime has been a major advance in policing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/dna-databases-and-human-rights.pdf

DML 2013 Conference

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T09:48:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dml-2013-conference.pdf

Divergence between the GDPR and PDP Bill 2019

pallavi — 2020-02-21T13:05:08Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/divergence-between-the-gdpr-and-pdp-bill-2019

Distinguished Fellows

sunil — 2020-07-27T12:50:59Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is based in Chennai. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is based at UNU-MERIT at Maastricht. Hans Varghese Mathews is based in Bangalore. Shyam Ponappa is based in New Delhi. Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana is based in Bangalore and Mumbai.

Hans Varghese Mathews

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (known to friends as Arun) started his career as a research chemist, but found his calling in information science. In the past four decades, he has been a student of chemistry, a laboratory researcher (at the Central Electrochemical Research Institute and the Indian Institute of Science), an editor of scientific journals (at the Publications and Information Directorate of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Academy of Sciences), the secretary of a scholarly academy of sciences (IASc), a teacher of information science (at the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre), and a development researcher (at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras). While working with M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, he initiated the South-South Exchange Traveling Workshop to facilitate hands on cross-cultural learning for knowledge workers from Africa, Asia and Latin America engaged in ICT-enabled development.

Arun is on the editorial boards of six international refereed journals including Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, and Journal of Community Informatics; a member of the international advisory board of IICD, The Hague, a trustee of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, and a Trustee of the Voicing the Voiceless Foundation. Improving information access both for scientists and for the rural poor; scientometrics, ICT-enabled development and open access are among his current research interests.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is a researcher based in Maastricht. He is an Open Source Initiative board member, the founding international and managing editor of the peer-reviewed journal First Monday, and the Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT. He has undertaken several global, high-profile studies on Free Software. He is a jury member for Global Bangemann Challenge (now Stockholm Challenge Award), a prestigious prize awarded to IT projects with socio-economic impact by the mayor of Stockholm and founder member of the GII Internet Commerce Brain Trust. From 1995–1999, Rishab has worked as an editor at The Indian Techonomist, an analytical newsletter on Indian media and communications targeted at a global audience, an analyst and newsletter contributor for US-based Paul Kagan Associates, and a weekly columnist on Internet society (Electric Dreams). He still writes regularly, with over half a million words published in journals, newspapers and magazines worldwide, from PC Quest India to Wired Magazine, USA. From 2008, he heads the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT.

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow whose work is in the areas of broadband, telecommunications, and spectrum policy, from management, systems, and technology perspectives.

Beginning his career at the State Bank of India, he was a Senior Manager, Management Consulting Services, at Price Waterhouse in San Francisco, M&A Head for Citibank in India, and thereafter managed a partnership doing alliances, business strategy, and financial placements in New Delhi for major international and domestic clients. Subsequently, he was an independent consultant in India and abroad. His experience is in financial placements, M&A, and business strategy for clients in IT, telecommunications, power, oil/energy, airlines, biotechnology, banking/financial services, hotels, shipping, railroads, manufacturing, agri-business, law firms, and retail enterprises.

He has advised the government on public policy since 1990, primarily in telecommunications. As a columnist for the Business Standard, he writes on infrastructure and managing economic reforms (http://organizing-india.blogspot.com). He has an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA (History) and a BSc (Physics) from Madras Christian College."

Tejaswini Niranjana is presently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.

At CSCS (www.cscs.res.in), Tejaswini helped set up in 2001 an inter-disciplinary doctoral programme in Cultural Studies, and many of her Ph.D. students have brought Indian language materials into their research and writing. At TISS (www.tiss.edu), Tejaswini is incubating the Centre for Indian languages in Higher Education, which will anchor a multi-institutional programme for Indian languages in higher education, including production of new resources, curriculum strengthening, research training, digitisation and archiving. On the anvil is the creation at TISS of a digital hub for Indian language resources for tertiary education.

She is also Lead Researcher of the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Programme at CSCS (http://heira.in). HEIRA works towards sectoral transformation in higher education, working with private and public institutions to design and field-test new methods for curriculum development, teacher training and institutional change at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Tejaswini is co-author of a policy note on quality education in Indian languages, the recommendations of which are now part of the final 12^th Plan document (http://www.ugc.ac.in/ugcpdf/740315_12FYP.pdf).

Select publications are available from cscs.academia.edu. Her best-known book is Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). More recently, she published Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration across India and Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Tejaswini is the Adviser (since February 2013) to the 'Access to Knowledge' programme of CIS and will guide the A2K team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/people/distinguished-fellows

Dissent on Aadhaar: New book highlights limitations of ID project, legal and tech opposition to it

Admin — 2019-02-02T13:13:07Z

In 2010, a year after the UIDAI was constituted, three of its functionaries visited internationally-renowned developmental economist Professor Reetika Khera.

The article by Partha P Chakrabartty was published in First Post on February 2, 2019.

They were hoping to get her endorsement on how Aadhaar would prove ‘transformational’ for reducing corruption in social schemes like PDS and NREGA. Khera writes, ‘Upon reading their policy documents on PDS and NREGA, I was aghast because they betrayed a complete lack of understanding of the problem they were trying to address’. What had begun as a PR exercise by the UIDAI ended up creating one of its most acute critics. Professor Khera’s latest salvo, Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother, has just been published by Orient BlackSwan, and is on shelves now.

Dissent on Aadhaar, edited by Professor Khera, brings together in one volume an array of experts commenting on the universal ID project. Given its many facets, she has included Anumeha Yadav, a journalist, who has been tirelessly reporting on Aadhar from the field; economists, including the celebrated Jean Drèze; lawyers, including civil liberties expert Dr Usha Ramanathan; and technologists like Sunil Abraham, of Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Internet and Society. The book is rounded off by international experts comparing Aadhaar to digital/universal ID projects in other countries. The picture they paint is not rosy.

‘Dissent’ on Aadhaar might not seem new to us, the English-speaking population of India. We all remember the storm of tweets and memes when Aadhaar was declared mandatory for everything from bank accounts to a mobile phone connection. We also saw through the September 2018 Supreme Court verdict, where Aadhaar was ruled optional for opening a bank account, but secretly remained mandatory due to its link with the PAN card. While some of the themes mentioned in this book, like concerns over privacy, have filtered down to our conversations, the book reveals that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

Khera debunks the prevailing popular wisdom around Aadhaar in the opening chapters, sometimes even using the Government’s own data. Was Aadhaar necessary to create because there were many Indians without a legal ID? Aadhaar data says, only 0.03 percent of Aadhaar enrollments were by people without existing IDs, using the ‘introducer’ system. Were existing IDs compromised, necessitating an overhaul of our national ID systems? If so, how is it that those very compromised IDs were used to create the Aadhaar database? And what of the loopholes in the Aadhaar system, like cards for dogs and gods? These egregious pranks may have been caught, but what of less obvious aberrations?

Does Aadhaar prevent fraud? Here, Khera points out there are three kinds of fraud: identity fraud, eligibility fraud, and quantity fraud; Aadhaar only provides some measure of protection against the first. Khera’s previous studies have shown that the most prominent kind of fraud in India’s social schemes is quantity fraud. Even eligibility fraud, where citizens claim benefits reserved for others, cannot be checked by Aadhaar, as eligibility depends upon a separate set of documents.

Finally, does Aadhaar ease access to government schemes and benefits for the poorest? Here, what has seemed farcical quickly becomes tragic.

In a country where basic infrastructure in terms of electricity and mobile phone connections is poor, can a digital ID system like Aadhaar really ease the process of disbursement? Anumeha Yadav provides the on-ground reality — in Bhim Block, Rajsamand District, Rajasthan, 1,799 pensioners were declared dead because they failed to open Aadhaar-linked bank accounts in time. A door-to-door campaign conducted by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan found that 1,308 of these were actually alive, and had been denied their rightful pensions. Yadav quotes a Dainik Bhaskar estimate that 1 lakh of Rajasthan’s 2.97 lakh pensioners had been inaccurately declared dead.

If these ideas are so far off the mark, how did they come to take root in our minds? How come there was no meaningful opposition to prevent this Himalayan blunder? Khera quotes the father of Aadhaar himself, Nandan Nilekani, who outlined his three-point strategy to overwhelm opposition: Do it quickly, do it quietly, and build a coalition of powerful interests who will overpower any opposition.

Nilekani’s strategy worked beautifully. A damning 2011 Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance Report, which deemed UIDAI categorically unacceptable, was mostly ignored. The Rajya Sabha’s concerns and suggested amendments were circumvented by passing off the Aadhaar bill as a Money bill (requiring passage only in the Lok Sabha), even though its ambit was much wider than just allotment of financial resources. The Supreme Court itself had a lone dissenter, Justice Chandrachud, who published a note to that effect.

Opposition has not come just from activist, legal and parliamentary sources. Sunil Abraham, a technologist, speaks of the many alternatives UIDAI had to its present system of a centralised biometric database, and its many vulnerabilities, including the theft of data, and the difficulty of correcting input errors. An alternative would have been to have smart cards that stored encrypted biometric information on the card itself, instead of in a centralised database; a conjunction of card-and-fingerprint would make the system secure from identity fraud. Abraham warns of high-resolution cameras that can be used by governments and private interests to identify fingerprints even at a distance, for instance of protestors in a marching crowd.

But what happened when Abraham’s Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) published a report stating the Government had inadvertently leaked millions of identification numbers? The Government sent them several legal notices. A researcher from CIS also spoke of visits from officials from the Home Ministry and from the police. One policeman even asked the researcher, ‘How was that trip to Turkey?’, demonstrating the extent of their surveillance.

If Aadhaar was not created for all the things the UIDAI claimed, what was its true intent? We can guess from the way Aadhaar insiders, like ex-Chief Product Manager Vivek Raghavan, who ‘volunteered’ for Aadhaar between October 2010 and June 2013, went on to found Khosla Labs, with its for-profit Aadhaar Bridge product. When the Supreme Court struck down the sharing of Aadhaar data with private companies in its September 2018 judgment, private interests dropped their masks and have started campaigning for a reversal. Dr Usha Ramanathan covers this in her chapter, making sense of the new, hybrid public-private entity that UIDAI represented, and its consequences.

And what did the government get out of it? Considering how it used its existing might to harass CIS, can you imagine what its expanded capabilities with Aadhaar will achieve for anyone who critiques their functioning? And how many critics who see something wrong in policy or execution will hesitate before saying something for fear of persecution? This ‘chilling effect’ is already spreading — just speak to anyone who critiques the government, and how often they have been advised to stop doing so.

Many of the big battles when it comes to Aadhaar have already been lost. 1.2 billion people have yielded up their biometric information; Aadhaar, which had started off as voluntary, has become mandatory to access basic rights of citizenship, and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court; India has ignored best practices from other countries and lessons from other such attempts, and has therefore squandered a historic opportunity to do this digital ID right.

Far though this juggernaut has rolled, the experts in this book are still offering warnings; while there has been substantial harm already, especially to the rural poor and the elderly, the worst damage is yet to occur. While the State has power to gain from defending UIDAI, and private interests have millions in profits to reap, the scholars and activists in this book have no millions to make, and are indeed staking both their personal safety, and their professional reputations in putting forward a narrative that goes so far against the dominant one. I trust readers will give their thoroughly-researched essays a fair hearing.

The writer wishes to acknowledge the contribution of Prasun Chakrabartty in researching and clarifying this piece.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/first-post-partha-p-chakrabartty-february-2-2019-dissent-on-aadhaar

Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and Their Availability on FRAND Terms

praskrishna — 2016-04-27T15:28:22Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discussion-paper-on-standard-essential-patents-and-their-availability-on-frand-terms

Disconnected Network Disruptions

Admin — 2018-06-12T01:23:02Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/disconnected-network-disruptions

DIPP Comments

praskrishna — 2016-04-24T04:40:15Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dipp-comments.pdf

Digitize any Book in the Public Domain

subha — 2014-04-03T08:41:18Z

The article is about a mass scale digitization project for Kannada WikiSource by two Wikipedians.

This was originally published in Opensource.com on March 27, 2014.

A form of poetry in India called Vachana sahitya is part of the popular Indian language, Kannada. It evolved in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th as part of the religious Lingayatha movement. Since that time, more than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, have compiled over 11,000 Vachanas (verses).

21,000 of these verses were digitally published into 15 volumes, called Samagra Vachana Samputa, by the government of Karnataka. These volumes were then turned into a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya; this project was taken on by two Kannada Wikimedians, a Kannada linguist, and the author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy—to enrich the Kannada WikiSource. This team used Unicode, a standard of consistency for converting text (and code) into a new format.

Swamy was trying to access these poems, and was having trouble because it was in ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. We began writing scripts to make the Vachanas (poems) searchable by an index. But, in order to do that well, we had to build a platform for everyone to use: the linguistic researchers, students, and the public at large who are interested in reaching this literature.

Omshivaprakash, a Kannada Wikimedian, worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements, and chose the open source software tools to use. I was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, our repository, Vachana Sanchaya, has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these poems. The public has been using our repository and accessing Vahanas (poems) from our Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not just meant for reading the poems, it is also meant for research. So, we have added a way for researchers to help us review the content and will be adding references from various research papers.


Above: A screenshot of the Vachana sahitya page

The most commonly searched words are:

ಕರ್ಮ(Karma: English: work/deed)
ಸತ್ಯ(SathyaEnglish: truthfulness )
ನದಿ(Nadī: English:river)

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,
ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ,
ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ,ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ,
ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು.
ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

We encourage other projects of this kind to follow our method and use any part of our process that is helpful.

Going foward, we would like to:

Initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary
Continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyasa and Muddann (work not yet started)
Extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-march-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-digitize-any-book-in-public-domain

Digitising contest to preserve rare books in Malayalam

praskrishna — 2014-01-31T06:33:15Z

The Malayalam Wiki Grandhasala has announced a competition in digitally preserving rare books in Malayalam.

The article was published in the Hindu on January 4, 2014.

‘Digitalisation Contest 2014’, launched by the Wiki community, is aimed at digitising rare books in Malayalam, the copyright of which has expired, and making them available online in Unicode font.

The Wiki community wants the books to reach innumerable readers through the Internet.

The competition will be held in separate categories for schools and the general public. The competition involves entering the text on the computer and proof-reading. The prizes include e-book readers and books.

In the first phase of the project, 55 books listed by the Kerala Sahitya Akademi have been offered for digitising. They include ‘Samskshepa Vedartham’ (1772), ‘Malayanmayude Vyakaranam’ (1863) and ‘Hasthalakshanadeepika’ (1892).
Copies of magazines such as ‘Rasikaranjini’ and ‘Mangalodayam’ have also been offered for digitising.

Those who wish to take part in the competition should visit the Wiki Grandhasala (ml.wikisource.org) and become a member of the project.

Details of the competition and the list of books may be downloaded. The contest will be open till January 31. It is being organised on the 10th anniversary of the Wiki Source project by the Centre for Internet and Society, IT@School project, Swanthanthra Malayalam Computing and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi.

For details, contact K. Manoj, general convener of the contest (cellphone number: 9495576262).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-january-4-2014-digitising-contest-to-preserve-rare-books-in-malayalam

Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949

subodh — 2022-10-11T14:53:58Z

The digitization project of O Bharat, a historic biweekly published between 1912 to 1949 in Goa was completed through collaboration of different organizations. The trustees of Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust initiated the project in collaboration with Marathi department of Goa University, Bhakti Dnyan Marg Sanstha and Goa Central Library. The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge Programme facilitated the project with technical and financial assistance. Two local students scanned 12000 pages in 8 days. The year wise volumes of O Bharat are now freely available on Wikimedia Commons in the form of archive.


Above: Front page of O Bharat in Portuguese	Above: Front page of O Bharat in Marathi

Context

It all started like this. During the Wikimedia session at Goa University in October 2021, it was realised that there is very little documentation about the ‘Goa Liberation Struggle’ on Wikimedia projects. So, in the meeting Prof. Vinay Madgaonkar from the Marathi language department took the lead to develop a project around this theme.

The exhaustive list of freedom fighters, major incidents in history, the places related with struggle, monuments and memorials was prepared. The next day, to have a glimpse of the situation on ground, we toured a few places and monuments in South Goa. As we were shocked to see the sorry state of the memorials, we came across a monument of Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai known as Bharatkar (an editor of O Bharat), in a lush green forest near Quepem village. Being curious to know about the history of O Bharat publication, Prof. Vinay introduced us to the grandson of Bharatkar, Adv. Khagendra Desai who founded Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust, non-profit organisation in Goa to archive the works of Bharatkar.

As both of us share the same vision, CIS-A2K partnered with Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust, to relicense and digitise freedom fighter Bharatkar’s ‘O Bharat,’ a Marathi-Portuguese bilingual weekly, currently housed at Goa Central Public Library.

About the 36 Year Run of ‘O Bharat’ upto India’s Independence

Freedom fighter, social reformer and journalist 'Bharat'kar Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai, (7th Nov 1885 - 15th Aug 1949), started 'O Bharat' (in Portuguese) or 'Bharat' (in Marathi) on 6th November 1912. For 36 years thereafter, Bharatkar courageously protested the Portuguese occupation, relentlessly advocated radical and progressive social reforms and doggedly championed the cause of an independent and sovereign Indian Goa.

Partnerships

The partnerships with various stakeholders were developed after a series of discussions and official communications. The Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust obtained official permissions from the State Government departments for the access of O Bharat volumes in the library. Goa Central Public Library provided access to the bound volumes of O Bharat and permission to scan them. Another local organisation, Bhakti Dnyan Marg Sanstha in association with Goa University Marathi Department identified few students for the digitisation.

Digitisation process and launch on Wikimedia Commons

The trustees of Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust relicensed the two volumes of selected editorials published in 2018 and the whole O Bharat issues into CC-BY-SA 4.0. We conducted digitisation training with Prof. Vinay Madgaonkar and students, Shravani Parab and Shridhar Raut, from Goa University to scan 12000 pages in 8 days. The officials of Goa Central Public Library cooperated in access to original volumes and in the process of digitisation. The Chief Minister of Goa inaugurated the project on Wikimedia Commons on India’s 75th Independence day, 15 August 2022. The year wise volumes of ‘O Bharat’ are now freely accessible to anyone in the world at any time anywhere. The uploading of the volumes is in progress.

Media links

The event of launching digitised content on Wikimedia was very well received by the people in Goa. The researchers, students, readers and journalists will have this reference value content while exploring the history of Goa. Various national and local media published the news covering all the aspects of this archive. The links are given below -

This was originally published on Wikimedia Blog in September 2022

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digitisation-of-o-bharat

Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949

subodh — 2022-10-11T13:11:15Z

Context

About the 36 Year Run of ‘O Bharat’ upto India’s Independence

Partnerships

Digitisation process and launch on Wikimedia Commons

Media links

This was originally published on Wikimedia Blog in September 2022

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digitisation-o-bharat

Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:26:09Z

Promoting Openness in Today's Digital World

The internet has created exciting new ways to share information and collaborate globally and we are only beginning to see its full potential. So what does the future hold, or more importantly, what could the future hold?

Join ictQATAR and Creative Commons for an interactive forum addressing how innovation can thrive in the digital age through sharing and openness. We'll take on issues such as digital content rights, the open cloud, open source software, openness in government, openness in creativity, culture and art and the value proposition of openness.

Hear the latest thinking from Google, Mozilla, Georgetown University and other leaders in the digital rights arena. Participate in lively panel discussions on openness in government, openness in business, and openness for culture and creativity.

Speakers:

Program:http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker

8:45 a.m.      Registration Opens

9:30 a.m.      Welcome
                       Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR

9:45 a.m.       What it Means to be Open
                       Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation

10:15 a.m.    Digital Content Rights
                       Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons

10:45 a.m.    The Open Source Revolution
                       Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google

11:15 a.m.     Break

11:30 a.m.     The Open Cloud
                        Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown
                        University

12:00 p.m.     Panel: Openness in Science and Technology

                      John Wilbanks, Creative Commons, VP for Science - Moderator

                       Shaikha Al-Jabir, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel
                       International

                       Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat

                       Habib Haddad, Founder, Yalla Startup, Yamli.com

                       Lucio Rispo, Qatar Science and Technology Park

1:15 p.m.       Lunch Break

2:15 p.m.       Panel: Openness in Government (moderated by Michael Nelson)

                       Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Center for Internet & Society, India

                       Paul Keller, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain,
                            Knowledgeland

                       Marwan Marouf Mahmoud, Executive Director of ICT Industry
                            Development, ictQATAR

3:15 p.m.      Panel: Culture, Creativity and Openness

                       Eric Steur, Creative Commons Creative Director - Moderator

                       Abdulrahman Al-Otaiba, Web and Application Developer

                       Arend Kuster, Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation
                            Journals

                        Roger Mandle, Director, Qatar Museum Authority

4:15                End

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR

Dr. Hessa Al Jaber is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. In her nearly six years of leadership at ictQATAR, Dr. Hessa has led Qatar's ICT strategy across sectors, spearheading major initiatives in government, education and business.

She has overseen the liberalization of Qatar's telecommunications market, ushering in an era of choice and competition, and directed the modernization of Qatar's ICT infrastructure. Passionate about ensuring that the benefits of technology reach all sectors, Dr. Hessa has led numerous initiatives to make Qatar a more inclusive society through ICT.

She has spearheaded the modernization of Qatar's government through ICT, streamlining processes, making government more transparent and accessible to its people, and also launching an online portal to the government, Hukoomi. She is also leading Qatar's initiative to build the first high-capacity satellite "E'Shail" to be launched in 2012. Dr. Hessa has been instrumental in the creation of Mada, an assistive technology center that serves persons with disabilities in Qatar, as well as initiating a host of national programs that empower women and youth, and protect children online.

Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Baker was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. She has also sat on the board of the Open Source Applications Foundation.

Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape's source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, Baker led the creation of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.

Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is on the board of CCC and Tucows. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices.

He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.

Chris DiBona, Open Source and Public Sector Program Manager, Google

Chris DiBona is the open source and public sector programs manager at Mountain View, Ca. based Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches. In the public sector space, he looks after Google Moderator, the polling locations API. Additionally, he is on the board of Our Good Works, a non-profit that looks after the volunteer matching website Allforgood.org.

Mr. DiBona is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He occasionally appears on the This Week in Tech and Cranky Geeks podcasts. He is a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and has a masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, he serves on the advisory board of imeem, a San Francisco, Ca. based social networking firm.

Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University

Michael Nelson is currently Visiting Professor of Internet Studies in Georgetown University's Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. Since January 2008, he has been doing research and teaching courses on "The Future of the Internet" and technology trends as well as consulting and speaking on Internet technology and policy.

Nelson is a Trustee of the International Institute of Communication, a member of the Board of FirstMile.us, and until April was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet2 university research consortium. He is also the outgoing chairman of the Information, Computing, and Communications Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Panelists:

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society

Sunil is the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), in Bangalore. He is the founder of Mahiti, a social enterprise aiming to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the voluntary sector by using free software. Sunil continues to serve on the board of Mahiti. He is an Ashoka fellow and was elected for a Sarai FLOSS fellowship.

For three years, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of United Nations Development Programme's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme, serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2007 - 2008, he managed ENRAP an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development projects in the Asia-Pacific, facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Dr. Shaikha Sultan Al-Jabir, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances, Qtel International

Dr. Shaikha Al-Jabir a visionary IT executive who understands where business is going and takes corporate IT to a whole new level. She is currently the Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances in Qtel International (QI) where she is building a framework for strategic and sustainable innovation within QI.

Prior to joining QI, she was the CIO at Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation- Kahramaa, where she established a sophisticated ICT infrastructure, placing the organization at the forefront of technology. Dr. Al-Jabir has a PhD in Computer Science, MS in Telecommunications and Computers, and a BS in Electrical Engineering.

Abdulrahman Al Otaiba

Abdulraham is a Qatari developer who has been passionate about computers since an early age. He started as a software developer, then web developer, and recently mobile application developer. Most of his personal projects are released under the open source license. He also co-founder and editor-in-chief of Almashroo Arabic blog, which talks about all sorts of web development.

Habib Hadad, Founder & CEO, Yamli.com

Habib is a serial tech entrepreneur, recently founder and CEO of Yamli.com a startup focused on empowering the Arabic language on the web. His also the founder and CEO of YallaStartup an NGO focused on early stage entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and the ArabianBusiness named him one of the most influential Arabs under 30. He currently serves on the Global Agenda Council on innovation.

Paul Keller, Senior Copyright Advisor, Knowledgeland

Paul Keller is senior copyright policy advisor at Knowledgeland, an Amsterdam based think-tank focused on innovation in the knowledge economy. He is public project lead for Creative Commons in the Netherlands and serves as Collecting Societies Liaison for Creative Commons International.

Paul is an expert on open content licensing with a special focus on the cultural heritage organizations, the music industry and the creative industries. Next to his work for Creative Commons he is currently coordinating the copyright related aspects of Images for the Future one of the biggest digitization projects for audio-visual heritage in Europe and he is one of the architects of the licensing framework for Europeana, the European Union funded online aggregator of Europe's cultural heritage. Paul frequently advises organizations on the implementation of open content licensing strategies.

Arend Küster: Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ)

Arend joined BQFJ from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, where he was Business Development Director and led the development of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. He has over 5 years of consulting experience in Sales and Marketing Strategies for scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers including Elsevier Science, Springer, American Physical Society, Taylor and Francis, Wiley Blackwell, University of Chicago Press, British Medical Journal, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan.

Marwan Marouf Mahmoud, Executive Director of ICT Sector Development, ictQATAR

An ICT professional with more than 20 years of experience working with various levels of technology, Marwan oversaw the preparation and implementation of some of the most comprehensive ICT strategies in financial institutions and now heads the ICT Industry development at ictQATAR. In this role ictQATAR, he is involved in building an ICT Industry ecosystem and a digital content ecosystem, which includes initiatives in intellectual property, broadband infrastructure, international ICT Industry cooperation and entrepreneurship programs in the digital content space.

Roger Mandle, Executive Director, Qatar Museums Authority (QMA)

Roger Mandle brings to the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) more than four decades of experience as a senior museum executive and arts educator. As Executive Director, he oversees all of the QMA's museum programs and building projects, including the Museum of Islamic Art. His responsibilities range from administration and finance to the curatorial direction of the museums to a comprehensive educational program, which includes the creation of an international network of training opportunities for Qatari citizens who desire careers in the museum field.

Mr. Mandle comes to the QMA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island, where he served as President since 1993. From 1988 to 1993, he was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Mr. Mandle was the Director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio from 1977-1988 and served as Associate Director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 1967 to 1974.

Lucio Rispo, Strategy Research Director, Qatar Science & Technology Park

Lucio has more than 35 years of experience in multinational and multicultural environments.
Lucio is currently Strategic Research Director at Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP). Prior to joining QSTP Lucio was Managing Director at BioGeM, a European leader in the biotech research and services. He developed strategy and services based on a network infrastructure which allows internationally cooperation.

In 2006 Lucio founded the telecom division of Pradac Informatica, Srl, which provided value added services for telecom companies, and which was acquired by Amuser. Prior to Amuser, Lucio held several executive positions including Wordwide Telecom Sales VP at Sema Group, President at Nortel Networks for the Southern European Region and CEO for Europe and Latin America at Bull.

Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons

Eric Steuer manages Creative Commons' relationships with artists, media companies, and cultural institutions. He produces creative projects and events that emphasize the use of CC licenses, and also directs the organization's media strategy. Before joining Creative Commons, Eric was as an editor for Wired Magazine, which he continues to write for. He is on the board of CASH Music, is the co-founder of Sneakmove Recordings, and is in a hip hop group called Meanest Man Contest.

John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons, Creative Commons

As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark.

John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He serves on the Board of Directors for DuraSpace and AcaWiki.

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/digitally-open

Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently?

zeenab — 2017-02-03T01:50:20Z

In a new report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Centre for Internet and Society, Zeenab Aneez explores how Indian newsrooms are adapting their workflow and processes to cater to an increasing digital audience and the implications these changes have on how journalists produce news.

This was published on the website of the London School of Economics and Political Science on January 16, 2017.

Global discussions about how the rise of the Internet has impacted journalism and news publishers has involved accounts of newspapers stopping publication altogether, or bringing their presses to a halt in order to direct resources to publishing solely digital content as in the case of Newsweek or the Independent. Large newspapers like The New York Times and The Guardian have successfully managed to transition from print only publications to multimedia news providers, bringing out both print and digital news but this is an ongoing and costly process.

In the Indian context however, things are a bit different, especially with regard to Indian language newspapers whose print business remains profitable, which positively impacts the dynamics of this transition. For our report, we interviewed over 30 senior editors, managers and rank-and-file journalists of three newsrooms – Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama – to understand how large Indian newspapers are reorganising themselves to cater to the demands of the digital space.

It has always been known than the print industry in India is still growing and we found that this leaves big Indian newspapers in a more comfortable position when it comes to investing in digital operations. Contrary to our assumptions, we discovered that these newspapers are taking aggressive steps to capture India’s growing digital audience and while Hindustan Times’ transition is very similar to English-language newspapers abroad, both Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran have adopted approaches that are specific to their niche audience and their position as market leaders.

Expansion rather than transition

In contrast to the Hindustan Times, which has reorganised and equipped its existing print newsroom to do print as well as digital and mobile journalism, both the Indian language newspapers have focused on launching digital operations that run parallel to the print newspaper organisation.

This involved creating new brands (Jagran Online, Jagran Josh, Manorama Online), opening up new offices and hiring new personnel geared towards putting purely digital media products, that are not limited to news.

Sukirti Gupta, CEO of MMI Online explains, “When we started thinking of our digital strategy, we were not looking so much at news but asking if there are new areas of growth as a media company and content was the first thing that seemed exciting for us. We looked at two genres that we thought would be great – health and education.”

Jagran Online includes ten websites covering news, health, entertainments, blogging and classifieds. Manorama Online lists fifteen websites as part of their operations, of which about ten are news, feature or content websites while the rest include a matrimonial site, classifieds and portals for real estate listings and doctor’s appointments.

Changing rhythms in the newsroom

The production and distribution of digital news content for Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran is handled primarily by their respective digital counterparts from a separate newsroom. In adopting this approach, both newspapers have partially shielded their traditional newsrooms from the difficulties that arise when moving from a print to a digital newsrooms. At the same time Manorama Online and MMI Online, which operate as start-ups within these incumbent organisations, partially avoid the inertia that comes from their established organisational and professional cultures. Although print reporters are not directly involved with the digital publication, they continue to be the primary source of news for the website and mobile applications and have to adapt their workflow according to the demands of the online space.

This means that breaking news, a prominent feature of online news, has been made a priority for all reporters. “The journalism remains the same,” says Santosh Jacob George, Editor, Manorama Online, “the only difference is that we have to break the news ourselves while print has the whole day to produce the story. We’ve requested our print reporters to file first for online, either directly into the CMS or via WhatsApp.” At Dainik Jagran, Digital Editor Shekhar Tripathi, has the right to ask a reporter to file the story immediately for the website. “First our policy was print but now online is our first priority, but not at the cost of print. If a story breaks at 8 am, it first comes to me on WhatsApp. If I’m interested, I ask the reporter for more details and then to file the story. Our print reporters have gotten into the habit of filing stories online, they give us the facts first and add perspective later,” he says.

This change in rhythm has not come easily to the print newsrooms which are accustomed to filing stories towards an evening deadline but efforts by management are towards promoting a systematic collaboration between the print and online desks. Dainik Jagran’s Chief Editor has made digital a part of every journalist’s Key Result Area (KRA). “So it’s not just the digital team’s responsibility but now everyone has it in his list of duties and responsibilities to support digital,” explains Gupta. At Malayala Manorama, a clear set of guidelines to streamline workflow were introduced; ‘They called in senior people from print to have detailed discussions on this and our senior editors also visited individual bureaus and spoke to reporters there,’ informs an associate content producer, recalling efforts to sensitise print journalists to the demands of digital news.

Emergence of new forms of newswork

Apart from the changes in workflow, the medium demands the use of various new tools and methods to gather, publish and distribute news. This has resulted in the emergence of new kinds of newswork performed by a new category of news workers. At the Hindustan Times newsroom, this work is performed by journalists who work on the online and audience engagement desks while at Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama, it is carried out by ‘content producers’ of the digital newsrooms. Although writers and editors for Manorama Online are journalism graduates who have also undergone journalism training specific to MM’s writing styles and journalistic values, they are designated as ‘content producers’ to differentiate their role from that of print journalists. At MMI Online, content producers do not necessarily possess prior journalistic experience, but have experience in web content production.

These content producers are social media savvy, have an eye for trending topics, are acutely aware of their competition and feel directly responsible for performance of their stories and subsequently, revenue. “We have to be very quick and prepare keyword-stuffed, trending news in a matter of minutes. It’s a race not just to get clicks but to retain the audience,” informs a junior content producer at Jagran Josh. “In print, your job [is], you write your story and you are done. With online we are more responsible for the outcomes. A well-researched story may not garner too many views so we have the option and the responsibility to package and redistribute the story until it finds the audience,” explains a senior content producer at Manorama Online.

Aside from these key observations, our interviews revealed the increased use of audience analytics combined with the introduction of new applications like Chartbeat and Parse.ly that analyse performance of stories and aid in editorial decision making, the increased use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as a source of news and distribution, experiments with new forms of storytelling, especially with the use of mobile phones and a renewed focus on hyperlocal news especially in the case of Indian-language publications.

Our findings, which are limited to observations of what changes are taking place within newsrooms and how this is impacting journalists, open up several questions about the current state of journalism in India, the increasing interdependence on social media platforms, especially Facebook, the use of external software to make editorial decisions, the evolving role of journalists in digital newsrooms and finally, the question of developing a sustainable business model for news on the web.

This article is based on a report co-authored by Zeenab Aneez, Sumandro Chattapadhyay from the Centre for Internet and Society, Vibodh Parthasarathi of the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Milia Islamia and Rasmus Kleis Nielson of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The open access report can be read and downloaded on the Reuters Institute website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-january-16-2017-digital-transitions-in-the-newsroom-how-are-indian-language-papers-adapting-differently