Centre for Internet and Society

Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019

subodh — 2019-07-04T02:48:58Z

Christ University in association with the Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) organized a conference, from 20 - 22 June 2019, at Christ University, Bengaluru. Forty-nine Wikimedians from four countries (Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India) participated in the event.

The meta report published on Wikimedia Blog can be accessed here.

CIS-A2K is working with various universities and educational institutions to develop content in Wikimedia projects. One such institutional partner, Christ (deemed to be university) has taken the initiative to organize Wikimedia Education SAARC conference in association with CIS-A2K and Wikipedia & Education User Group. The participants included one member from Sri Lanka, four members from Nepal, seven members from Bangladesh and 37 members from India. In all 14 language communities were represented.

The broad objectives of the conference were:

To know the nature of education programs being conducted.
To share the best practices.
Discuss the challenges like retention and quality.
Explore the methodologies to evaluate & measure the work being done.
Enhancing the community involvement in the education programmes.

The applications for participation and thematic submissions were invited from Wikimedians of SAARC countries. The selection committee comprised of representatives from Wikimedia Foundation and community conducted the scrutiny. The scholarships were provided to 49 selected participants. In all 12 submissions on diverse topics were received from different language communities. Wikimedia Foundation’s Partnerships & Global reach team member Praveen Das, Trust & Safety team member Neha Nair and advisor for this conference Tanveer Hasan were also present for some of the sessions during the conference.

The following report gives a summary of all the deliberations at the conference.

Day 1, 20 June 2019

The inaugural session was graced by chief guest Dr. Ramesh Sharma, an expert in open education and Associate Professor of Instructional Design at Ambedkar University Delhi along with Dr. Anil Pinto Registrar of Christ University who was instrumental in launching Wikipedia in education for the students. The other persons on the dais were Tito Dutta, Program Manager CIS-A2K, Dr. Mallika Krishnaswami, Dr. John Joseph Kennedy, and Dr. Sebastian K A.

In this session the speakers stressed upon the advancement of language, to adopt latest knowledge sharing technologies, innovation in education programmes and collaborations with multifaceted institutions to actualize new ideas. The journey of Christ University regarding the Wikimedia education program during the last six years was also elaborated.

The inaugural session was followed by a session on Code of Conduct and Friendly space policies by the Response Team of CIS-A2K. The objectives, diversity statement, general community guidelines, unacceptable behaviour and process of reporting described in CoC were discussed. To explain the motivation and hierarchy of Wikipedia in Education at Wikimedia movement the following sessions were conducted during the conference.

In the keynote address, Dr. Ramesh Sharma revealed many facets of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the field of academic courses, science, mathematics, music, multimedia etc. He shared many experiences of working with Open Education Resource University (OERU) and appealed for future collaborations. He also deliberated upon some wider topics like Government education policies, licenses and quality improvement framework for OERs. In a remote session with Nichole Saad, Senior Programme Manager (Wikipedia Education Programme) from Wikimedia Foundation, she explained the rationale behind the Education in Wikimedia projects and the execution process.

The session on Wikipedia & Education User Group focused on the global user group that supports the work around Wikimedia and Education in various capacities. One of the Board members of user group, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga gave an introduction to the user group, its background, vision, and objectives. Later the functioning of the group was also explained including the membership process and the governance. The three focus areas of the group were explained in detail — community, resources, and outreach. Later, the participants were briefed on various ways in which they can get involved with the group. These included joining the newly formed working groups for each focus area, taking up membership, and also attending the monthly open meetings held by the group, and share their stories to the broader community. The session ended with a brief upon areas where community members could seek the support of the group, such as mentorship, securing resources, advocacy, etc.

The participants were introduced to each other through their work. Session on sharing of various programmes being conducted, it’s learning, challenges and way ahead were very informative and stimulating. The participants from different language communities explained the present status of the education programmes being conducted with institutions. The challenges like lack of initiative, the paucity of resources, trust in Wikipedia and consistency were discussed collectively. New and innovative ideas that were not tried so far were also put forth by the members making it an interesting session.

The last session of the day one was group work on the theme - ' कल आज और कल ' : Past Present Future. The participants were divided into eight groups. Enthusiasm was very high during discussions on the past, present & future of education programmes with the community. The groups collectively worked on the poster presentations.

Day 2, 21 June 2019

The second day started with an interactive session on the topic - The interesting ways of Introducing Wikimedia projects (Wikidata, Wikisource, etc.) into classrooms. The participants shared their experiences with different entry point events other than Wikipedia. Many felt that Wikipedia is complicated to start with. The community also reacted strongly sometimes due to the quality of the articles. This discussion was followed by promoting planned growth process for bridging the gender gap.

The conference submissions on education projects were presented in two parallel tracks. According to interest, the members attended the various sessions. The highlights of the presentations are given below.

Goals of Wikimedia + Education: Content, Retention, Skills: The session started off by asking participants about why they do an education programme, and what else can we include as the goals for any EduWiki activity. Different approaches for achieving each of these goals, and how each of these goals affects the rest were discussed. This included a quick brainstorming on how communities should collaborate with the EduWiki activities so that it adds value to its goals. Eventually, the presenter along with the participants realized that retention of users should be prioritized over the other two goals to easily reach all the three goals. Caution points regarding assignments like copyvio, reliable references were also discussed. The scale of the activity and scoping student interest are also an important criterion.

Challenges of growing communities : Make Wikipedia trustworthy to educators: In this session, challenges before Bangla Wikipedia were discussed. There is a need to collaborate with institutions and capacity building of editors to improve the quality of articles.

Non-Conventional methods of knowledge expansion by programs involving Wikimedia and Education: The formal approaches like giving compulsory tasks for students will not work in the Wikimedia movement. We can expect better outcomes by adopting non-formal methods like digital skills development and team building through collaborative work.

Wikimedia Program Outreach Mentorship: Proper awareness and detailed planning of resources are the key aspects of outreach programmes.

School Wiki in Kerala: State government education department of Kerala has developed School Wiki with Wikimedians in Kerala. In all 15000 articles of schools have been created with their history, location details, alumni, maps, cultural activities, photos and creative works of students like stories, poems and paintings. The innovative project - Folk encyclopedia is also shaping up. The linkages with Malayalam Wikipedia are being established slowly. As the students are now aware of the Wiki environment, there are chances of getting good editors in future.

Wikipedia in School: State government of Tamil Nadu took the initiative to organise capacity building programme for teachers through the EDUSAT on a mass scale. This Wikipedia training started in 2016 and till now 40,000 teachers are trained. Due to this, teachers became active on Wikipedia.

Retaining Tulu Language and culture: the ways and means: Karavali Wikimedians user group is active in the coastal part of Southern Karnataka and Northern Kerala. It is focusing on the preservation of language and culture. They have started the first physical Wiki library with 650 books. Other innovative activities are ‘Karavali Wikimedians to Home’ and Text-Performance-Documentation and Reconstruction of rare Folk Performing art Sidda Vesha.

VVIT WikiConnect : A Year in review : The coordinators of Wikiclub presented the activities conducted in the last two years. The focus is on capacity building of active students, leadership development, quality of content and retention. According to the scoping of students’ interest, various events were conducted like Edit-a-thons, Photowalks, Wikidata workshop, 1lib1ref session, Wikimedia Strategy Salon, Mini Media Wiki training, Thematic workshops, etc. The user survey was also done to get the feedback of students.

Wikipedia Student Association at Alva's College Moodubidire: The regular Wiki activities have resulted in active Students’ Association at Alva’s College. The major activities are publishing of wall magazine - Wiki Suddi : Mundu and newspaper - Wiki Samachaara, Wikicamp and internship by Department of Journalism.

Wikipedia in Education at Christ University: The coordinator presented the journey of six years programme at Christ. The process of engaging students from day one to the last day of the second semester was explained. The students learn digital skills, language typing, writing articles on the topic of interest and respective stream. From writing in the sandbox, they even progress up to documenting case study on research related to Wikipedia. The structure of monitoring and evaluation systems within the department was elaborated. The community engagement aspect was also discussed in detail. The challenges and the preparations for the next curve of WEP Christ were presented.

In the last session of the day, groups presented their work through posters visualising ‘Past, Present & Future’ of the education programmes. The interaction and loud thinking provided many ideas to be taken further for implementation.

The second day ended with Cultural programme by Christ University students. The vibrant performances of music and dance were enjoyed by the participants.

Day 3, 22 June 2019

The day started with early morning ‘Bird Walk’ at the university campus with rich biodiversity. Seven enthusiasts joined this walk and captured images of 22 different species of birds which is documented on eBird portal.

The last day of the conference started with a remote presentation on OER by Wayne Macintosh (Director OER Foundation, and UNESCO - ICDE Chair in OER). Wayne started with an overview of demand for education vis-a-vis the infrastructure available in the global south. The fundamentals of OERs, OER Foundation and OER University were elaborated. He stressed the need to start at least two OER courses by every Indian University. They can join the OERu network for free to host the courses. The credit system for various micro courses was explained through examples. He also discussed the WikiEducator programme and appealed Wikimedians to join this evolving community as all courses run using media-wiki software. Regulatory issues for universities to adopt OER courses are to be looked into in Indian context. Dr Ramesh Sharma assured to facilitate in this matter.

The next session, ‘Strategy in Wikimedia and Education’ by Pavan Santhosh intended to help participants understand the importance brewing Strategy and figuring out a Big dream in their programs. This session started with demystifying the word strategy. With examples from the Wikimedia movement that participants can relate, the presenter explained how can a Big dream help prioritizing activities and programs. Later in an interactive part of the session, participants came up with ideas to run a strategy process in their programs and communities.

Lively group activity - ‘Revolving cafe’ happened after the strategy session. The activity was planned around five themes - Program and Events Dashboard, Wikidata, Communication & Blogging, GLAM in Education and Support structures (WMF grants and CIS Requests page). As the groups were small, the participants utilised this opportunity to clear doubts through one to one dialogue. The session was mutually beneficial for group leaders as well as participants.

After the cafe activity, Wikimedia Education Staff member Sailesh Patnaik deliberated upon the outreach and communications aspects. He stressed on using social media effectively and give publicity to innovative activities through newsletters. He also explained about upcoming Greenhouse pilot.

The last session, ‘Wikisource in education’ was conducted by Jayanta Nath. He explained how Wikisource activity is complementary to the qualitative growth of Wikipedia. The basics of Wikisource like licenses and workflow were discussed in detail. Various ways to combine the education programme with Wikisource were explored in interaction.

The conference closing ceremony was meaningful with spontaneous feedback from the participants.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-june-22-2019-wikimedia-education-saarc-conference-2019

AI and Healthcare Report

pranav — 2019-06-11T14:23:51Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/ai-and-healthcare-report

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:03:09Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

Sadaf Khan: Media Matters for Democracy and Twitter

...By now there are a number of questions buzzing around my head, most of them unasked. Are users comfortable with so much of their data being collected? Are there really algorithms that string together all this data into medically-relevant trends? How reliable can these trends be when usage is erratic? Are period tracking apps pioneering, fundamental elements of a future where medical aid is digital and reliable data is inevitably linked to the provision of medical services? And if so, are privacy and health soon to become conflicting rights?

I also want to find out how users understand data collection and privacy before giving apps consent to utilize their data and information as they will. Hareem says she gives apps informed consent. ‘If my data becomes a part of the statistics aiding medical research, why not? There is no harm in it. I am getting a good service, and if my data helps create a better understanding as a part of a larger statistical pool, they are welcome to use it.’

But is she really sure that this information will be used only as anonymised data for medical research? ‘Look at the kind of information that is being collected,’ she answers. ‘Dates, mood, consistency of mucus, basal temperature. What kind of use does one have for this data?’

Naila, in turn, says: ‘Honestly, I have never really thought about what happens to the data the application collects. Obviously I enter detailed information about my cycle and my moods and my sex life. But a), my account is under a fake name and b), even if it wasn’t, who would have any use for stuff like when my period starts and ends and what my mood or digestive system is like at any given moment?’

In fact, this sentiment is shared among all the women interviewed for this piece — what use would anyone have for this data?

As users, we often imagine our own data as anonymised within a huge dataset. But as users, we don’t have enough information about how our data is being used — or will be used in future. The open and at times vague language of a platform’s terms and conditions allows menstrual apps to use data in ways that I may not know of. Some apps continue to hold customer data even after an account is deleted. Even though I may technically ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions, is this fully informed consent?

One of the big concerns around this kind of medical information being collected is the potential for collaborations with big pharmaceuticals and other health service providers. With apps sitting on a goldmine of users’ fertility and health information, health service providers might mine their data for potential consumers and reach out directly to them. While this is like any targeted marketing campaign, the fact that the advertiser is likely to be offering medical services to women suffering from infertility and are at their most vulnerable, raises totally different ethical concerns.

And these apps and their businesses might grow in directions that users haven’t taken into consideration. Take Ovia’s health feature for companies to buy premium services for their employees. While the gesture is packaged as a goodwill one, it also means that an employer has access to extremely private and intimate medical information about their women employees. And while the data set is anonymised, it is still possible to figure out the identity of users based on specific information. For example, how many women in any company are pregnant at any given time?...

Pregnant a year after my miscarriage, I initially downloaded multiple apps in a bid to find a good fit. I don’t know which one of these was in communication with Facebook. But almost immediately, my Facebook timeline started becoming littered with ads for baby stuff — clothes, shoes bibs, prams, cribs, ointments for stretch marks, maternity wear, the works.

It makes me think of those old school clockwork-style videos. You drop a ball and off it goes: making dominos fall, knocking over pots and pans, setting in motion absurd, synchronized mechanisms. Similarly, I drop my data and watch it hurtle into my life, on to other platforms, off to vendors. Maybe to stalkers? To employers? Who knows.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers

Plugging into India’s broadband revolution

Navadha Pandey — 2019-06-05T14:02:48Z

After many false starts, the plan to wire India’s digital future may finally take off with Jio GigaFiber’s entry.

The article by Navadha Pandey was published in Livemint on June 4, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

All through 2018, 58-year-old Ashok Kumar Rai’s Lucknow-based small architecture firm used to spend a princely sum of ₹11,800 each month for the privilege of a good broadband internet connection. “We used to send building walk-through files to clients every day and the size of each file could go up to 1GB (gigabytes)," he says. Doling out cash for reliable internet was a necessity. All that changed when a new player, Atria Convergence Technologies Ltd (ACT), came to Rai’s upmarket Gomti Nagar neighbourhood in Lucknow. In the summer of 2019, Rai’s internet access speed has shot up from 4 to 150 Mbps (megabits per second). And the monthly bill has come crashing down to about ₹1,000.

For far too long, India’s internet action lay centered in its metros, leaving out even relatively big cities like Lucknow. The fledgling online access push into smaller cities and rural India happened primarily via mobile data transmitted over wireless spectrum. Home broadband was nowhere in the picture. But all that seems set for some dramatic change. If the country’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has his way, high-speed broadband will become a reality in at least 1,600 cities.

In the process, he aims to also leapfrog India from its current rank—134—in fixed-line broadband penetration to the top five with the help of Jio GigaFiber.

The dream of a broadband revolution, however, has its fair share of detractors. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, for example, who helms the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CWEiT at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), says: “Fiber penetration will take a long time in India."

The logic is simple: unlike mobile towers, fiber needs to reach each home physically. China’s broadband boom happened because it has rebuilt nearly its entire housing stock in the last 15 years, fuelled by a construction-led growth bubble. “In India, initially only all the upcoming new buildings may get connected to fiber-based (fast) internet," says Ramamurthi.

But India’s untapped millions are about to set off a race. And this journey, which will clearly not be a cakewalk, has huge rewards in store. Sample this: India has 1.16 billion mobile subscribers but just 18.42 million wired broadband subscribers. And many of them, like Rai, are data hungry. There is an existing playbook: what happened to mobile broadband after 2014.

In 2014, the cost of one GB of mobile data was ₹270. Now, it is ₹10 per GB. As a result, mobile data consumption has soared. In late-2014, an average user on Airtel’s network (India’s largest telecom operator back then) used 622 megabytes (MB) of data in a month. By late-2018, the number of users had tripled, but, despite a broader base, average data usage stood at 10GB a month.

First-mover advantage

The expansion in wired broadband access may have far-reaching implications beyond a mere spike in data usage. When Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industry Ltd which owns Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, declared optical fibre based fixed-line broadband as “the future" last July, the real play was not on the infrastructure itself, but the services that would ride on top—from smart home experiences to new forms of e-commerce. The revenue and the first-mover advantage lie in who gets to tap into the “ecosystem"—of how a household connects to the wider world to buy, watch, and exchange.

Essentially, new businesses could emerge to feed the “ecosystem". And some existing small and medium-scale businesses may finally become viable enough to expand and go big. Netflix, for example, emerged as one of the world’s largest video streaming platform, riding on top of the US broadband boom. But India already has a crowded pack of 34 web video streaming entertainment platforms, most of which have cropped up to sustain the attention of mobile data guzzling Indians. With wired broadband following mobile usage expansion, unlike in most other countries, India’s new-age internet businesses are likely to be unique and different.

Home-based surveillance and security systems could be one space that could gain significant traction, says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based think-tank Centre for Internet and Society. “If there are 40 families (in a high-rise apartment) who have babies and need surveillance facilities, each apartment going for an individual connection from a telecom service provider would involve a huge amount of money. But a fibre-based intranet or peer network could connect all 40 flats for a much smaller price," he says.

There could also be unintended consequences for the country’s digital gender divide. Only 29% of India’s current internet users are women, according to a recent Unicef report. If the cost of wired broadband begins to crash—thereby increasing the number of homes which have access—women who will never get access to a phone (due to the cost of device and patriarchy) will finally be able to see things on the internet, says Nandini Chami, a researcher at IT for Change, a non-governmental organization. “How this negotiation will happen inside the house, we will have to wait and watch," she says. Household-level access would also confuse corporate entities trying to “hyper-profile" users since multiple people will be accessing the internet through shared devices at home, she adds.

But as internet access improves, making the digital economy more vital, Chami says, governments would have an important role in ensuring women get to use the internet “on terms that are empowering". “We can think of innovative models when fixed broadband becomes cheap. The household is not the space for this. It can be libraries which have special times for young girls or digital labs for women. We need to rethink the missed opportunity of the BharatNet and the national optic fibre network. Internet access should not stop at just the panchayat office. We must think of different points of access, particularly for women," Chami adds.

The possibility of many of these radical changes in both the social and business realms will, of course, entirely rely on the pace at which India goes broadband. Despite the rapid expansion in mobile internet, data originating from mobile devices still account for only 20% of India’s data consumption. That is why what happens in the wired broadband space will matter increasingly. And that is also why Jio is betting big on expanding the existing wired user base (18 million) to 50 million.

The Jio gameplan

Jio is currently running beta trials for GigaFiber in New Delhi and Mumbai, providing 100GB of data at 100 Mbps for free, except for the ₹4,500 one-time deposit for a router. While the landline will come with unlimited calling facility, television channels will be delivered over the internet (Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV). The packaged trio of fast Internet, landline telephony, and television access will remain free for a while—similar to what had happened in the mobile phone services segment in 2016. After commercial launch, the per month cost is expected to be ₹600, roughly half of what similar services cost currently.

Jio’s rival Bharti Airtel Ltd has decided that it is not interested in the entire pie but just the creamy top layer. It will focus on premium customers and expand its broadband services across India’s top 100 cities, instead of copying Reliance Jio’s ambitious plan to create a fibre-optic network across the country. To achieve this, Airtel, which already has 2.36 million fibre customers, will stay focussed on high-rise buildings rather than horizontal deployment, as this business model is more economical and logical.

The dark horse in this race is, of course, ACT with its existing 1.42 million customers. Its presence is much smaller with just 18 cities, largely in the south India and the newly expanded zones of Delhi, Jaipur and Lucknow. On the ACT fibre network, average data consumption per user is already at 130GB a month.

“We have seen a 150% increase in average consumption in the last 18 months," says Bala Malladi, chief executive officer, ACT. “People are now looking at higher speeds and the experience is taking precedence over cost. In fact, even in the hinterland, people want higher speeds and non-buffered experience," he adds.

But why hasn’t fibre penetration gone up if the demand is booming? Why did India miss the bus when other countries like the US have an 80% fibre penetration?

Policy paralysis

Firstly, fibre is expensive to lay, unlike a SIM card which can be given away for free. Moreover, India till a few years ago was mostly a voice calls market and not a data market. Secondly, municipalities in India have complicated right-of-way (RoW) procedures which act as a big hurdle for digging and laying fibre. This is one of the reasons why even government (such as the Delhi government) plans to set up citywide surveillance and Wi-Fi hotspots have failed.

“The centre has finally issued a very good RoW model, but now every state has to come up with its own policy modelled on the central guidelines. They are taking their own sweet time," says Rajan Mathews, director general, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

The lack of forward movement on these fixable policy issues assumes significance given the government’s focus on fibre in its National Digital Communications Policy-2018, which has a target of attracting $100 billion worth of investments in digital communications.

The policy’s goals include universal broadband for all, creating four million jobs in digital communications, and raising the share of digital communications in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 8% (from less than 6% in 2017). Deployment of five million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2020 through a National Broadband Mission is also on the agenda. The key goal, however, is to provide 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) connectivity to all gram panchayats by 2020 and 10 Gbps by 2022.

The sad reality is that the last five years were an absolute failure in laying fibre in the country. BharatNet, the flagship mission to connect 250,000 gram panchayats with broadband, which was being implemented by Bharat Broadband Network Ltd (BBNL), a special purpose vehicle set up under the department of telecommunications (DoT) in February 2012, has been a disappointment, to say the least.

The government has completed laying optical fibre cables across more than 100,000 gram panchayats in the first phase and had aimed to complete connecting the remaining 150,000 councils by March 2019. The second phase has seen “zero progress", according to government officials close to the matter. Pained by poor utilization of digital infrastructure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) suggested auctioning BharatNet infrastructure on an “as is where is" basis after a meeting held in December at the prime minister’s office to take stock of the mission.

To start with, the DoT plans to monetize fibre assets built by the government under its flagship mission BharatNet through outright sale to private players or by leasing these assets for a 20-year period after a bidding process. If successful, it could boost connectivity in Indian villages, which have so far been kept out of the digital dividend.

Bigger cities, however, will have a different consumption story. With intra-city fibre coverage leading to improved penetration, wired broadband would not just offer an enhanced content viewing experience, but also open doors for internet of things, or IoT. “Home security is going to become a big business going forward, riding on fibre. Even gaming will see a lot of traction as you can enjoy a 4K game in real-time, thanks to low latency and high speed of an optic network," Malladi of ACT says.

The looming question, however, is how much investment can operators put in given the current low tariff environment in the telecom sector. Big players are stressed for funds and are diluting their non-core assets to generate funds to keep networks afloat. “If you are looking at what will happen in the next three years... I believe that there is a business case to be made and tariffs should sustain it (the investment)," Mathews says.

Whether that happens or not could become an important footnote in India’s growth story. The far-reaching implications of fast internet access pushed billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), to launch 60 internet-beaming satellites last month. The grand scheme is a response to the practical constraint of laying fibre, a concern which is more pressing in India’s vast landmass.

Unlike Musk, the country’s broadband dreams, however, still remain rooted to the ground—in the simple tech of optic fibre. And the success or failure of those dreams will be written by how fast the fibre network expands.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/news/livemint-navadha-pandey-june-4-2019-plugging-into-indias-broadband-revolution

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference?

sailesh — 2019-06-22T09:37:23Z

The Wikimedia Education SAARC conference is on 20th June 2019. A conference for Wikimedians, Wikimedia education leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the regional union of nations in South Asia. Wikimedians belonging to these nations share several common challenges and many of them are emerging communities within the Wikimedia movement. The community members to attend the Wikimedia Education SAARC conference are involved in Indic language Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference will be the first of its kind conference in SAARC countries which will engage Wikimedians, education program leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement. We believe that the students of all ages should not only consume the knowledge available on the Internet but also be a part of the larger Open Internet movement, and help in creating open knowledge resources.

The event will be organised in and by the Christ (Deemed to be University) in Bengaluru from 20th June 2019 to 22nd June 2019. CIS-A2K team has been working with the department of languages in this university from 2013, where students of the university are contributing to multiple Wikimedia projects. Our education activity at this university has inspired us to plan this event. To know more about this university, Please see here.

This conference will allow us to understand the different efforts made by the SAARC communities involved in the Wikimedia Education movement. This will help us to create models, templates and documents that can be replicated in by other institutions or programs.

Conference Goals:

To know the Wikimedia Education activities happening in South Asia by different community members/Languages.
Sharing the knowledge and best practices of how to build "trust relationship" with new partners/teachers and how to improve trust in Wikimedia projects.
Challenges on student retention and how to engage them in the broader Wikimedia movement.
The best method to evaluate and measure the quality of the work done by the students.
To introduce tools like the dashboard, not in your language, and other tools which will be useful for the tracking, assessment, allocation of the topics and others.

The program structure for Wikimedia Education SAARC conference has been developed by keeping the general and specific challenges and opportunities in South Asia, and the submission selected from the participants.

Follow the hashtag #EduWikiSAARC19 for more updates.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/what-is-wikimedia-education-saarc-conference-1

SIF Concept Note

Admin — 2019-06-05T04:13:13Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/sif-concept-note

MoU between PAH Solapur University & CIS-A2K

subodh — 2019-06-05T06:21:47Z

CIS-A2K is working in collaboration with PAH Solapur University, Solapur in Maharashtra on Wikimedia projects. The Mass Communication and Journalism departments are involved in content generation on Marathi Wikipedia & Commons.

In 2019, the students completed assignments in the form of Wikipedia articles. Looking at the interest of students and knowledge creation process, other departments also expressed their willingness to adopt this methodology in academics. Vice Chancellor Dr. Mrunalini Fadnavis took initiative to conduct introductory meeting to discuss the larger collaboration with University courses. The department heads agreed on working in Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata, Commons and other Wikimedia projects to enhance the skills of students. As a result, principle level MoU to accommodate Wiki programs in academics as policy for the next academic year was signed between University and Centre for Internet & Society (CIS-A2K) on 15th May at Solapur. On this occasion, Program Manager Tito Dutta was present to sign on behalf of CIS. From University, VC, Registrar, Prof. Ravindra Chincholkar- Coordinator and HoD's of 4 departments were present. The summary of MoU is given below:

Terms of Collaboration

To promote content generation in Wikimedia projects among the institutions under University affiliation. To organise awareness programs and training workshops to achieve this. For consistent and dedicated efforts, mechanism of subject experts and coordinators will be developed.
To integrate the academic assignments, projects etc. with knowledge building in Wikimedia projects e.g. Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons.
To facilitate content donation in the form of published thesis, University publications to free library - Wikisource. To write well referenced articles based on these research work.
To develop platform in University for outreach programs on Digital knowledge, Language & technologies, FOSS, Unicode etc. To involve other stakeholders in knowledge business like publishers, writers, printers, designers in these programs.
To take lead in accommodating open knowledge concepts, locally relevant content generation practices while designing the courses.
To promote content generation in Wikimedia projects among the institutions under University affiliation. To organise awareness programs and training workshops to achieve this. For consistent and dedicated efforts, mechanism of subject experts and coordinators will be developed.
To integrate the academic assignments, projects etc. with knowledge building in Wikimedia projects e.g. Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons.
To facilitate content donation in the form of published thesis, University publications to free library - Wikisource. To write well referenced articles based on these research work.
To develop platform in University for outreach programs on Digital knowledge, Language & technologies, FOSS, Unicode etc. To involve other stakeholders in knowledge business like publishers, writers, printers, designers in these programs.
To take lead in accommodating open knowledge concepts, locally relevant content generation practices while designing the courses.

Plan of Execution

A core team shall be constituted by representatives of this MoU for realization of the objectives of this MoU. This core team will be constituted by 10 June 2019.
The core team shall prepare an action plan with specific goals for achieving the objectives of MoU. They shall take into consideration the academic, commercial and legal aspects of this co-operation.
The proposed action plan shall be reviewed and approved by representatives of both parties.
The core team shall be supported and authorised to take all necessary actions to implement the action plan in an effective, speedy and dynamic manner.
Revenue sharing shall be decided on case to case basis by core team.

Media Coverage

The news of this event was published by major media houses:

Lok Mat (22 May 2019).
Pudhari (22 May 2019).
Sakal (22 May 2019).
Surajya (22 May 2019).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mou-between-pah-solapur-university-and-cis

May 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-06-26T01:40:33Z

The Centre for Internet & Society Newsletter for the month of May 2019

Highlights for May 2019

Omidyar Network is investing in in establishing a three-region research alliance co-led by the Institute for Technology & Society, Brazil , the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, Kenya, and the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), India on appropriate use of Digital Identity. CIS will look at the policy objectives of digital identity projects, how technological policy choices can be thought through to meet the objectives, and how legitimate uses of a digital identity framework may be evaluated. The term Fintech is generally used to describe innovative technology and technological processes being used in the financial services sector. Vipul Kharbanda has presented a detailed analysis of RBI’s Draft Framework on Regulatory Sandbox for Fintech. Centre for Internet & Society's 'Access to Knowledge' wing (CIS-A2K) signed a MoU with PAH Solapur University, Maharashtra to promote content generation in Wikimedia projects among the institutions under University affiliation and develop a platform in the university for outreach programs on digital knowledge, language and technologies, FOSS, unicode, etc. Timely and affordable access to scientific research remains a problem in this digital day and age. Most countries including India, continue to struggle with implementing open access. The latest international initiative (created in Europe) to remedy this problem is Plan S. This has been positioned as a strategy to implement immediate open access to scientific publications from 2021 which India is considering adopting. Anubha Sinha in an article unpacks the disorderly growth of open access in India, and discusses the gap between the Plan's vision and current Indian scenario in some respects Shweta Mohandas was nominated to curate Genderlog's Twitter handle (@genderlogindia). She tweeted about topics related to gender and data, more specifically around AI, big data, privacy and surveillance. Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Tim Davies co-authored a chapter titled Open Data and Land Ownership in State of Open Data book which was recently launched at World Bank. The authors have thrown light on how the lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and CIS as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada. Can data ever know who we really are? This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in May:

How privacy fares in the 2019 election manifestos | Opinion (Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon; May 1, 2019).
Democracy, Digital India and Networks (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; May 1, 2019).
Why the TikTok ban is worrying (Gurshabad Grover; Hindustan Times; May 2, 2019).
Digital Native: Narendra Modi’s interview by Akshay Kumar is a PR masterpiece (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; May 5, 2019).
Will the WTO Finally Tackle the ‘Trump’ Card of National Security? (Arindrajit Basu; The Wire; May 8, 2019).
Digital Native: Three things we need to realise about what TikTok is doing to us (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; May 19, 2019).
Open Data and Land Ownership (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; State of Open Data; May 22, 2019).
Can EVM vulnerabilities be used to game the Indian election? (Karan Saini; Kaarana Blog; May 22, 2019).
The Huawei bogey (Gurshabad Grover; Indian Express; May 30, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Cyber criminals hide in the ‘dark web’ to remain anonymous (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; May 2, 2019).
BJP outspends Congress, others in social media advertising (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; May 3, 2019).
Three emerging market think tanks to collaborate on Good ID recommendations with Omidyar backing (Chris Burt; Biometric Update; May 8, 2019).
"Aadhaar Reduced Agency in Citizens and Empowered Those in Positions of Authority" (Martin Moore; News Click; May 20, 2019).
In Parts of India, Internet Shutdowns Are a Fact of Life (Megha Bahree; Top10VPN; May 21, 2019).
Artificial Intelligence: Consumer Experiences in New Technologies (Consumer International; May 28, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Copyright & Patent

Blog Entry

Should India adopt Plan S to realise Open Access to Public-funded Scientific Research? (Anubha Sinha; May 29, 2019).

Wikipdedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Wikipedia assignments workshop for Post Graduate students in PAH Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; May 3, 2019).
Wikisource Workshop at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal (Subodh Kulkarni; May 26, 2019)
MoU between PAH Solapur University & CIS-A2K (Subodh Kulkarni; May 31, 2019).

Jobs

CIS-A2K team is seeking applications for the following posts:

Events

Train-the-Trainer 2019 (Organized by CIS-A2K; Vishakhapatnam; May 31 - June 2, 2019).
Wikimedia Education SAARC conference (Organized by Christ University (Deemed to be University) with the association of CIS-A2K; Christ University; Bangalore; June 20 - June 22, 2019).

Media Coverage

Ahmedabad Wikisource Workshop (Vishwavihar; May 13, 2019).
Youths come forward to augment Assamese Wikisource project (NE Now News; May 17, 2019).
Wikipedia looks to ramp up its Indian language content (Tushar Kaushik; May 28, 2019).
Project Tiger: Wikipedia ropes in locals to contribute articles in Indian languages (Tushar Kaushik; May 29, 2019).

Openness

Publication

Open Data and Land Ownership (State of Open Data; Sumandro Chattapadhyay; May 22, 2019).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Digital Identity

Announcement

Announcement of a Three-Region Research Alliance on the Appropriate Use of Digital Identity (Amber Sinha; May 13, 2019).

Event Organized

Picking ‘Wholes’ - Thinking in Systems Workshop (Organized by CIS; New Delhi; May 27 - 28, 2019).

Gender

Blog Entry

Workshop on Feminist Information Infrastructure (Ambika Tandon; edited by Gurshabad Grover and designed by Saumyaa Naidu; May 9, 2019).

Free Speech

Participation in Events

Stockholm Internet Forum 2019 (Organized by Stockholm Internet Forum 2019; Stockholm; May 16 - 17, 2019). Gurshabad Grover was a panelist in the discussion on 'Influencing Internet Governance' co-organised by Article 19.
Consilience 2019 (Organized by the Law and Technology Society; National Law School of India University, Bangalore; May 25, 2019). Gurshabad Grover was a panelist on the discussion on 'Online Content Regulation: Global Perspectives and Solutions'.

Privacy

Research Paper

An Analysis of the RBI’s Draft Framework on Regulatory Sandbox for Fintech (Vipul Kharbanda; May 8, 2019).

Participation in Events

Data Empowerment And Protection Architecture (DEPA) Workshop (Organized by iSPIRT Foundation; May 18, 2019). Pranav Manjesh Bidare attended the workshop.
ABLI Privacy Workshop (Organized by Asian Business Law Institute; Singapore; May 21 - 22, 2019). Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.
HillHacks 2019 (Organized by HillHacks; Bir, Himachal Pradesh; May 24 - 26, 2019). Karan Saini was a speaker.

Artificial Intelligence

Participation in Events

Society 5.0 and Artificial Intelligence with a Human Face (Organized by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi). Radhika Radhakrishnan attended a roundtable consultation.
AI for Good Workshop (Organized by Swissnex India and Wadhwani AI; Bangalore; May 22, 2019).
MWC19 Shanghai AI and Trust in APAC and China (Organized by Digital Asia Hub; MWC Shanghai; June 27, 2019). Sunil Abraham will be making a presentation at the summit on AI and Trust in APAC and China. Sunil has been invited as a speaker on panel ‘Framing AI for Digital Upstarts’.

Cyber Security

Participation in Event

Shining light into darkness: Encouraging greater transparency of government offensive practices in cyberspace (Organized by Rights Con; Tunis; June 12, 2019). Sunil Abraham will be attending a conversation on encouraging greater transparency of government offensive practices in cyberspace.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions.

Article

Democracy, Digital India and Networks (Shyam Ponappa; Organizing India Blogspot; May 1, 2019).

Participation in Event

Live [Closed]: TRAI Open House Discussion on OTT Regulation - Delhi (Organized by TRAI; New Delhi; May 20, 2019). Anubha Sinha attended the event.

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Essay

Can data ever know who we really are? (Zara Rahman; May 22, 2019).

Blog Entries

War Driving in Lhasa Vegas (Oxblood Ruffin; May 11, 2019).

#DotBharatAdoption (Dr. Amit Prakash, K.A. Dayanand, Dr. Srinivasan Ramani, Dr. V. Sridhar, and Vivek Pani; May 11, 2019).
#MaterialisingWriting (Dibyadyuti Roy, Indrani Roy, Padmini Ray Murray, and Puthiya Purayil Sneha; May 21, 2019).
The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality (Karandeep Mehra; May 21, 2019).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
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► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and 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, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2019-newsletter

Should India adopt Plan S to realise Open Access to Public-funded Scientific Research?

sinha — 2019-06-05T13:19:28Z

Timely and affordable access to scientific research remains a problem in this digital day and age. Around three decades ago, the radical response that emerged was making public-funded scientific research “open access”, i.e. publishing it on the Web without any legal, technical or financial barriers to access and use such research. Several Indian public research institutions also adopted open access mandates and built self-archiving digital tools, however, the efforts haven’t yielded much. Most countries including India, continue to struggle with implementing open access. The latest international initiative (created in Europe) to remedy this problem is Plan S. Plan S is has been positioned as a strategy to implement immediate open access to scientific publications from 2021 – which India is considering adopting. This article unpacks the disorderly growth of open access in India, and discusses the gap between the Plan's vision and current Indian scenario in some respects.

Note: This blog entry was first published on May 29, 2019, and later updated on June 5, 2019 to accommodate the revisions to Plan S (released on May 31, 2019 after their public feedback exercise).

Introduction

In 2017, scientific researchers in India produced 1.4 lakh pieces of peer-reviewed literature, of which approximately 27,000 were open access publications (SCImago 2018). This means that only 27,000 pieces were available to the public to freely read and share, despite the fact that Indian tax-payers had funded half of the annual expenditure on R&D that year. The remaining items were largely stuck behind expensive paywalls and subscription systems, doing a huge disservice to the scientific ecosystem as well as the public interest.

Open Access is a movement to make both scientific research and data accessible to everyone in society, and a key tenet of Open Science. It emerged in response to rising costs and barriers to timely access and sharing of research, as well as a crisis of epistemic injustice in science. With the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, it was expected that costs of publishing and disseminating scholarly research would decrease leading to a more equitable research environment. The principal idea was “to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the internet.”(Harnad S 1995). Two principal ways of implementing OA that initially emerged were: publishing on online institutional repositories (of the research institute/ funder) and/or paying the journal to make the paper OA online (i.e. author pays upfront instead of public paying subscription charges to read that research).

Since Harnad’s first call, numerous international conventions, mandates, calls have been issued in support of OA. The latest international response to the problem is Plan S. With its origins in Europe, Plan S was initially positioned as a clarion call to provoke a global flip to OA, and then transformed to achieving the goal of "scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms" from 2021. Plan S invites research funding organisations to become members of cOAlition S, who in turn are expected to abide by the ten principles articulated under the Plan. Crucially, it holds funders responsible for enforcing OA policies and sanction non-compliance.

The Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India announced in February 2019 that India will join Plan S. That could make India the second country in the global south to adopt Plan S (Zambia (via National Science and Technology Council of Zambia) was the first one). Although it must be noted that the announcement was made with respect to an earlier version of the current plan. It remains to be confirmed if India will still abide by its commitment. Even so, at first glance the key tenets underlying the plan remain the same to a large extent. Regardless it is a huge step for India, and perhaps bears the promise of pulling together the various strands of a diffused OA movement in India. Presently, cOAlition S is dominated by European entities. Majority of the entities provide marginal funding support to Indian scientific research, with the exception of two members - the UK based biomedical charity Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Wellcome Trust has been a longstanding global advocate of OA, and also played a crucial role in shaping a key institutional OA mandate in India. Apart from the European Commission and European Research Council, China’s largest funding agency has also made strong statements to support Plan S.

Plan S’ principles prescribe that research should be only published in those journals and on platforms which enable authors to publish articles under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC- BY; alternatively, CC Attribution Share-alike or CC Public Domain licenses); authors should retain copyright in their articles; have a “solid system” in place for peer-review as per the standards in the relevant research discipline; provide subsidies/ waivers in Article Processing Charges (APCs); and do not operate under the hybrid model. More importantly, the Plan prioritises publishing in journals over institutional repositories (IRs) – and requires funding organisations to pay APCs. Further, all kinds of self-archiving platforms (including IRs) should also meet certain registration requirements.

Key aspects of Indian scientific research

Funding of research

Currently, scientific research is significantly funded by both government and private sector in India. During 2017-18, the national investment on R&D activities in scientific research was estimated to be approximately one lakh crores, with majority (45%) being met by central government, and approximately 38% from private sector industries (and 7% from state and 5% from public sector organisations). The highest R&D expenditure is incurred by Defence Research and Development Organisation at INR 13,000 crores, followed by Department of Space at 5000 crores, Department of Atomic Energy at under 4000 crores. Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR), Council of Scientific and Agricultural Research (CSIR), Department of Science and Technology (DST) find themselves in the same bracket of 2000-4000 crores roughly, whereas Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) trail with under 1000 crores (Department of Science 2018). Of these institutions, only ICAR, CSIR, DST and DBT have OA mandates.

Indian institutional OA initiatives

The earliest OA efforts in India led to the creation of IRs to support self-archiving in scientific research institutions (Arunachalam 2004). Recommendations presented at the 93^rd Indian Science Congress in 2006 said that an optimal national OA policy should mandate research papers produced either by partial or full government funding to be deposited into IRs immediately upon publication; encouraged such grant holders to retain copyright; and suggested that the government should commit to cover costs for publication in OA journals (i.e. cover APCs). These recommendations found support in a 2007 report by the erstwhile National Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India. The Commission envisaged a national academic OA portal for sharing research articles, and highlighted the need for the government to allocate funds for digitisation of books and periodicals in the public domain (material outside the scope of copyright protection). Additionally, it recognised the digital divide as an impediment to access to scientific knowledge. More importantly, it required the government and research institutions to bear the cost of publishing in OA journals, instead of passing the financial burden to authors/ scientists.

Soon key public-funded institutions such as the Council of Scientific and Agricultural Research (CSIR), Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology (DST-DBT), Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Institute of Mathematical Sciences adopted OA mandates. However, the thrust of all policies happened to be on IR deposits and not financial support for APCs. The concept of IRs took root to a considerable extent, although many IRs later ran into issues for various reasons and stopped functioning (Das 2014). A few initiatives such as the CSIR-URDIP (which developed a centralised IR to make OA journals discoverable across institutions funded by CSIR and DST-DBT) remain under-populated despite being stably maintained. This is either due to absence of or uneven implementation of OA mandates – for example, only some institutional beneficiaries (approximately 20) have implemented the DST-DBT mandate, and a meagre 3000 papers have been made open thus far in various IRs. Problems cited for under-populating of repositories include disinterest by administrators in implementing the mandates (DST Centre for Policy Research 2018).

Plan S' vision and current Indian scenario

Mandatory copyright retention by authors

If India signs up for Plan S, IRs under Indian OA mandates will be required to publish articles under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY; alternatively CC BY SA or CC0, and CC BY ND in exceptional cases), wherein the copyright shall be retained by the author without any restrictions. Unfortunately, “copyright retention by authors” hardly finds support in Indian OA mandates as a fundamental principle. None of the institutions with OA mandates (mentioned previously) provide a clear stance on copyright retention, thereby implicitly leaving it to individual authors to negotiate their own arrangements with publishers. For example, the DST-DBT OA policy states that “It is not the intent of this policy to violate copyright or other agreements entered into by the researcher, institution or funding agency...” Individual arrangements largely take the shape of mandatory copyright transfers in favour of the publishers (with an embargo condition on author’s freedom to re-publish). Mandatory copyright transfers harm the agency of authors to publish/ share their works in other places of their choice. This is the primary reason for legacy works to remain locked up with the publishers until the copyright term expires; and in many cases even after the work has become a part of the public domain, publishers are loathe to release such works.

This happens despite two things: firstly, in most cases in India, authors’/ researchers’ institutional employment contracts require that all IP vests with the institutions; secondly, as per the applicable law - Indian Copyright Act, 1957, copyright in such works in ordinary circumstances vests with the employer. Thus, if public institutions so desired, they should be able to retain the copyright in the work produced under their aegis (and transfer it to the authors).

Removal of embargoes

Both OA and closed access journals routinely impose embargoes averaging a year for peer-reviewed outputs to be made open. Presently, most Indian OA mandates accommodate an embargo of six months to one year, and accept both post-prints and pre-prints (the two terms roughly refer to the version of author’s manuscripts before and after peer-review) for publication in IRs. Such conditions again run contrary to the Plan’s requirement of making the final peer-reviewed published version of articles (post-print version) to be made open immediately upon publication– i.e. without an embargo period.

Addressing the menace of predatory publishing

Separately, another thorn in the side of OA’s reputation has been the rise of predatory journals. Predatory journals are outfits that dress themselves as a genuine OA journal, often charging unsuspecting authors high APCs, but conduct abysmal peer-reviews and provide poor editorial services and exhibit such conduct amounting to fraud. Such outfits have irreparably damaged many researchers’ reputations and careers, especially for vulnerable authors in the global south, with their unchecked manuscripts getting published without requisite quality checks (Sinha 2016). While this is an issue that requires special immediate measures; Plan S can potentially check the growth of such journals since it requires all publication venues to be completely transparent about their editorial policies and editorial board members, and also prohibits them from using APCs as bait to guarantee publication.

Publishing in 'prestigious venues' cannot be a criterion for evaluating scientific merit

The growth of OA has further been hindered due to a misguided tendency amongst authors to publish only in select prestigious journals, many of which are closed access. Such select journals have cultivated a brand of reputability and prestige over decades, they demonstrate as much by their high JIF (Journal Impact Factor) credentials. Traditionally, JIF has been the measure of a journal’s prestige – a proxy for the impact and influence of a journal’s publications. Despite having been discredited as wholly inaccurate (Kiermer 2016), many funding agencies continue to consider a publication’s worth in terms of the JIF of the journal it was published in, in hiring, promotional and other career advancement decisions. So long as we continue to judge the worth of research by the venue of its publication (assuming a uniform high quality of peer review and other checks) and not by its actual contribution to science, OA publishing is bound to be a less favourable option, because most OA journals are new and have not raked up a high impact factor score. Yet Indian funding agencies continue to use and promote JIF metrics, for a lack of awareness or wanton dis-interestedness in improving the system. Another reason for an immediate need to break the religiosity surrounding JIF is that many journals (both OA and closed access) in the global south enjoy good reputations but do not carry a high JIF as they are newer and their citation metric pales in comparison to their more dominant western counterparts. This disparity is starker for fields wholly situated in the global south. In this respect, the Plan clearly requires funders to only evaluate a publication on the basis of its intrinsic merit, and not factor in publication channels, impact factors or the publisher.

Recent steps by Indian government and agencies

Indian agencies’ approach to addressing these issues has been chequered, and does more harm than good. In 2017, the Universities Grants Commission (UGC) released a pre-determined list of journals that researchers should publish in, and linked researchers’ career advancement to publishing in the select listed journals (Pushkar 2016). This approved list contains approximately 39,000 journals that are indexed in Web of Science, SCOPUS and Indian Citation Index (Universities Grant Commission 2018). UGC’s step was seen as an attack on academic freedom with serious doubts about its competence to create a credible exclusionary list of journals in multiple disciplines – and it has indeed been shown that the procedure of making the list is flawed (Patwardhan et al. 2018). Separately, the Ministry of Human Resources and Development notified to National Institutes of Technology (NITs) that papers published in journals levying APCs will not earn career advancement credits (Mukunth 2017). MHRD’s notification dismisses all paid journals irrespective of their quality. This has the effect of placing genuine high-quality OA journals on the same pedestal as predatory journals, and ultimately dents the growth of OA business models looking for modest support via APCs that are helpful in covering operational costs (software platform and an editorial team), and do not come close to unreasonable APCs levied by the biggest commercial players in the field. The reality is that most OA journals charge authors to publish (Bastian 2018).

These steps led to much consternation amongst the Indian research community. Another government central committee has proposed to award cash bonuses for publications (with a higher bonus for publishing in international journals over national journals). This has been criticised by Indian scientists on two grounds: firstly, that the scheme may lead to a spike in predatory or sub-standard journals; secondly, it devalues national journals, and reinforces the prestige factor to favour international journals (Vaidyanathan 2019). A 2011 study has shown that cash incentives appear to encourage submission of research that has low regard for quality (Franzoni et. al 2011). In fact in 2010, UGC introduced APIs (Academic Performance Indicators), which was essentially a system of reward points against number of publications for researchers and faculty members ostensibly to improve scientific publishing. However, this ended up triggering a race to publish poor quality research in fake journals (Pushkar 2016), and the UGC recently changed the scheme to in order to do damage-control.

Government will have to foot APC bill

Crucially, the Plan requires funding organisations to commit to funding APCs, in addition to research grants. The PSA in his announcement on Twitter (relating to Plan S) has said that, “We will negotiate for APCs normalised to India.” The Plan also emphasises on waivers and discounts for low and middle income countries. Studies show that Indian authors spend anywhere between INR 500 to 3 lakhs per article on APCs, and during 2010-14 the estimated payment to open access journals (the immediate OA kind) was INR 16 crores per year, on an average costing INR 76,000 per paper (Madhan et al. 2016). It has been estimated that Plan S will cost India INR 616.46 crores per year (Mukunth 2019). The estimate is more than half of the annual investment in public institutions such as DBT and ICMR.

Imperfect competition in the scholarly publishing market

Does the academic publishing market have any justifications for exorbitant APCs? A European University Association study highlighted the oligopolistic structure in this market sector, which functions with an absolute lack in pricing transparency (through strict confidentiality agreements with institutions), large profiteering through public funds and asymmetry in negotiating power (European Universities Association 2018). In 2015, five companies controlled more than half of the market for academic publishing: RELX (formerly Reed Elsevier, UK), Taylor and Francis (UK), Wiley-Blackwell (UK), Springer Nature (Germany), SAGE (US). Majority of the most important closed-access journals continue to be owned by these publishers (Larivière et. al 2015). It does not help that many of the top OA journals are also owned by the same publishers (who are responsible for charging the highest APCs). It will be interesting to see which journals will change their model to comply with Plan S requirements.

Conclusion

Nonetheless, after many years of piecemeal OA reforms within Indian institutions, the PSA’s announcement indicates a renewed interest in OA. Elimination of copyright transfer agreements and embargoes will give authors surely more control over their works – steps that should have been implemented and strictly enforced by Indian institutions long ago.

However, it makes little sense for developing countries to spend an enormous amount on APCs demanded by a foreign publishing oligopoly. Latin America continues to be opposed to Plan S as a matter of its principled position against APCs. If India signs up for Plan S, it is could be the case that we will find ourselves in a situation where our public institutions will be paying for subscriptions as well as APCs for a long time to come. One of the plan's principles does say that "... When Open Access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must be transparent to inform the market and funders potential standardisation and capping of payments of fees." Since the coalition is currently overwhelmingly Eurocentric, it remains to be seen how a fair and reasonable analysis will be worked out across geographies. In this sense, Plan S is not exactly a breakthrough plan for the global south as it does not sufficiently undercut the market power of the oligopoly.

There is plenty that can be done in the interim to realise the vision of OA, as we continue to ponder and debate the feasibility of Plan S in the global scheme of scientific publishing as well as India. For starters, it would be ideal to conduct a nationwide consultation with the research community in India. Strengthening the infrastructure underlying institutional repositories – in terms of developing more powerful search tools for IRs, linking IRs, making deposited articles more discoverable over the Web are steps that do not require relatively large funds (vis-à-vis APCs), yet stand to contribute to improving visibility of our research. The government must also look out for authors’ interests by actively negotiating stricter terms with publishers, so that authors aren’t coerced into signing away their copyright (or by fait accompli). Transparency of commercial agreements should become a non-negotiable principle in institutions’/ libraries’ dealings with publishers, which is also reiterated as a key principle of the Plan. Such steps may not result in an immediate shift to OA, if implemented strictly and uniformly can perhaps be more radical and fruitful than anything that the Indian research community has seen in decades.

References

Arunachalam, Subbiah (2004): “India’s March Towards Open Access,” SciDevNet, https://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/opinion/indias-march-towards-open-access.html

Bastian Hilda (2018): “A Reality Check on Author Access to Open Access Publishing” https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/

Das, Anup Kumar (2014): “Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives,” CSIR –NISTADS (ed): India - Science and Technology, Vol 3, pp. 292-299

Department of Science and Technology (2018): “Annual Report 2017-2018” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IPKUdbSx0Da2Zi_ufzC4u-T3jCFzPred/view

DST Centre for Policy Research (2018): “Panel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH_kjoFRjAQ

European Universities Association (2018): “The lack of transparency and competition in the academic publishing market in Europe and beyond” https://eua.eu/component/attachments/attachments.html?task=attachment&id=1691

Harnad, Stevan (1995): “Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal”, Scholarly Journal at the Crossroads, Washington DC: Association of Research Libraries

Kiermer, Veronique (2016): “Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates,” PLOS Blogs, https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2016/07/impact-factors-do-not-reflect-citation-rates/

Franzoni, Chiara & Scellato, Giuseppe &Stephan, Paula (2011): “Changing Incentives to Publish,” Science, http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/reid/sta2201s/2012/Science-2011-Franzoni-702-3.pdf

Larivière, Vincent & Haustein, Stefanie & Mongeon, Philippe (2015): “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,” PLoS One. 10 (6), p. 1-15.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Madhan, Muthu & Kimidi, Siva Shankar & Gunasekaran, Subbiah & Arunachalam, Subbiah (2016): “Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published?,” Current Science http://dst.sciencecentral.in/17/1/Current_Science_Sept2016.pdf

Manupriya (2017): “Helping institutions embrace open access,” IndiaBioscience, https://indiabioscience.org/news/2017/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access

Mukunth, Vasudevan (2017):“Scientists in the Lurch After Imprecise MHRD Notice About 'Paid Journals'”, The Wire, https://thewire.in/education/mhrd-open-access-nit-predatory-journals-career-advancement-impact-factor

Mukunth Vasudevan (2019): “Six Concerns Over India Joining the Plan S Coalition for Science Journals”, The Wire, https://thewire.in/the-sciences/six-concerns-over-india-joining-the-plan-s-coalition-for-science-journals

Patwardhan, Bhushan & Nagarkar, Shubhada & Gadre, Shridhar & Lakhotia, Subhash & Mohan Katoch, Vishwa & Moher, David. (2018): “A Critical Analysis of the ‘UGC-Approved List of Journals’”. Current science. pp 114.

Poynder, Richard (2019): “Plan S: What strategy now for the Global South?” https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Plan_S.pdf

Pushkar (2016): “The UGC Deserves Applause for Trying to Do Something About Research Fraud,” The Wire, https://thewire.in/education/the-ugc-deserves-applause-for-rrying-to-do-something-about-research-fraud

SCImago (2018): “SJR – SCImago Journal and Country Rank” viewed on 2 April 2019 (https://www.scimagojr.com/countrysearch.php?country=in )

Sinha, Anubha (2016): “Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up”, The Centre for Internet and Society, https://cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up

Universities Grants Commission (2018): “Annual Report 2017-2018” https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/5595965_UGC-ANNUAL-REPORT-English-2017-18.pdf

Vaidyanathan, Gayatri (2019): “Indian payment-for-papers proposal rattles scientists,” Nature India, https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/10.1038/nindia.2019.18?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureInd#.XGlrKLpUnPU.twitter

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/should-india-adopt-plan-s-to-realise-open-access-to-public-funded-scientific-research

AI Consumer Experiences

praskrishna — 2019-05-28T01:53:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/files/ai-consumer-experiences

In Parts of India, Internet Shutdowns Are a Fact of Life

Megha Bahree — 2019-05-27T15:43:53Z

Fears of a censored internet are rising, as the government cites fake news and unlawful content in blocking internet access.

The article by Megha Bahree was published in Top10 VPN on May 21, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

In 2017, Faakirah Suraiya Irfan, a lawyer and mental health counselor in the northern Indian state of Kashmir, was online with a patient when the internet went down. In the restive state the government frequently, and without any warning, shuts down the internet, so it was not an unusual occurrence. But for Irfan, who was employed by women’s career networking platform Sheroes to offer online counseling services to its members, the interruption couldn’t have come at a worse time. She was in the midst of talking a patient out of suicidal thoughts.

“At that point when you lose the network, you just lose the person,” said Irfan. “I’m talking, and I’m in a flow and trying to get them to open up but then in the middle of that the internet is shut down.”

Irfan quit her job after a year because “the work was through the internet and [owing to the frequent network shutdowns] it just wasn’t working.”

Internet, interrupted

In the last couple of years India has seen a phenomenal increase in the number of people coming online thanks to an explosion of cheap data and affordable smartphones. With more than 500 million people online, it has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China.

But that growth has been accompanied by the usual sins of abuse, including a rise in online trolls and the spread of fake news. New Delhi has responded with a heavy hand. It has implemented internet shutdowns, banned apps and blocked hundreds of websites. Unsurprisingly, all of this has led to increasing fears of censorship in the world’s largest democracy.

India leads the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 alone, according to the latest Freedom On The Net report. The study tracks internet freedom in 65 countries, covering 87 percent of the world’s internet users, and addresses internet access, freedom of expression, and privacy issues. The report followed events between June 2017 and May 2018 and India came in as “partly free” with a score of 43 out of 100.

“There’s a censorship process underway in India,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and executive director of Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization that works to defend net neutrality, freedom and privacy. “There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.”

Shutdown throughout elections

India has just concluded the world’s largest general election with over 900 million people eligible to vote. But ongoing internet shutdowns prevented many people from accessing information as they prepared to cast their ballot.

Over the voting period of April 11 to May 19, the states of Rajasthan, West Bengal and Kashmir reported mobile internet shutdowns. News agency UNI reported that in April, authorities in parts of north Kashmir suspended internet services of all cellular providers in the region as it went to poll. This came two days after a shutdown in another region in Kashmir. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a legal services organization that aims to protect digital freedom and which tracks internet shutdowns across the country, found there have been 30 shutdowns in the state so far this year, and 40 across the country.

“There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.” – Apar Gupta

Shutdowns have a couple of provisions in law, says Gupta. One was passedin 2017 and empowers both the federal and the state government to suspend telecom services, and by extension, internet services. The other – which prohibits public gatherings – dates back to when the British ruled the country. The law was initially used to prevent Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence struggle, from organizing protest marches and now is regularly used to restrict internet access. The latter is more frequently used as it allows even local authorities to issue orders for shutdowns without a review process, says Mishi Choudhary, legal director of SFLC.

IFF’s Gupta says these shutdowns “disturb the constitutional protection for free expression.” He adds: “Such a disproportionate action beyond legal doctrine practically disrupts daily life to a severe degree and causes immense hardship. It provokes anxiety among families who talk to each, causes business losses and reduces the political freedom in a country.”

History of services suspended

In India, internet shutdowns began somewhere around 2012, picked up pace from 2015 and peaked in 2018. According to the New Delhi think tank Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, the internet was shut down for a total of 16,315 hours between 2012 and 2017, costing the economy approximately $3.04 billion.

Shutdowns can be partial—when a specific class of websites are blocked, like all internet messaging sites—or complete when the entire internet is cut off. Kashmir has the dubious honor of the highest number of shutdowns at 155 to date, according to the SFLC.

The longest shutdown in the country occurred in Kashmir in the summer of 2016 after a local rebel was killed that July. Mobile internet services were suspended for 133 days. While internet services on postpaid connections were restored by November, users with prepaid connections got their internet access back only in January 2017, nearly six months after they had been cut off.

The second longest suspension of internet services took place in Darjeeling in eastern India in June 2017 during a local secessionist agitation. Initially, just the mobile internet services were shut off but within a couple of days, the broadband services were cut off as well, according to SFLC’s tracker. Ultimately there were no internet services in Darjeeling for a total of one hundred days.

In both cases, it wasn’t clear who ordered the shutdown, as reflected in local media reports. Typically, shutdowns happen without any warning and in most cases the only explanation offered is that services were suspended “as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order”.

In a country where internet usage has risen dramatically in the last few years, the shutdowns have been “a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees and deprive the citizens the freedom to communicate,” says Choudhary.

In the summer of 2016, mobile internet in Kashmir was shut off for four months.

India’s data explosion

It was a new telecom entrant that drastically changed the dynamics of the country’s internet access, and brought vast numbers of people online.

In September 2016, Reliance Industries, which is owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched 4G network Jio. The network allowed subscribers to use internet plans to make calls, send text messages or browse the internet, and it jump-started the business by offering its services for free initially. Once it started charging for data, its rates were incredibly cheap. A year later it offered low-cost 4G handsets for a refundable security deposit of $22. In 2018 it offered a 4G phone for a third of that price. The strategy helped it gain millions of users, and encouraged the transition from feature phones to smartphones, giving users easy access to the internet.

“The internet shutdowns are a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees.” – Mishi Choudhary

Rajakumari Dayamenti, a native of Sabantongba village in the north eastern state of Manipur, was one such user. Before Jio set up a cellphone tower in her village, Dayamenti plugged a 10-meter-long USB extension cord into a Huawei modem that she stuck on her rooftop, creating her own mini tower to get online.

Cheap data and the millions of new users also ensured the rise of apps, with entertainment becoming one of the biggest drivers. Users in the big Indian cities have flocked to the same apps as their peers across the globe, including Apple Music, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. In the smaller cities, however, consumers have turned to more local and regional social networking apps like ShareChat and to apps that offer free content like Wynk, Gaana and Hotstar, Star India’s mobile and digital entertainment platform. For news, users turn to Facebook as well as UC News and Dailyhunt.

Disrupting daily life

Lateef Mushtaq, a native of Kashmir who is pursuing an undergraduate degree in technology in Delhi, has experienced internet disruptions countless times, he says. Mushtaq was on a two-week internship in Kashmir last July with state-owned telecom company BSNL to measure internet speeds in different areas when the internet was shut down. The company had to extend the internship to six weeks so he could complete the project.

More recently in February he was home and was scheduled to take an exam online when a suicide bomber blew up a convoy of vehicles carrying security personnel, killing at least 40 in an area called Pulwama. India blamed archenemy and the neighboring state of Pakistan, which denied the allegations.

In the midst of escalating tensions between the two nuclear armed neighbors, the internet speed in Mushtaq’s area was reduced to 2G. But he still had to take his exam, a frustrating experience as he found that the same page was being reloaded after he would submit his responses instead of moving forward to the next set of questions.

“I was submitting my answers, but it kept going back to the previous page,” he says. “I kept answering the same questions again and again.” Mushtaq couldn’t finish the paper and scored 63 percent on it. He says he could’ve done much better.

“In Delhi the internet is never shut down so when it happens to me now, I feel like I’m locked down in a single room without access to the world,” he says.

Finding any available network

While mobile phone services are disrupted frequently, the government occasionally spares the state-run BSNL as the armed forces also use this service. Mushtaq has in the past tried to get a BSNL broadband connection but without success. These connections are prized possessions and Kashmiri teenagers develop hacking skills early in an effort to ride on any broadband network when the government shuts their mobile services down.

“If we hear about a house with broadband, we try to crack the password,” admits Mushtaq. Networks that are secured on WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security standard are easy to crack and there are several apps on the Google play store that help with that, says Mushtaq.

When it’s just some sites or apps have been blocked, Mushtaq and his friends have turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxy services to find a way around the blocks, he says.

Internet shutdowns have cost India’s economy approximately $3.04 billion

But during a complete shutdown none of these workarounds do the trick, as Musthtaq found last year. He had to drive to another part of Kashmir where the internet was still working to check his score for an important entrance exam. Once he got the signal on his phone, he pulled up and sat on the roadside waiting for the website to load.

Similarly, during the 100-day shutdown in Darjeeling, Nirmal Tamang drove his daughter on his motorcycle more than 40 miles to another city where the internet was working so she could fill forms online to apply for undergraduate studies.

Battling ‘unlawful’ content

Rumors or provocative messaging on social media and instant messaging platforms have often been cited as reasons to order internet restrictions.

One critical issue involved the spate of mob attacks in India in the past couple years, fueled by widely circulated messages such as reports of strangers abducting children.

According to an analysis by IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, between January 1, 2017, and July 5, 2018 33 people were killed and at least 99 injured in 69 reported cases of mobs attacking people they suspected were planning to abduct children. In all the cases, the charges turned out to be baseless, with 77 percent of the reports based on fake news that had spread through social media.

With at least 200 million users in India, WhatsApp was one of the mediums through which these rumors spread, and in the aftermath of the violence, came to be a poster child for fake news.

New Delhi responded by asking the platform to take responsibility for the messages circulating on it, stating: “Such a platform cannot evade accountability and responsibility especially when good technological inventions are abused by some miscreants who resort to provocative messages which lead to spread of violence.” It added, “WhatsApp must take immediate action to end this menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such mala fide activities.” (In response, last July WhatsApp introduced a limit in India on the number of times a user could forward a message to five. It has now imposed that limit on the rest of the world as well.)

Since then, the Indian government has proposed rules that would force internet companies to remove content from their platforms. In late December, it issued a draft policy of rules intended to curb the misuse of social media and stop the spreading of fake news.

Apar Gupta likens the government’s proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression”

Under the policy, the government has proposed an amendment to Section 79 of India’s IT Act, which would require internet companies to take down content deemed inappropriate by authorities. And if a company receives a complaint from a law enforcement agency, it would be required to trace and report it within 72 hours and to disable that user’s access within 24 hours. Should this amendment go through, it would effectively break the end-to-end encryption that secures user communications on platforms like WhatsApp.

Another recommendation in the draft policy says that internet companies will have to purge their platforms of “unlawful” content. However, the policy doesn’t clearly define what makes something “unlawful”, raising concerns that the clause could be easily abused by authorities to remove any content they wish.

Internet companies and privacy advocates say the new measures, if implemented, pose a threat to free speech and would encourage censorship.

It’s “plainly unconstitutional,” says Gurshabad Grover, policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, a nonprofit organization. “By mandating online platforms to detect and remove “unlawful content” through automation, the draft rules shift the burden of judging whether content is legal from the state to private organizations. They will only lead to a great chilling effect on speech, and a regime of online censorship regulated by private parties,” he says.

IFF’s Gupta likens the proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression standards” and his organization has asked for a complete rollback of the proposal.

Website censorship on the rise

Large-scale disruptions and intentional slowdowns are not the only tools employed by the government to exert control over the internet. Specific websites and apps are also sporadically blocked.

In April 2017, in the wake of massive student protests in Kashmir, the state government banned access to 22 social media apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Telegram and WeChat, for a month.

Two experts at the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said the restrictions had “a significantly disproportionate impact on the fundamental rights of everyone in Kashmir,” and that they “fail to meet the standards required under international human rights law to limit freedom of expression.”

Another crackdown targeted the country’s 827 porn websites. In India it is not illegal to watch porn privately and the country has the dubious honor of being the world’s third-biggest porn watching country. Unsurprisingly, the ban didn’t fully succeed.

Within days of the government order, Pornhub, one of the biggest adult content sites, had launched a mirror website for India with an altered web address. Other workarounds in use included VPN or proxy services such as hide.me, hidester, and whoer.net. As per a TorrentFreak report, the search for VPNs shot up in the days after the ban. Users also switched to different browsers such as Alibaba’s UC Browser or the Opera browser where the banned sites could still be accessed.

Privacy advocates say the government’s amends to internet policy, if implemented, would encourage censorship.

Most recently, an Indian court banned China’s Beijing Bytedance Technology Co.-owned music and video app TikTok which had been downloaded by nearly 300 million users in India.

The ban came on the heels of a handful of incidences—a 24-year-old man in the southern city of Chennai reportedly committed suicide on being harassed for posting videos of himself dressed as a woman. Soon after, a member of a local political party of Chennai’s home state of Tamil Nadu declared that the younger generation was hooked on TikTok and getting pushed onto the path of cultural degradation. In response, a state minister promised to seek the federal government’s help to ban the app.

A Tamil Nadu court then banned downloads of the app and forbade the media from showing videos from the app, stating: “The dangerous aspect is that inappropriate contents including language and pornography are being posted in the TikTok App. There is a possibility of children contacting strangers directly […] Without understanding the dangers involved in these kinds of Mobile Apps, it is unfortunate that our children are testing with these Apps.”

After TikTok responded that it was experiencing a daily financial loss of $500,000 and 250 jobs had been put at risk, the ban was eventually lifted, at which point the app’s downloads surged.

No reason for some blocks

However, not all website and app bans are justified, explained or commented upon by the government. In August 2018, for example, the country’s telecom minister informed parliament that since January 2016, the Department of Telecom had asked internet service providers to ban 11,045 websites, news agency Press Trust of India reported. Yet the minister didn’t offer any explanations on why these websites had been targeted.

One site that has been blocked on multiple occasions is the Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine. In the past few months, other sites that have been banned include audio streaming site SoundCloud, encrypted messaging service Telegram, and graphic design website Behance, among others. According to IFF’s Gupta, the reasons for the blocks are not disclosed.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

In January, IFF received several complaints from users that they couldn’t access Reddit. The IFF then invited users to fill an online form to share the list of sites and VPNs that they were unable to access. By late March it had received nearly 200 responses from across the country. Reddit frequently appeared, as did several other major platforms including Spotify, Alexa.com, SoundCloud, Telegram and several VPNs. The largest number of complaints came from those who were Reliance Jio customers, followed by Airtel.

An Airtel Spokesperson said that the company “supports an open internet and does not block any content on its network unless directed by the authorities/court in accordance with the applicable law.”

A Jio spokesperson declined to comment.

To save India’s open internet

Gupta calls these “core net neutrality violations,” as internet service providers are legally obliged to provide equal access to all internet content. This, he says, “ultimately results in a very different version of the internet from the global commons and allows the ISPs, even sometimes political interests, to become gatekeepers to access of information.”

While India has net neutrality rules in place – thanks to a massive campaign in 2015 called Save the Internet – the problem, says Gupta, is a lack of enforcement. “A policy fix is required to enforce net neutrality rules,” he says.

In March, IFF relaunched a campaign for an open internet, asking users to report net neutrality violations and sign a petition asking the Department of Telecom and the country’s telecom regulator to introduce a clear enforcement mechanism. Some of these efforts are showing signs of success already, says Gupta, as the regulator is considering issuing a consultation paper on enforcing net neutrality.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

Kushal Das, an India-based member of the Tor Project and a developer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says telecom companies like Jio block all VPNs so they retain insights into users’ browsing preferences that can be useful for advertisers.

“If you use a VPN, Jio will not know your taste in food, et cetera,” says Das. But Tor software can bypass these blocks and the number of Tor users in India has shot up three times since October 2017 to roughly 60,000 now, says Das.

“We should be able to ask people in power why blockades are being implemented,” says Das.

Policy points to restrictions

However, the Narendra Modi-led government has been keen to bring in rules for greater control over data and the internet.

In February, the government proposed a draft national e-commerce policy that sees data as “a collective resource” or a “national asset” that the government holds in trust but which can be auctioned off, like a coal mine. The draft also cautioned that this belongs to Indians and cannot be extended to foreigners.

IFF’s Gupta says the fact that the very framework of its drafting has not been made sufficiently public is worrying. “It may all seem very dull and dry but … any platform changes, any changes to government policy in India will reflect in demand in Europe and America eventually,” he says, due the large internet user base in India.

For now, in the days after a general election, all these policy proposals are on hold and it’s not clear how soon a new government would turn its attention to internet policies.

The one thing that activists can take some relief in is the fact that the government has acknowledged at least some of the internet shutdowns in the country were implemented without sufficient cause. In December, the Department of Telecom, in response to a request for information filed by IFF, said that “frequent internet suspension orders were being issued by various State governments… even in situations where it is not warranted.” It added that it had asked all state governments to “sensitize concerned officials/agencies” against such actions.

It’s anyone’s guess how long that pause will last.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/top-10-vpn-megha-bahree-may-21-2019-in-parts-of-india-internet-shutdowns-are-a-fact-of-life

Open Data and Land Ownership

sumandro — 2019-05-22T11:32:18Z

In this chapter of the recently published volume on State of Open Data, Tim Davies and Sumandro Chattapadhyay discuss how the lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems. State of Open Data, edited by Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein, and Fernando Perini, is published by African Minds and International Development Research Centre, Canada.

State of Open Data: Website and Book (Open Access)

Chapter on Open Data and Land Ownership: Zenodo (PDF)

Key Points

- Global availability of land ownership and land deals data is patchy, but, when available, it has been used by individual citizens, entrepreneurs, civil society, and journalists.

- Over the last decade, a number of responsible data lessons have been learned. These lessons can provide guidance on how to balance transparency and privacy and on how to draw research conclusions from partial data.

- In spite of large donor investments in land registration systems, few resources are currently made available to enable open data related to these projects. There are untapped opportunities as a result.

- Lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership

Youths come forward to augment Assamese Wikisource project

NE NOW NEWS — 2019-05-21T16:03:43Z

Assamese Wikisource is a sister-project of Assamese Wikipedia, where Assamese books with expired copyrights are available.

The blog post was published in NE NOW NEWS on May 17, 2019.

In order to take the Assamese Wikisource project forward, few young men and women of the state involving in different fields, recently gathered in Guwahati to attend a workshop.

Assamese Wikisource is a sister-project of Assamese Wikipedia, where Assamese books with expired copyrights are available. The project owned by Wikimedia Foundation was launched in 2013.

A total of 14 volunteers from across the state participated in the workshop hosted by Centre for Internet and Society-Access to knowledge (CIS-A2K) in a city hotel.

Two experts–Jayanta Nath from Kolkata and Tito Dutta from Bangalore–were present as trainers for the workshop, say organisers.

The two-day event was coordinated by Gitartha Bordoloi, a physician based in Silchar and the administrator of Assamese Wikipedia and Wikisource.

“Wikisource sources hosts books, plays, lyrics, letters etc which are available in open source,” says an organiser.

PDF or similar files are added to Wikisource which are then converted to unicode form so that every information becomes searchable on the internet.

In addition to books that are hitherto copyright free, new books can also be donated by authors and can be added to the field.

Everyone can access and contribute to this collaborative project. Presently, Assamese Wikisource stands at ninth position out of eleven Indic languages. This can be due to less Wikisource projects and also lack of contributors.

In addition to the basic navigation on Wikisource, the participants learnt searching and uploading public domain works, using OCR to get the texts, correcting errors and creating final product for the readers, he says.

As a part of the workshop, the participants fully digitised three old Assamese books within a few hours. They also discussed the future aims, perspectives and goals of Assamese Wikipedia and Wikisource.

As a result of their persistent efforts, works of Srimanta Sankardev and Madhabdev, Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Rajanikanta Bordoloi, Hiteshwar Barbarua and some others are now available on Assamese Wikisource.

With the target of digitizing the books by an author in every one or two months, the volunteers have mulled to digitize the works of Padmanath Gohain Baruah, a luminary of Assamese literature.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/northeast-now-may-17-2019-youths-come-forward-to-augment-assamese-wikisource-project

"Aadhaar Reduced Agency in Citizens and Empowered Those in Positions of Authority"

Martin Moore — 2019-05-21T15:33:01Z

In the space of one election cycle, authoritarian governments, moneyed elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes, and turn social networks into battlefields. Facebook, Google and Twitter – where our politics now takes place – have lost control and are struggling to claw it back. As our lives migrate online, we are gradually moving into a world of datafied citizens and real-time surveillance. The entire political landscape has changed, with profound consequences for democracy.

The article by Martin Moore was published by NewsClick on May 20, 2019. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Written by Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age, is a compelling account of how democracy is being disrupted by the tech revolution, and what can be done to get us back on track. The following are excerpts from the chapter "Survellaince Democracy" of the book.

Tembhli, a remote rural village in northern Maharashtra, about 250 miles north of Mumbai, is rarely visited by high-powered politicians or prominent dignitaries. But on Wednesday, 29 September 2010, it found itself hosting not just the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, but the president of Congress, Sonia Gandhi; the chief and deputy chief ministers and the governor of Maharashtra; and the head of the recently established Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani. It was this last figure, the least well known of the distinguished group, who was the reason behind the visit, and who would subsequently play the most important role in its aftermath. Nilekani and the politicians were there to give out the first ten ‘unique identifiers’ to residents of Tembhli. These ten people received their own twelve-digit number, a number that would, from that day forward, distinguish each of them from every other Indian citizen, and indeed – combined with their biometric data – from every other citizen in the world. “With this,” Sonia Gandhi said, “Tembhli has got a special importance in the map of India. People of Tembhli will lead the rest of the country. It is a historic step towards strengthening the people of our nation.”

Governments of all stripes are prone to exaggerated rhetoric, but in this instance, Gandhi was proved right when she proclaimed that “starting from this tiny hamlet, the scheme will reach more than a billion people of this country.” Despite the change of government in 2014, by April 2016 a billion Indians had been allocated their unique identifier. By 2018 the number had exceeded 1.1 billion, out of a total population of just over 1.3 billion. It was, in the words of a Harvard Business School report, a “hugely ambitious project”, “the largest-scale project of its kind in the world”. Aadhaar, as the project was called, was “unique in its scale and ambition”.3 Each Aadhaar identifier included not just a twelve-digit number, but all ten fingerprints, iris scans from both eyes, and a photograph of each person’s face (with the potential for facial recognition later). By combining the number with one element of biometric data, the government believed, it could ensure that every Indian citizen had a single, verifiable, machine-readable identity. With this verifiable identity a citizen could open a bank account, receive welfare or pension payments, pay tax, apply for a driving license, or receive healthcare, regardless of literacy. In a country known for its administrative torpor and tortuous bureaucracy, where – in 2013 – only forty per cent of children’s births were even registered, such a scheme had the potential to let India leapfrog other democratic countries into the digital era, and make government not just digitally enabled but digitally empowered.

Yet this, for critics of the scheme, was one of its many flaws. “Aadhaar marks a fundamental shift in citizen–state relations,” Pranesh Prakash from India’s Centre for the Internet and Society wrote in the Hindustan Times, “from ‘We the People’ to ‘We the Government’.” Civil society activists objected to the government’s enhanced power, and the relative unaccountability of the body running Aadhaar, headed by Nandan Nilekani until 2014. “In effect,” tech developer and activist Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote, “they are beyond the rule of law.” Others had practical objections.

Biometric identification often did not work. A database of this size and importance was bound to attract hackers. Leaks were inevitable. Indeed, the Tribune newspaper in January 2018 revealed that it had been able to buy a service, for 500 rupees (less than $10), that gave it access to any of up to one billion Aadhaar details. Yet such objections were written off as ‘scaremongering’ and Aadhaar critics as “activists of the upper crust, upper class, wine ’n cheese, Netflix-watching social media elite”. On top of which, despite an Indian Supreme Court judgment in August 2017 that affirmed the fundamental right of Indians to privacy, by early 2018 Aadhaar had achieved such momentum as to appear unstoppable. If the government was able to navigate the various legislative challenges to the scheme, then there was also a queue of other nations keen to adopt something similar.

[…]

As the government pushed Aadhaar towards every interaction the state had with the citizen, evidence mounted of failures in the system.

In the north-eastern state of Jharkhand, an eleven-year-old girl died of starvation after her family stopped receiving their government food ration. Their ration card, the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy reported, “was not linked to Aadhaar”. The centre also reported on data, taken from the government’s websites, showing that in Rajasthan, where receiving rations was dependent on Aadhaar authentication, between a quarter and a third of people with ration cards did not receive rations between September 2016 and July 2017. In some ration shops, after having spent hours trying and failing to get their fingerprints read by the biometric machines, people lost their temper and smashed the machines on the ground.

Across India there were reports of machines not recognizing fingerprints, or only recognizing them after multiple attempts. Old people’s prints turned out to be more difficult to read, as were those of manual workers and fishermen. Since the system presumes guilt rather than innocence, the burden of proof lies with the citizen, not with the state. To claim a ration, apply for a scholarship or buy a train ticket, you have to prove who you are before receiving it. The obligation lies with the citizen to prove she is not a fraud. Even if she is not, and the failure is not with her but with the system, she pays for the system’s failure, not the government. To dispute a decision made by the machine means going to the nearest large town – often many miles away – and convincing an official that the problem is with the machine or the digital record, not with you. It is not surprising that some people wrecked Aadhaar machines in their rage.

While the system was found to reduce agency in citizens, it empowered those in positions of authority. Central government was able to make public services conditional on authentication by Aadhaar (despite repeated court rulings that Aadhaar be voluntary, not mandatory). This conditionality could then be extended to the level and type of public services available to individuals. In fact, it had to be for many services – distinguishing pensioners from non-pensioners, for example. Yet in this conditionality, there is plenty of scope for harm and abuse. In 2017 the independent media site Scroll.in reported a rising number of HIV-positive patients who were dropping out of treatment programmes because they were required to use their Aadhaar numbers and were fearful of their condition becoming public.

Equally, while Aadhaar itself did not provide any information about caste, ethnicity, religion or language, once it was linked to other databases, most notably the National Population Register, then it became possible to identify people by group. Formal group identification by the state has an ignominious history. During the apartheid era in South Africa, the penultimate number on the South African identity card indicated race. In the Rwandan genocide in 1994, anyone who had ‘Tutsi’ on their identification was liable to be killed. In Nazi Germany in 1938, every Jewish citizen had ‘J’ stamped on their ID cards and passports. In India, where political and religious divisions are closely intertwined, there is good reason to be anxious about new opportunities for group identification.

Thanks to Aadhaar, companies started to build services using unique identification. A series of ‘trust platforms’ emerged, built on top of Aadhaar, where employers – and others – could access and authenticate people’s identity. A company called TrustID advertised itself as “India’s first, unique and comprehensive online verification platform”. Through TrustID an employer could check whether a potential employee had any criminal or civil convictions, or whether that person had a good or bad reputation (based on a news search and social media profiling). The company even encouraged women to check up on potential husbands they had found via marriage websites. Other international companies integrated Aadhaar into existing services. This is similar to the way in which companies work with platforms like Facebook to profile, and target, individuals based on their personal information – except in this instance doing it via the government. All the same questions about trust, privacy, freedom and power arise, with even greater political potency. The state and private companies are in partnership to track citizens constantly and to gather as much data as they can on them – data that they can then use for commercial or political purposes. This opaque, asymmetrical knowledge of the citizen seems like the reverse of what was intended by democratic transparency, especially in the absence of strong privacy and data protection. “Totalitarian states often do this against the wishes of their citizens,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the president of the Centre for Policy Research, writes, yet “in our democracy, our consent is being mobilized to put an imprimatur over more control and arbitrariness.”

In August 2017, the Supreme Court of India came to a unanimous 9–0 decision that Article 21 of the Indian Constitution did guarantee a fundamental right to privacy. As such, it was not lawful for the government to make it mandatory for people to identify themselves using a unique identifier like Aadhaar, except in specific circumstances. To some this looked like a huge blow to the grand project. The Supreme Court decision “raises serious questions about Aadhaar”, lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan argued in India’s Financial Express, and appeared to send “a direction to the central government to create a regime to ensure that privacy rights are not trammelled by other private parties”. The judgment was about privacy broadly, and did not refer to specific cases like Aadhaar, but was seen as the basis from which future challenges to the scheme could be launched. The Modi government, however, appeared to carry on regardless. In October it linked Aadhaar to driving licence applications. By mid-December, the government had made Aadhaar mandatory if citizens wanted to access any of 140 government services.

Nandan Nilekani, who had stepped down as chair of Aadhaar in 2014 in order to become a candidate for the Congress party, railed against those who criticized the scheme. There was, he claimed, an “orchestrated campaign” to malign the system. “I think this so-called anti-Aadhaar lobby is really just a small bunch of liberal elites who are in some echo chamber,” he told an Indian business news channel. Anyway, Nilekani argued, it was too late for the naysayers to stop it. Too many people were now enrolled. It was too integral to the provision of services. Others saw attacks on Aadhaar as political, arguing that Congress was using it for political gain prior to the 2019 election, and that this would backfire. “Aadhaar today is not just a number,” the editor of India’s Economic Timeswrote. “The Congress envisaged it as a means of identity but the Modi government has taken it to a different level. It has become a weapon in the hands of the poor and a powerful tool to fight entrenched black money interests. It is now a symbol of anti-corruption, anti-black money drives, a symbol of efficient allocation of welfare benefits.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsclick-martin-moore-may-20-2019-aadhaar-reduced-agency-in-citizens-and-empowered-those-in-positions-of-authority

Project Tiger 2019 Coordinator position open

gopala — 2019-05-27T06:28:38Z

To contribute to support, and coordinate of the work of the Project Tiger, we are looking for a creative, dedicated individual to join the team as a coordinator. Please note that women, especially those from socioeconomically marginalized communities, and women who are returning to work after a hiatus will be given preference.

Project Background

In India, Wikipedia exists in 23 Indian languages. All of these Wikipedias are in the early growth phase having a range of articles from few thousands to 100,000+ articles. The typical size of an Indian language community is only to have around or less than 100 people making 5+ edits every month. While there are many social economic and technical reasons for the size and activity of the Indian language communities, learnings from successful projects in the past have demonstrated that we can provide specific interventions to support these communities.

Many active Indian language Wikipedia editors tend to contribute more actively when they are provided support for contributing equipment and internet expenses. This was evident from the success of the pilot program initiated by the Wikimedia India chapter. The recently launched hardware donation program also had a lot of interest from the Indian region.

Wikipedia communities usually show interest participating in contests and edit-a-thons. Well known examples are Wikipedia Asian Month, Punjab edit-a-thon, Women’s history month.

More than 80% edits of all Wikipedias are made by around 2% editors of the community. While many editing promotion activities aspire to attract new editors who are hard to retain, we can sustain more editing activity by empowering existing active editors.

Combining these insights, we propose to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages by launching this pilot program which will (a) support active and experienced Wikipedia editors through the donation of laptops and stipends for internet access and (b) sponsor a language-based contest that aims to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.

Responsibilities

The CIS-A2K team is primarily based in the Bangalore office of CIS, and the Project Tiger coordinator, henceforth PTC, will be expected to work out of the same office.

To support and drive outreach of the work being done by the CIS-A2K team, the PTC will be responsible includes but not limited to:

Supporting Project tiger related communication, documentation and coordination
Supporting Project Tiger Chromebook disbursal.
Supporting internet stipend distribution and reimbursement.
Supporting creation and updation of statistics.
Feedback collection and surveys.
Logistics coordination of offline events.

Characteristics of a coordinator

Accountability
Awareness and sensitivity regarding issues of gender and sexuality
Critical appreciation of open knowledge initiatives
Effective communication
Inclusive collaboration
Intellectual curiosity and openness
Respect for diversity
Strong cross-cultural competency

Ability to learn-at-work, especially about the Wikimedia ecosystem

Eligibility criteria

These are the eligibility criteria

Basic criteria

Graduate in any discipline
Fluent in English and excellent communication skills in English and working knowledge (or better) of at least one other Indian language

Technical

Basic understanding of functioning of Wikipedia, and ideally of other Wikimedia projects too

Location and Remuneration

The position is based out of the Bangalore office of CIS.

Monthly remuneration will be decided after selection. Expected monthly remuneration is around INR 28,000. As this is a consultant position, no other benefit is available

Application Process

We invite interested (and eligible) candidates to apply for the position before 7 June 2019 sending us the following documents to tito+ptc2019@cis-india.org (do not miss +ptc2019 part from the email id, it is a filter for us) with “Application for Project Tiger (Coordinator)” as the subject:

Cover letter (2 pages): This should introduce your relevant academic, professional, and other experiences, and describe the kind of work you look forward to do as part of the CIS-A2K team. We strongly recommend reading the Supporting Indian Language Wikipedia Project page[1] on Meta while writing this cover letter, as well as for preparation for the interview to follow (if you are shortlisted for interview).
CV: This should provide details of your academic, professional, and other achievements

Footnotes:

[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/project-tiger-2019-co-ordinator-position-open