Centre for Internet and Society

Ideology and ICT Policies

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-05-10T10:21:49Z

For better policies, decision-makers need to know their own and others’ biases, and consider what others are doing, writes Shyam Ponappa in an article published in the Business Standard on 4 November 2010.

Why do the same facts regarding people’s needs for ICT infrastructure give rise to different policies? Apart from problematic motivation such as malicious intent and opportunism, even well-intentioned policy-makers may prescribe entirely divergent solutions for a given situation. This is evident if one compares India’s broadband policies with those of most countries. There are at least two reasons for this: differing perceptions of the facts, and differences in underlying beliefs and assumptions, i.e. ideology, as distinct from objective data.

Consider the facts of India’s ICT space. In one sense, there has been spectacular success in the communications sector. One statistic cited as evidence is the phenomenal increase in mobile phone subscriptions (over 12 million in September 2010). Equally, to those who focus on aspects like the shortfall in services outside the big cities and towns, or the meagre broadband coverage and its inaccessibility in rural areas (i.e. in much of the country), the communications sector falls tragically short of its potential, and requires policy change.

In this time of India Rising interrupted by the Great Recession, there is a stark contrast between the orientation of our ICT policies and that of most other countries. One area is the extent of government intervention and spending on broadband development. Governments of most advanced economies have stepped in to dramatically improve their broadband networks and policies for user access. This is not only in the EU where, historically, the approach is that government acts to extend consumer welfare, but also in America, the UK and Australia, which are considered much more free-market-oriented in their approach, and in many countries in Asia, including China. Unlike in America since Reagan, regulatory intervention in Europe is part of more supportive policies at the national and local levels. But this time around, even America has embarked on a comprehensive Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, with the goals of providing access to users in unserved areas, improving access in underserved areas, supporting public interest schemes for broadband access, improving broadband use by public safety agencies, and stimulating demand for broadband, economic growth and jobs; there is also a separate Rural Utilities Service.*(Click for graph)

With regard to underlying assumptions and beliefs, an analysis on how economic doctrines affect policies by Robert D Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation offers a way to think through alternatives for better decisions.** His analysis is on ICT, although it can be applied to all sectors. To quote from his conclusion, for advocates and policy-makers, “differences over doctrine cause partisans to view facts differently and to focus on small segments of complex debates, leading to a breakdown of constructive dialog and much ‘talking past each other’.”

He summarises four ideologies or economic doctrines:

Conservative Neoclassical (CNC)
Liberal Neoclassical (LNC)
Neo-Keynesian (NK)

Innovation Economics, also called structuralist-evolutionary, neo-Schumpeterian, or evolutionary economics (IE)

While he describes differences in nuanced detail, the simplified abstractions rendered as a logic tree in the accompanying diagram (above) show how economic beliefs affect network policies.

CNCs are characterised as being less concerned with fairness, and less likely to expect market failures. Therefore, network and broadband markets in which governments do not intervene are considered to be competitive, and require no unbundling or price prescriptions. Their bias is for pure competition.

LNCs are more concerned with fairness, as are NKs and IEs. They accept that telecommunication markets are not competitive, and that there may be market failures. LNCs and NKs would use policy to increase competition in different ways. LNCs expect more competition to lead to increased consumer surpluses. LNCs favour regulated competition, viewing more competition as better. NKs want more competition through directed government subsidies, e.g. for municipal broadband or to small companies (which they consider less rapacious than large corporations).

IEs believe broadband markets have economies of scale, and that increased competition could result in excessive and redundant investments. They consider duplication of existing, expensive infrastructure as inefficient investment. IEs view communications infrastructure as a “general purpose technology” that drives economic activity, innovation and productivity. Therefore, they advocate policies that invest in higher-speed broadband, and in extending network services to more people, favouring a national broadband policy. The US National Broadband Plan defines broadband as a “Transformative General Purpose Technology”, and most countries practise IE. Irrespective of their economic philosophies, most countries have embarked on an aggressive broadband plan.

In comparison, India’s approach does not fit any of these categories. There are no policy incentives for broadband, and actions like the spectrum auctions this year indicate a focus on collecting government revenues rather than on facilitating communication services. Whereas the OECD countries and other Asian economies are working on network resource-sharing schemes, India seems to have previous-generation preoccupations: revenue-collection-for-the-government, increasing competition per se, or abstruse technology considerations, such as loading the most traffic on every unit of commercially available spectrum, instead of maximising the economic benefits from it. Costs and benefits in the public interest are apparently ignored.

BSNL, MTNL and DD have networks that, if they could be channelled with the right mix of policies and private enterprise, could be part of the overall backbone infrastructure for open network operations, as is being done by a consortium in Singapore. If our policy-makers understand their biases as well as those of others, they could adapt beneficial policies from other countries, as demonstrated by many countries with different philosophies converging on improving broadband.

* “Broadband Stimulus Policy in Europe and the US: A Comparative Review”, Dariusz Adamski, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School: http://www.nyls.edu/user_files/1/3/4/30/84/187/245/Adamski,%20SPRING%202009,%2018%20MEDIA%20L.%20&%20POL%E2%80%99Y.pdf

** “Network Policy & Economic Doctrines”, Robert D Atkinson, The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, October 2010: http://www.itif.org/files/2010-network-policy.pdf

Read the original in Business Standard

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/ideology-and-ict

Report: Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, 23 Oct 2010, Doha, Qatar

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:43:25Z

A summary of the event "Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum" held in Doha.

Although I arrived in early morning of Saturday, 23 October 2010, I managed to attend Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, held at Sharq Village, Doha Qatar. Here is below a summary of the event.

The welcoming speech was given by Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. Al Jaber spoke about the importance of open digital environments for the region, and outlined specific initiatives that ictQATAR is leading to embrace it (establishment of incubation center, drafting policies that encourage open source in government and arabizing content). She noted that "The Arab world has a strong and important voice that must be heard. Embracing a digitally open world will put us at the forefront of innovation and help propel us towards being a knowledge based economy." The full speech of Dr. Al Jaber is available here.

Michelle Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation provided her insights of openness. She described elegantly openness as “a state of mind” and is about spreading innovation. To Baker, if you want to be effective on the internet, you need to have “scale”. Openness is important for “scale”. Creative Commons is a framework of how to work with a copyright system and share ideas. Mozilla intends to build a layer of the internet designed for individuals to make civil and social value. According to Baker, there are many degrees of “openness” and it up to the users contributing to open projects and the companies to choose between the various levels. She argues that openness does not mean “free” and believe that in certain areas this might hold some truth, but the matter is far from being settled.

Joi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons gave an interesting presentation entitled “Innovation and Digital Content Rights”. He described from his own experience while working for Japanese IT companies how innovation was perceived pre the internet era and afterward. He also compared between the traditional style of IT innovation (governments, large companies, experts) and the new style of innovation with the arrival of the internet (users contributing to open source and open content projects). To joi, the internet is made of various layers and stacks. Creative Commons is the next stack. It basically lowers the costs and creates an explosion in knowledge and innovation. He gave examples of organizations that are using Creative Commons including Wikipedia, Aljazeera, and Governments in New Zealand and Australia.

Chris Dibona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google, spoke about open source. He outlined the motivations behind releasing code by developers. He described how Google practices open source projects such as “Chromium”. One audience member asked Dibona about Google’s attention in the region in relation to open source. He replied that Google needs to learn more about the region and the culture of the Middle East. His full presentation is available here.

Professor Michael Nelson, a visiting professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University spoke about “open clouds”. He emphasised that we are living in new world where small countries can make big impact in technology world. Estonia is the most “wired” country in Europe. Skype changed the way we do business. Qatar can provide the seed for the magic cloud. This can be achieved by having the right policies in the right time.

The second panel entitled “Openness in Science and Technology” was moderated by John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons. He gave introductory remarks to the use of CC in science. His full presentation is available here.

Shaikah Al- Jaber, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel International gave a presentation entitled “Open Innovation for Telecom Companies in the Middle East”. She mainly spoke about innovation in the telecommunication sector and how it can be achieved. Her full presentation is available here.

Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat, gave a presentation entitled “From Linux to Beyond”. He went through the history and development of “open source”. Redhat was the first cooperation to take “open source” into the commercial arena. It was founded in 1983 and it currently employs 3500 employees with offices in 29 countries. He also discussed other issues related to open source community and open source adoption. His full presentation is available here.

Habib Hadid, the founder of Yalla Startup and Yamili.com did not give a presentation, but instead spoke spontaneously about business and how innovation and openness can help it. He recommended at the end to consider “innovation as a human right”.

Lucio Rispo, a strategic research director for the Qatar Science and Technology Park, spoke about the internet technological revolution and how it is changing the world. He described several initiatives that were taken in Doha, Qatar including IQRA to spread technology and innovation. His full presentation is available here.

The third panel was about “Openness in Government” that was moderated by Professor Michael Nelson. Sunil Abraham, executive Director for the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India provided interesting remarks about the internet and openness from the perspective of developing countries especially India. He also mentioned the importance of putting government funded research under open transparent and open models.

Paul Keller, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain, Knowledgeland, Netherlands, discussed the ways to promote openness in the public sector through the use of Creative Commons licensing model. To view his presentation click here. Marwan Marouf Mahmod, Executive Director of ICT Industry Development, ictQATAR spoke about his experience and the initiatives that they have taken in ictQatar.

The final panel was entitled “Culture, Creativity and Openness”. There were 3 speakers in this panel. Eric Steuer, Creative Commons Director and the moderator of the session gave an introduction to CC. He described how CC is being used in Education, music, museums, design, films and journalism. His full presentation is available here.

Addulrahman Al Qataba is a web and application developer from Qatar. He presented his philosophy on “open life”. He developed several projects that serve the open source community in mobile applications. The full presentation is available here.

Arend Kuster, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation (BQF) outlined the initiative that Bloomsbury Publishing is taking in Qatar to spread knowledge through printed books and journals published in Arabic and English.

Roger Mandle, spoke about museums and his experience as a director of the Qatar Museum Authority.

CC Arab World Second Meeting
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Sharq Village
12:30 p.m – 9:00 p.m.

The CC Arab world was attended by lawyers from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and also users and enthusiasts supporting CC from across the region. The meeting was divided into two sessions. The first was for all attendees and the second was divided into two groups one for users and another for lawyers.

The first session started with a welcoming note by Joi Ito, who stressed the importance of reaching consensus decisions on important matters related to CC in the Arab world. He noted the difficulties associated with organising such an event and the efforts that CC has invested to bring all people together. Donna thanked the organizers and the supporters of the event particularly ictQATAR. She also set out the agenda for the meeting. Diane spoke about the Affiliate Enhancement Program and Michelle gave details on drafting road maps for each jurisdictions. Speakers from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the UAE presented their road maps to CC.

After discussion and questioning, Diane gave an introduction to CC naming policy in other jurisdictions including Spanish speaking countries. The discussion of CC naming policy started with Rami Olwan writing in Arabic suggested terms for English CC licences. There were two views in relation to the translation of the English terms to Arabic. The first view came from lawyers who want to use legal words that might not sound appealing to Arabic users of the licences. The second view came from users who want to use words that might not be legal and enforceable in courts. After discussion that lasted three hours, a decision was reached on each term. It was agreed to either to use المشاع الإبداعي (creative Commons) or use the English version alone. Attribution: نسب المصنَف; ShareAlike: الترخيص بالمثل, NoDerivatives: منع الاشتقاق; NonCommercial: غير تجاري.

I attended the second meeting of the session for lawyers. Diane and Joi were present at this session. Diane spoke then allowed each of the jurisdiction leads to speak. Hala Essalmawi from CC Egypt spoke about the A2K project in the library of Alexandria, Egypt and how it was important to start the project there.

I spoke also about the importance for CC in governments and education. Pierre El Khoury and Mohammed AL Darwish spoke about their upcoming events that will feature Lawrence Lessig as a speaker to the Lebanese Bar Association. Mohammad from CC Lebanon also spoke about his involvement in the Consumers International and the reports that he produced for A2K in Lebanon.

Omar Al Taweel presented his views to CC of how CC should proceed in Jordan. Several questions were asked by the lawyers and Diane gave answers. The meeting ended as some of the attendees had to leave for the airport.

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/report-digitally-open-innovation-and-open-access-forum-23-oct-2010-doha-qatar

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:14:30Z

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, a movement in which Open Society Foundations have played a key role. It maps the vast terrain of legal, cultural, and technical issues that activists and thinkers aligned to the movement negotiate every day.

Produced with the support of the Open Society Information Program, the book aims to make accessible a diverse range of subject matter, including access to medicines, software patents, food security and access to agricultural biotechnology, the public domain, remix culture, free expression, and semiotic democracy.

It features over 60 essays from leaders in the A2K movement, including influential thinkers and doers like Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos, Lawrence Liang and James Love. The book also contains a chapter by Senior Information Program Manager Vera Franz, exploring the potential to redress the copyright balance of a new international instrument to mandate a minimum set of limitations and exceptions.

An electronic copy of the book has been made available for free download under a specially crafted Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) license which additionally allows for translations.

Date: November 2010
Source: Zone Books
Author: Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds.

Contents include:

The Emergence of the Politics of A2K
The Conceptual Terrain of A2K
Strategies and Tactics of A2K
A2K in the Future: Visions and Scenarios

Need help downloading a file or playing a clip? Click here.

Download the CC-licensed electronic copy of the book. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (PDF Document - 7041K)

Link to the original here

NEW

The end of the twentieth century saw an explosive intrusion of intellectual property law into everyday life. Expansive copyright laws have been used to attack new forms of sharing and remixing facilitated by the Internet. International laws extending the patent rights of pharmaceutical companies have threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries. Recently, a multitude of groups around the world have emerged to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counterpolitics of “access to knowledge” or “A2K.” They include software programmers who take to the streets to attack software patents, AIDS activists who fight for generic medicines in poor countries, subsistence farmers who defend their right to food security and seeds, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to defend the digital commons. In this volume, Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have created the first anthology of the A2K movement, mapping this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. Intellectual property law has become not only a site of new forms of transnational activism, but also a locus for profound new debates and struggles over politics, economics, and freedom. This collection vividly brings these debates into view and makes the terms of intellectual property law legible in their political implications around the world.

“It’s hard to believe that the ‘definitive’ book has already been written about a movement as new as A2K. It’s even more unusual for an edited collection of essays to have the power of a monograph. But this collection of essays is both the definitive explanation of the access to knowledge movement and a beautifully constructed conversation about the various ideas, conceptual, political and organizational, that make it up. From Amy Kapczynski’s superb overview, to Yochai Benkler’s brilliant meditation on the commons, to Lawrence Liang’s superbly titled ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book,’ the central ideas of A2K are laid out with a freshness and power that is remarkable. And the rest of the contributors in the essays gathered here are just as strong. This is a must-have for university libraries, but it is also something that will be read intently, tactically, and sometimes uneasily, in venues ranging from WIPO to the university classroom. Highly recommended.”

James Boyle, Duke University, author of The Public Domain

“This is the first book of its kind. It comprehensively describes the intellectual contours of a powerful and emerging social movement and serves as a handbook for activism. The A2K movement is disparate and diverse. So assembling a volume that takes account of its various strands and influences is no small task. Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have selected works from the most influential writers and practitioners of this new distributed politics. I will certainly assign this book to my survey course next year.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, author of The Googlization of Everything

See the news in Zone Books

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/access-to-knowledge

Crisis for identity or identity crisis?

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:16:30Z

The hurry with which the government is pushing its most ambitious project to assign a number (UID) to every citizen without any feasibility study or public debate has raised many questions.

“It will empower all”, declared Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he issued the first UID card to a villager from Tembhli village in Maharashtra. But as days pass and relevant issues come for public discourse, many people have begun to doubt prime minister’s assurance.

Unique identification number (UID), named Aadhaar is a 12 digit identification number that the government plans to issue to all citizens that will not only be an identity card but will also serve multiple purposes for its holder.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has been assigned the responsibility to execute this proposal as Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Mr Nilekani leads a team of 120 people having the task of assigning unique identities to 1.2 billion people. He plans to take Aadhaar beyond being just a 12-digit identification number for every Indian. This ambitious and mammoth project is pitched to handle projects as diverse as a national-highway toll-collection system, a technology backbone for the forthcoming Goods and Services Tax (GST) and reform of the vast public distribution system (PDS) for subsidized foodgrains.

Government plans to cover 60 per cent of the nation’s population under this project in the next three years starting October this year. This project is intended to collect identification data about all residents in the country. It is said that it will impact the PDS and NREGA programmes, and plug leakages and save the government large sums of money.

But the UID will not replace ration cards and passports, and is not mandatory as of now. No questions would be asked related to language, caste or religion of the person applying for UID.

The UID number is linked to the fingerprints and the pattern of the eyes of the person assigned that number. This inimitable biometric data ensures that any given number is linked to only one person. So there is hardly a chance of any misgiving or stealing of rations and wages from the holder. It is believed that soon banks, insurance companies, cell phone providers and hospitals will demand UID number before doing business with you.

In short, in the future our name, address, bank account numbers, personal information and identity as a whole will be solely linked and governed by those 12 digit number we hold.

Critics say that there has been no feasible study conducted about UID project, neither has there been a cost benefit analysis done. To add to it, there are serious concerns about data and identity theft.

But apart from the buzz about this new project, there is an air of suspicion surrounding it too.

The launch of the UID has led to a flurry of debate amongst policy-makers, legal experts and civil society at large. In response, Mr Nilekani claims the UID to be “a foolproof project implemented at a low cost”.

However, some critical issues remain unanswered.

One of the major objections about UID is that there has been no feasible study conducted, neither has there been a cost benefit analysis done. There is no project document as such.

To add to it, there are serious concerns about data and identity theft.

In a world where cyber terrorism is the new threat, and the countries are gearing themselves to protect against such a threat, projects like UID come as an open invitation to terrorist outfits to infiltrate their defences.

The UID number is linked to fingerprints and the patterns of the holder’s eye. But medical studies show that our eye's iris patterns can change due to aging, disease or malnourishment. More over the government has no alternative option for many millions who fall outside this pattern of identification owing to callused hands, corneal scars and cataract induced by malnourishment. Even as enrollment is poised to begin, authentication is still an unstudied field. Fake fingerprints can very easily be made. Hence, the unique element of these numbers can be tampered.

Recently, Sunil Abraham, Director, Centre for Internet and Society has remarked, “If I leave my fingerprints around, my identity can be stolen and transactions done on my behalf. They could use that number, to share information about anybody.”

A cyber-criminal having access to any person’s identification number can virtually control that person. Telephone numbers, addresses, family history can all be tracked down. Bank accounts can be manipulated and transactions done without the person knowing. Since these days, a lot of money transactions are done through internet, a cyber criminal can easily steal few UID numbers and impersonate those persons to manipulate the bank or credit card accounts.

In an even uglier scenario, where people might be tracked and judged by their numbers, a criminal’s fingerprints left behind on a scene of crime can be mixed with some one else through a slight manipulation and exchange of UID numbers, making an entirely innocent person a suspect in the eyes of law. Some incompetent or revengeful government officials can also frame innocents for a crime one never committed.

Human rights activists claim that a tech-savvy person can hack into the system and gain any person’s information from the servers unless the government tightens the defenses. A reminiscence of the Bruce Willis starrer Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard 4, a bunch of techno geeks operating from trailer truck hold the entire United States hostage as they hack into every main frame computing network from transportation, communication, power, defence and individual accounts.

The number can also be used for real time tracking, profiling, mounting surveillance and ‘convergence’ of information. Apart from the concerns about identity theft, the number can also invade our private space. If in the future insurance companies and hospitals merge their databases, the insurance companies can increase premium, or simply refuse insurance cover to a person who is not keeping well.

Poor labourers and immigrants who are on the move in search of work could also be the victims of the ‘Aadhaar’. In future, in case of card being lost or misplaced, poor labour would be threatened with financial and welfare exclusion. Where being a legal resident is to be closely tied in with having a UID number, it could render the poor vulnerable to exclusion and expulsion by exploitative employers and others.

Interestingly, few months back in June, UK government scrapped the plans for the controversial 5 billion pounds National Identity Card scheme. The UK government now plans to destroy all information held on the National Identity Register, effectively dismantling the whole system.

Though Mr Nilekani claims that UID would be a cost effective project, however deeper analysis throws a different story. It is reported that the UIDAI project will cost Rs 45,000 crores to the exchequer in the next 4 years. This does not seem to include the costs that will be incurred by Registrars, Enrollers, additional costs on the PDS system to connect it to the UID, the estimated cost to the end user and to the number holder.

Defending himself from the flurry of queries, Mr Nilekani has stressed that the identification number is not mandatory for everyone and only those interested can enroll. The project aims to first enroll the poor and uneducated masses promising them better wages and ration schemes. As was reported, the first villager to get the UID card was ‘happy but did not know its benefits’. Critics allege that the reason why Aadhaar is selling itself to millions of poor in the country is to create a foundation of legitimacy to deflect concerns over its possible misuse, unsafe technology and huge costs. Later, with a larger foundation, the UID can be enforced upon all citizens in the near future as the apex identity proof, making everyone vulnerable to several risks described above.

The UIDAI project has proceeded so far without any legal authorization. There has been no feasibility study or cost-benefit analysis preceding the setting up of such a pervasive project. All calculations are of the back-of-the envelope variety. Data theft is a very serious threat to every individual and the country as a whole. There are deeply disconcerting facts about the project that should make even a die-hard UID supporter worry about its long term implications.

This article has been written by Sushant Sharma. He is a college fresher and avid reader.

Interestingly, few months back in June, UK government scrapped the plans for the controversial 5 billion pounds National Identity Card scheme. The decision came after about 15,000 citizens had already been enrolled and given their numbers. The UK government now plans to destroy all information held on the National Identity Register, effectively dismantling the whole system.

The UK system like the Indian UID had also started with much fanfare, claiming to save nearly 900 million pounds for the taxpayers. While the project was axed, UK’s Home Secretary Theresa May stated - “It (the identity card project) is intrusive and bullying, ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good.”

The same logic implies to the India as well. But instead of scraping this over-hyped-failure-in-the-making project, our Prime Minister claims the UID project “will empower all”. But will it actually? That is for us to decide now.

Read the original article here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/identity-crisis

October 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T12:02:11Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society!

News Updates

Internet, szabadon
A polgárjogi aktivisták konfrontálódtak és panaszkodtak, a Google és a Facebook hárított és panaszkodott az Internet at Liberty konferencián, amelyet kedden és szerdán rendezett a Google és a CEU Budapesten.
http://bit.ly/dwNhRw
Hogyan szűrik a kormányok az internetes tartalmakat?
Az internet szabadságáról tartanak háromnapos konferenciát Budapesten a Google és a Közép-Európai Egyetem (CEU) szervezésében. Kedden az internetes tartalmak szűrése volt a legfontosabb téma a rendezvényen.
http://bit.ly/aFApER
Konferencia az internetes szólásszabadságról Budapesten
Az internet és szólásszabadság viszonyát vitatják meg Budapesten, a Közép-Európai Egyetem és a Google szervezte, háromnapos konferencián
http://bit.ly/9evwE4
How the UID project can be a cause for concern
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), headed by Nandan Nilekani, is the UPA government's most ambitious project, where one billion Indians are branded with a unique identity number.
http://bit.ly/bl7INY
In new Facebook features, a comeback for community
Nearly 750 tweets bombard the web every second. Internet traffic is growing by 40 per cent a year. People post 2.5 billion photos on Facebook every month. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube. But who owns all that data? Until now, big business was in complete control and used the data to monetise operations. But all that is set to change. With Facebook launching two new features, ‘Groups' and a ‘Download your information,' the community is making a comeback.
http://bit.ly/arEi4V
Stiff Resistance Dogs India's ID Plan
An article about the UID project by Indrajit Basu in Asia Times Online.
http://bit.ly/bMcOSs
Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India
Glover Wright of the Center for Internet and Society talks about Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India at the Innovate/Activate Unconference in New York Law School on 24 September 2010.
http://bit.ly/alnjsn

Upcoming Events

Enabling Access to Education through ICT
ICT workshop in Delhi....Registrations open!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK

Network Culture: Archaeological and Artistic Interventions Public Seminar – Talk by Kristoffer Gansing and Linda Hilfing
Kristoffer Gansing and Linda Hilfling will give a talk on Network Culture on 8 November 2010 in the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
http://bit.ly/cEmOZw

Research

City in the Internet 1: Geography Imagined (Part 1)
“The estuaries that flirt with the land mass before they finally perish in the vast deep blue ocean beyond were perfect in their shape and grace. And you know what; from top it appears like a surreal landscape that is so restive and peaceful, almost heaven. The countryside is actually very beautiful”, says Pratyush Shankar in his latest blog post. A random conversation between two persons discovering the joys of seeing our existence through Google Earth!
http://bit.ly/9klUn1

A Digital Native coordinating Digital Natives
Samuel Tettner, joined CIS as a Research Coordinator for the Digital Natives project. He has written a blog entry about his experiences in the project.
http://bit.ly/cpJMQq
You Are Here
Geo-tagging applications are creating new and impromptu communities of true, says Nishant Shah in his column on Digital Natives in the Indian Express.
http://bit.ly/a64kj7
નિશાંત શાહ: ડિજિટલ પેઢીનો ઉદય
‘ડિજિટલ નાગરિક’ તેમને કહેવામાં આવે છે જેણે સામાન્ય જનજીવનમાં ડિજિટલ ટેક્નોલોજીના પ્રવેશ થઈ ગયા બાદ જન્મ લીધો છે. ડિજિટલ નાગરિકો દરેક જગ્યાએ છે. હવે સમય આવી ગયો છે કે આપણે એ જાણવાનો પ્રયાસ કરીએ કે આ લોકો કોણ છે, તેઓ શું કરી રહ્યા છે, તેઓ પોતાના અંગે શું વિચારે છે અને કેવી રીતે તેઓ કશું પણ જાણ્યા વગર આપણા ભવિષ્યને નવો આકાર આપવાનું કામ કરી રહ્યા છે. (A column by Nishant Shah in the Gujarati newspaper Divya Bhaskar)
http://bit.ly/9HnyBa

Digital Natives with a Cause?— Workshop in South Africa—FAQs
The second international Digital Natives Workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" will be held in Johannesburg from 7 to 9 November 2010. Some frequently asked questions regarding the upcoming workshop are answered in this blog entry.
http://bit.ly/c1XJHO

The silent rise of the Digital Native
In late August, this year, the world shook for many when they went online (on their computers, PDAs, iPads, laptops) and realised that the comfortable zone of talking, chatting, sharing and doing just about everything else, had suddenly, without a warning, changed overnight (or afternoon, or morning, depending upon the time-zone they lived in). With a single change in its privacy and location settings, Facebook, home to billions of internet hours consisting of relationships, friendships, professional networks, social gaming, entertainment trivia, memories and exchanges, allowed its users to geo-tag themselves when on-the-move.
http://bit.ly/bHY72Y

The geek shall inherit the earth
Demystifying the mysterious -agents changing the world around you...A column on Digital Natives by Nishant Shah in the Indian Express.
http://bit.ly/aq2BqY

Digital Natives Workshop in South Africa - Call for Participation
The African Commons Project, Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands for organising the second international workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" in Johannesburg from 07 to 09 November 2010. Send in your applications now!
http://bit.ly/d0rl7E

Telecom

Broad-basing Broadband
Education and training through the Internet need Commonwealth Games-like crisis management, says Shyam Ponappa in an article on broadband for education and training published in the Business Standard on 7 October 2010.
http://bit.ly/dnMtpU

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2010-bulletin

Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:26:09Z

Promoting Openness in Today's Digital World

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

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

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

Speakers:

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

8:45 a.m.      Registration Opens

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

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

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

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

11:15 a.m.     Break

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

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

                      John Wilbanks, Creative Commons, VP for Science - Moderator

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

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

                       Habib Haddad, Founder, Yalla Startup, Yamli.com

                       Lucio Rispo, Qatar Science and Technology Park

1:15 p.m.       Lunch Break

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

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

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

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

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

                       Eric Steur, Creative Commons Creative Director - Moderator

                       Abdulrahman Al-Otaiba, Web and Application Developer

                       Arend Kuster, Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation
                            Journals

                        Roger Mandle, Director, Qatar Museum Authority

4:15                End

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR

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

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

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

Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation

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

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

Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University

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

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

Panelists:

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society

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

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

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

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

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

Abdulrahman Al Otaiba

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

Habib Hadad, Founder & CEO, Yamli.com

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

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

Paul Keller, Senior Copyright Advisor, Knowledgeland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons

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

John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons, Creative Commons

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

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

See the original here

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

The Future of Journalism: EJC @ Picnic 2010

nishant — 2010-10-13T07:13:29Z

Nishant Shah was a speaker at the PICNIC 2010, in Amsterdam, where he made a presentation titled "Citizens in the time of Database Democracies : Information ecology and role of participatory technologies in India"

The relationship between citizenship and government informatics have historically been shaped through a series of debates around questions of citizenship, security, State-market collaborations, and right based discourse in India. Even before the information explosion caused by the emergence of digital and internet technologies, there has been a strident discourse around participatory democracy and technology mediated governance as ways of empowering the citizen's access to rights and resources in the country. With the emergence of new technologies of storage, retrieval and dissemination, these expectations have become more visible. The Indian Government has officially accepted the transition to become a S.M.A.R.T. (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent) State, with the rise of 'Netizens' who, in their access to new digital and internet technologies will change the very shape and structure of governance.

However, as the digital infrastructure develops and new kinds of citizen services and consumption come to the fore, battle-lines are being drawn between stakeholders. On the one hand are those who believe that this might be the opening of a Pandora’s Box for a country like India where a stark digital divide might create great inequality in citizens' access to State services and resources, producing unjust and discriminatory structures based on access, bandwidth and education. . On the other hand are those who celebrate the need for transparency, participation and access to governmentality that these e-governance initiatives usher in, addressing long standing questions of plutocratic governance, bureaucratic systems of denial of rights and widespread corruption. Both the warring factions draw upon partial data – of failed attempts and projects by different government initiatives to pilot studies initiated by different government and civil society organisations respectively – to make their arguments for and against the emergence of a 'Database Democracy' .premised on participatory politics facilitated by new media practices in the country.

Especially with the current rolling out of a Unique Identity Project (named Aadhar – The Hindi word for ‘Support’) these discussions have become more severe and the arguments have become angrier. It is not only timely but also necessary to examine the ecology of participatory technologies and processes in the country in order to look at the different sides of the debates and explore the role that new media practitioners and stakeholders would play in efficiently and responsibly establishing a protocol of open and transparent governance structures without compromising either the privacy, rights or safety of the citizens. This presentation explores the project Aadhar as symptomatic of a changing relationship between the State and its Citizens mediated by ICT technologies and stakeholders, to look at the ways in which new Citizenships are being forged in emerging information societies like India.

More news about the panel on Future of Journalism, arranged by the European Journalism Commission, is available at

http://futureofjournalism.net/index.php/EJC_at_PICNIC2010

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/picnic

Broad-basing Broadband

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-05-10T10:25:06Z

Education and training through the Internet need Commonwealth Games-like crisis management, says Shyam Ponappa in an article on broadband for education and training published in the Business Standard on 7 October 2010.

The central government and the Delhi administration have shown they can engage in sheer execution to save face for the Commonwealth Games. Couldn’t our governments choose to make similar efforts to improve an aspect of infrastructure that is perhaps the most powerful means for enhancing our productive capacity and quality of life: broadband? One might ask: why broadband, and not energy, water/sanitation, or roads…? While all infrastructure is essential, broadband gives the quickest, biggest bang for the buck, because of its nature vis-à-vis energy, water or transportation and our regulatory environment and functional organisation (for instance, the complexity of addressing power supply). If we could increase mobile phone coverage to present levels by reducing costs and increasing availability, it should be possible to do so for personal computer (PC) also, to draw on the wealth of free educational and training material for our vast numbers.

Unfortunately, for such infrastructure, there is no triggering crisis like the threat of failure of the Commonwealth Games, and consequently, no face-saving or glam factors, like the arrival of foreign teams and visitors. This article makes a case for a Commonwealth Games-type crisis management for broadband through a collage of factors.

Consider these aspects of our demographics1:

Nearly 460 million people are aged between 13 and 35 today.
Of these, 333 million are literate.
In 10 years from now, the countrywide average age will be 29, compared to 37 in the US and China, 45 in Europe, and 48 in Japan.
As many as 100 million Indians — the combined labour forces of Britain, France, Italy, and Spain — are projected to be added to our workforce by 2020, which is 25 per cent of the global workforce.

This indicates our productive potential. Its realisation would require education and training, efficient functioning, i.e. the matrix of enabling infrastructure, and organisation. If these needs remain unmet, the demographic opportunity can become the liability of an unproductive population, with attendant difficulties and social hazards.

We have many formal and informal institutions providing training and education. We add nearly 300,000 engineering graduates every year to our pool of 2 million engineers. India’s vocational training capacity is estimated at 3.1 million a year, whereas about 12.8 million people enter the workforce. However, the National Sample Survey (2004) found that only 2 per cent of the 15-29 age group had formal vocational training and another 8 per cent had non-formal vocational training. In the developed economies, the proportion of skilled workers is 60-80 per cent; Korea has 96 per cent skilled workers.2

Five years ago, McKinsey reported that only a quarter of India’s engineers were employable in the IT industry. Recently, a survey showed this has reduced to 18 per cent.3

Apart from training and education in specific disciplines, the processes that make for good work practices are: systems thinking, a scientific temper, and goal-oriented work practices to meet standards of quality and time. Then there are the attributes of playing team, while engaging in a hard-charging individual effort. All these skills and practices are necessary and can be learned and renewed over time.

How will our workforce of over 500 million, adding 12.8 million every year, have access to continuing education and training, information for civic amenities and facilities and easy, efficient access to commercial and public services? What about the prerequisites of schooling, vocational training and university education? To answer these questions, consider parallel developments in domains such as distance education, e-learning and smart applications. Here are glimpses of the transformation underway in university and secondary education, especially outside India:

iTunes U has become one of the world’s largest educational catalogues for free educational material. After three years, there are over 300 million downloads. Over 800 universities have their websites at iTunes U, including many of the top universities from the US, UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore and so on.
Khan Academy (http://khanacademy.org), a brilliant, free educational site by an ex-hedge fund analyst and manager, Salman Khan (Salman Khan of Silicon Valley, not Bollywood), covers mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, with over 18 million page views in August (http://khanacademy.org). Started in late 2006, Khan is reportedly developing an open-ended set of material covering many subjects, and is a favourite among people like Bill Gates, and John and Ann Doerr (Fortune: http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/tecnology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm). Of the 200,000 students who access this site every month, only 20,000 are from India.
There are many other educational sites from school level upwards, for instance, the Open Courseware Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org) by MIT, with US members like the University of California (Berkeley), Michigan and so on. Many universities and schools have their own websites. There is the Wikiversity, with portals from pre-school through primary to tertiary education, non-formal education and research (see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Browse).

India, BCG estimates that Internet usage will increase from 7 per cent of the population in 2009 to 19 per cent in 2015 (237 million). PC penetration, which was just 4 per cent in 2009, is estimated at 17 per cent by 2015 (216 million). To quote BCG: “India has among the highest PC costs and lowest PC availability of all the BRIC countries (including Indonesia).” Mobile phone penetration, however, is 10 times higher, at 41 per cent. This appalling situation needs to be redressed.

Inferences

Hundreds of millions of Indians should use these websites and the Internet for radical transformation. This will require policies and practices aimed at providing:

inexpensive access to broadband;
greater access to PCs and PC-equivalents as they evolve (e.g. Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense); and
systems and processes that encourage distance education, and discipline in all fields, with professionalism and excellence across all activities.

Regulations and tax regimes determine which activities are profitable, and to what extent. This is where the government and its policies come in. Could Internet users in India converge public opinion to rouse governments to address these needs, emulating the example of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit?

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/114002/India/aroon-puries-welcome-address-at-youth-summit.html
Employment Report, Ministry of Labour, July 1, 2010: http://labour.nic.in/Report_to_People.pdf
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/engg-college-students-not-industry-ready-survey/388620/

Read the original article in the Business Standard

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/broad-basing-broadband

Stiff Resistance Dogs India's ID Plan

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:59:06Z

An article about the UID project by Indrajit Basu in Asia Times Online.

Tembhali is little known beyond its neighborhood in northern Maharashtra. Yet, as Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi descended by on Wednesday, the tiny hamlet with less than 1,500 residents suddenly became the center of attraction in the global arena of e-governance.

India's prime minister and the ruling Congress party's leader were helicoptered in to officially flag India's most ambitious attempt to transform the way the state reaches its citizens - and also the world's largest identity program.

The so-called Unique Identification (UID) mission, which has been dubbed locally as "Aadhar" ("foundation"), the project will create unique biometric identification numbers for each and every one of India's 1.2 billion people.

Ambitious yet highly controversial, UID numbers will be linked to fingerprints, iris scans, personal information, a microchip for easy scanning, and more. Led by a new government agency called the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the project is spearheaded by Nandan Nilekeni, one of India's most famous techie-entrepreneurs as the co-founder of Infosys, who has been given ministerial powers and a magnanimous (rumored to be US$3 billion or more) budget to implement the grand plan.

According to Nilekeni, among the scores of advantages for the country's people, the millions of India's poor who are without access to the government's plethora of welfare schemes would benefit the most from the new identification system. Much like the mobile telephony, the UID number would connect the poor to the broader and advancing economy of India, he says.

"The government has taken up this project for two reason; one is there are large number of Indians specially those who are urban migrants and rural poor who do not have any form of acknowledged existence by the state and therefore they face the challenge of harassment in their lives. They do not get access to public services either. So the one of the main purposes of this program is to make life easier for the millions of poor, migrants and marginalized (expected to be over 300 million) people. As well as to give inclusion to them," said Nilekeni.

The other is to make all government welfare schemes far more efficient by ensuring that they reach "each and every deserving poor", he says.

Even as the impoverished tribal farming community in Tembhali - many of whom do not even own the land they till - wonder how a unique identity, as Manmohan declared on Wednesday, "can change their lives", UID is meeting stiff resistance from civil liberties groups, privacy advocates, and legal eagles.

Critics condemn the UID as a blatant intrusion to privacy, a tool that will increase bureaucracy and corruption, and say that in addition to being hugely expensive and even illegal, the UID goes against basic human values.

"This project, has been initiated without any prelude: there is no project document; there is no feasibility study; there has been no cost-to-benefit analysis and there are serious concerns about data and identity theft," said Gopal Krishna, Member Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties.

Worse, Krishna added, a project "that could change the status of the people in this country, with regard to security and constitutional rights has been initiated without any legal authorization; just on the basis of an executive order".

The strongest opposition to the project has been generated by the fact that it aims to create a huge digital database containing sensitive personal information in one central location. This is a security risk of "immense" proportions, according to critics.

"Given that the country has hardly any capability in securing its digital database, and an absence of privacy laws, UID's plans of storing its data in one centralized database is an immense risk," said Sunil Abraham, an activist at the People Union for Civil Liberties. "The trouble with a centralized infrastructure is that if it is compromised, then all of it will be compromised, which can result in the collapse of the country's information systems."

Nilekeni deflects these criticisms, saying that the UID Authority will use "the best expertise for security and we also have a policy of proactively publishing strategy policy report and committee reports on our website as well." But arguments against the project stretch on.

"The other opposition is the use of biometrics for ID," says Abraham. "Our fear is that most parts of the country do not have power and if the system mandates that every time a rural resident has to prove his identity biometrically for say collecting subsidized food, chances are that the process will be slower and more prone to failure because of lack of infrastructure."

That, according to critics, could give rise to newer complication or even manipulation of the biometric data - and hence an additional opportunity for corruption.

"A typical unlettered person does not understand the complexities of biometric data collection and verification," says Jiti Nichani, a researcher and an advocate, Alternative Law Forum. "Given the rampant bureaucracy and corruption in the country, this would give yet another reason for the corrupt to siphon off the largesse of a welfare scheme elsewhere; corruption will increase manifold as a consequence."

Still, its flip side is not really devoid of selling points; some of UID's beneficial characteristics are undeniable.

For one, experts say, for every rupee spent on the government's welfare schemes, lack of identity of a poor Indian results in just 15 paisa reaching them. UID then can really revolutionize the way government services are delivered.

Besides, inability to prove identity is not only one of the biggest barriers that prevent the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies, or stymie the government from reaching out to the deserving. It also stops the government formulating appropriate welfare polices, plugging leakages, and above all, eliminating fraud and duplicate identities.

UID, say its proponents, will no longer allow someone to represent themselves differently across a number of agencies, which could solve a lot these problems.

"A UID will enable the poor grab the right to education, get jobs on migration, get medical benefits and even open a bank account and get a mobile phone connection," said Nilekni. "The transformative capability of the UID scheme can be enormous."

Nevertheless, providing an identity to one billion plus Indians in a country so devoid of basic infrastructure is a Herculean task.

Its real challenge may not lie in the concerns that critics have raised, but perhaps in the politics of governance and its reforms. Experts say the success of the project depends on the effective use of political authority, and how Nilekeni and Manmohan manage to address corruption in the political and official systems.

Nilekeni though is undaunted. "I am aware that there are a lot of challenges and this is a humongous project," he said. "But there is a lot of political will and support, and the government is firmly convinced that this project could change the face of India."

Read the original in Asia Times Online

Note: Sunil Abraham does not work for People's Union for Civil Liberties

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/stiff-resistance

September 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T07:22:30Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this bulletin we bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage and announcement of events organised in the month of September 2010.

News Updates

Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010: This conference is being held in Budapest from 20 to 22 September 2010. It is co-sponsored by Google and Central European University. Sunil Abraham and Anja Kovacs are attending the conference.
http://bit.ly/afo0WY

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project: Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.
http://bit.ly/dnJDRu
Innovate / Activate: The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School. http://bit.ly/cbICFq
Webinar: Closed for Business: A Global Panel Discusses International Copyright Laws and Their Impact on the Open Internet
http://bit.ly/a3ZFBw
The madness of software patents
India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth.
http://bit.ly/cpHd7R
Why piracy is tough to rein in
“Video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the film industry”
http://bit.ly/aDUpiY
Transparency and MDGs: the Role of the Media and Technology
Key quotes from sixth panel
http://bit.ly/b3a0YC
Copyright bill restricts Net access
Law to curb piracy may fetter creativity
http://bit.ly/cFj3rD
科技改變社會數位原生代計畫
The Chinese language press covered the Digital Natives workshop in Taipei.
http://bit.ly/bPhEO4
科技改變社會數位原生代掀波
The Chinese press published an article on Digital Natives.
http://bit.ly/bHaQor
Information is Beautiful hacks in India with David Cameron
The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them.
http://bit.ly/dr3AJ2

Events

International Conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT: ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations open!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK
A Talk by Philipp Schmidt: Philip Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University will be giving a lecture at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 6 October, 2010.
http://bit.ly/aVyzMq

Research

On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop: What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed.
http://bit.ly/daE4dM
The Binary: City and Nature: A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.
http://bit.ly/b5FP5D
Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive: This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.
http://bit.ly/cNLKcY
The Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series: This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others.
http://bit.ly/agBOiq
Attentional Capital in Online Gaming: The Currency of Survival
This blog post by Arun Menon discusses the concepts of production, labour and race in virtual worlds and their influence on the production of attention as a currency. An attempt is made to locate attentional capital, attentional repositories and attention currencies within gaming to examine 'attention currencies and its trade and transactions in virtual worlds. A minimal collection of attention currencies are placed as central and as a pre-requisite for survival in MMOs in much the same way that real currency become a necessity for survival. The approach is to locate attentional capital through different perspectives as well as examine a few concepts around virtual worlds.
http://bit.ly/aaGZj8
What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least for Now: In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?
http://bit.ly/9a3I0G
Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context: This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India.
http://bit.ly/byfPye

Accessibility

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - A Conference in Delhi: The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore in cooperation with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT), a flagship advocacy organization of the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (UN-GAID), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), UNESCO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment and the Deafway Foundation is organizing an international conference, Enabling Access to Education through ICT in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The event is sponsored by Hans Foundation. Registration for the conference has begun.
http://bit.ly/bmrkf7

Access to Knowledge

Pre-grant Opposition Filed for a Software Patent Application by Blackberry Manufacturers: A pre-grant opposition was filed against a software patent application filed in the patent office by Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of Blackberry. The opposition was filed on August 31, 2010 by the Software Freedom Law Centre which has recently expanded its operations to India. This exciting development was announced by Mishi Choudhary from SFLC on the lines of the seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” organised on 1 September 2010 in Delhi jointly by SFLC, the Centre for Internet and Society, the Society for Knowledge Commons and Red Hat. Filing more such oppositions to software patents in India was in the pipeline and this is just the beginning of a movement to take on monopolisation of knowledge and ideas through patenting software, the organisers said.
http://bit.ly/9wE1Xs
First Post-Bilski Decision - Software Patent Rejected: In the first decision post-Bilski, the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) rejected a software patent claimed by Hewlett-Packard. The ruling in this case has buttressed the fact that the Bilski decision furthered the cause of narrowing the patentability of software even though the Supreme Court of the United States totally avoided mentioning software patents or the applicability of the machine or transformation test for software patents in its decision.
http://bit.ly/cnPw7E
The Bilski Case - Impact on Software Patents: The Supreme Court of the United States gave its decision in Bilski v Kappos on 28 June, 2010. In this case the petitioners’ patent application sought protection for a claimed invention that explains how commodities buyers and sellers in the energy market can protect, or hedge, against the risk of price changes. The Court in affirming the rejection by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also held that the machine- or-transformation test is not necessarily the sole test of patentability. The Court’s ruling of abstract ideas as unpatentable and its admission that patents do not necessarily promote innovation and may sometimes limit competition and stifle innovation have provided a ray of hope. In the light of the developments, the Bilski decision as far as patentability of software is concerned may not be totally insignificant, says Krithika Dutta Narayana.
http://bit.ly/bjrPGh

Openness

Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report: The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined.
http://bit.ly/9VVzkk
Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?: The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.
http://bit.ly/ciohYy

Internet Governance

Moldova Online: An Interview with Victor Diaconu: In this interview for Russian Cyberspace, set up with the help of Sunil Abraham (Executive Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India), computer software professional Victor Diaconu explains the nature of Internet use, state control and the development of blogging and social media platforms in Moldova. Victor works at Computaris in Chisinau. He is Moldova educated, and has travelled to several western countries (including lengthy stays to US, UK) to learn about and understand what there is to be done in Moldova. Sudha Rajagopalan interviewed Victor Diaconu.
http://bit.ly/cgIvXT
Presentation of the UID project by Ashok Dalwai – A Report: On Tuesday, 7 September 2010, Ashok Dalwai, the Deputy Director General of the Unique Identification of India (UIDAI), gave a lecture at the Indian Institute for Science in Bangalore. Representing the UID Authority, his presentation explained the vision of the project and focused on the challenges involved in demographic and biometric identification, the technology adopted, and the enrolment process. Elonnai Hickok gives a report of his presentation in this blog post.
http://bit.ly/aAy5DG
Beyond Access as Inclusion: On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is co-organised in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting was to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.
http://bit.ly/cgS9py
Summary of UID Public Meeting, August 25 2010: A summary of the "No UID" public meeting that took place on Aug. 25th at the Constitution Club, New Dehli.
http://bit.ly/9epHTz
No UID Campaign in New Delhi - A Report: The Unique Identification (UID) Bill is not pro-citizen. The scheme is deeply undemocratic, expensive and fraught with unforseen consequences. A public meeting on UID was held at the Constitution Club, Rafi Marg in New Delhi on 25 August, 2010. The said Bill came under scrutiny at the meeting which was organised by civil society groups from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi campaigning under the banner of "No UID". The speakers brought to light many concerns, unanswered questions and problems of the UID scheme.
http://bit.ly/97HwbS
Wherever you are, whatever you do: Facebook recently launched a location-based service called Places. Privacy advocates are resenting to this new development. Sunil Abraham identifies the three prime reasons for this outcry against Facebook. The article was published in the Indian Express on 23 August, 2010.
http://bit.ly/adXVjB

Telecom

What a highway can do: Despite signs of transformational change, we need more - SOPs and quality http://bit.ly/deUbmU

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin

Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive

zainab — 2011-08-03T09:56:52Z

This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.

In the introductory post, I had suggested that we needed to examine the notion of the ‘responsive state’, particularly in the context of discourses around transparency and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to institute transparency and thereby create a responsive state. I argued that interrogating the notion of the ‘responsive state’ is necessary to understand how responsiveness and even statehood actually translate on the ground for different citizen groups when ICTs and the Internet are deployed to provide information to citizens, to deliver services electronically, to eliminate middlemen, to re-engineer processes in government departments and state institutions, and to make the state more visible and (therefore, supposedly) more accessible and responsive to its people.

In this post, I want to open up the concepts of the state and the government in a more fundamental way to begin our explorations regarding ‘responsiveness’ and the ‘responsive state’. Attending to the idea and the practice of the state and the government in everyday life will open up the meanings that ‘responsiveness’ and transparency, ICTs and the Internet are attributed within different contexts and in the range of relationships that exist between the state and its citizens, governments and citizens, and across state and government institutions. It is necessary to understand how relationships between citizens and governments and across the range of government and state institutions get shaped by the contexts within which governance is carried out, and the “fields”[i] within which we locate and study governments, governance, transparency and technology. This will enable us to nuance the notion and the translation of responsiveness in its online, offline, transparent, secretive, overt and/or surreptitious avatars.

I will begin this post by explaining the similarities and differences between the concepts (and ground realities) of state and the government as well as the relationships that exist between these entities. This conceptual clarification will set the context for understanding the genesis and application of responsiveness and transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to usher responsiveness and transparency in India in subsequent blog posts.

The State – Abstract-Concrete, Composite-Fragmented, Homogeneous-Heterogeneous: The state is an abstract idea which has its concrete basis in a physical territory. The state is also reified through an organizational structure that is referred to as the bureaucracy. We, as citizens, give legitimacy and authority to the idea of the state and statehood by conferring powers on certain representatives, institutions and systems to make decisions on our behalf and to exercise power for maintenance of law and order. The notion of the state (more concretely the institutions representing and exercising powers on behalf of the state) also derives legitimacy and authority from the Constitution and the laws of the land. The image of the state, as has been passed down to us by particular narratives of history and certain strands of political philosophy as well as through the print and electronic media is that the state is a composite, compact structure which has absolute - and in certain contexts unlimited powers. The “state idea” (Abrams, 1988) remains a powerful organizing concept in the lives of citizens as well as the employees and representatives of the state. This is because the concept of the state provides a sense of structure and coherence in our lives which in turn creates a sense of belongingness to a territory (physical space) and/or an institution (such as public services, public sector institutions, municipality, government departments, etc). This sense of structure, coherence and order is further reinforced by the following beliefs:

1. That the state, organized and reified through its bureaucratic machinery, functions in a rational, orderly manner. This is the classic idea of the state promoted by Max Weber;

2. That the state is the source as well as the guardian of laws. These laws will protect and preserve the integrity of the territory and in turn, the integrity (and compositeness) of the state (where the notion of the state and its notional boundaries are based on an actual, physical territory);

3. That laws are supreme and everyone is equal before the law;

4. That laws will enforce order and provide relief, redressal, entitlements and access to welfare to one and all.

The state is thus imagined as a benign authority, a benefactor, which must protect its people, provide them with welfare and at the same time, safeguard order and integrity of the territory (and therefore, order and integrity of the state structure/organization). The state also remains the last resort that people have for articulating their claims and getting them fulfilled. There is therefore, a tenuous relationship with the state where as much as certain ideological groups/belief systems/world views and various citizen groups desire the state’s role and intervention in the individual’s life to be minimized, they still continue to view the state i.e., the law courts and the common judicial system[ii], to be the ultimate source of law and the final arbiter of disputes. To cite an example, even though the private property rights framework gives precedence to the individual over the state, advocates of private property invariably assume or necessitate the existence of an overarching/central legal system to which individuals can take their disputes and grievances. This kind of advocacy automatically creates a paradox for individual freedom because a centralized legal system functions on the basis of uniform laws that may not consider the particularities and the uniqueness of each dispute over private property. Moreover, such a centralized legal system has the capacity to impinge on the individuals’ and groups’ freedoms especially when individuals’ and groups’ practices of ownership and usufruct (which can be social, historical, cultural and negotiated over time) do not comply with corresponding legalistic notions and practices.

The concept of the state is also associated with the notion of power where the state holds and wields power. The relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by this power equation. The notion of democracy is hinged on the idea that since people confer powers upon the state and they elect representative governments by voting at elections, citizens should also be able to contain the powers of the state and prevent the state from becoming an absolute, authoritarian entity. Deliberations, debate and discussion over the state’s policies and decisions (and a free press) are viewed as tools through which the state’s actions can be questioned, criticized and when necessary, contained. It is for the purposes of deliberations, debate and discussion that publishing of information about state policies as well as the processes through which decisions are made is deemed as quintessential in certain frameworks (and corresponding policies) of the ‘responsive state’.

The notion of the state remains a powerful idea in people’s imaginations and actions. The belief in the existence of a state system/organization enables people to make claims on what they see as state institutions or employees of the state. At the same time, as researchers and theorists excavating the “everyday state” argue, what also matters is how people ‘encounter’ the state when they make claims and/or seek resources, who they ‘mark’ as the state in these encounters, and what their ‘experience’ of the state is – a monolith, a bureaucratic mess, a sloth, a responsive entity and/or apathetic (Corbridge, Srivastava, et al, 2005; Fuller and Benei, 2000; Elyachar, 2005; Tarlo, 2003). The nature of the encounters with ‘the state’ and consequently the perceptions of power and authority vary depending on the institutions/personnel that different people approach. This implies that the institutions within the state system are different from each other and they function in diverse ways and contexts. These institutions are also not equally and cordially aligned with the idea of the state and the state system. Moreover, the resources that they variously control have different kinds of significance and meanings for both, the officials in charge of the respective institutions as well as the people vying for those resources. In short, not all institutions within the state system are equally statist in terms of the way in which they control resources, wield power, maintain territorial integrity and statist quo and interact with different citizen groups. To explain this in more concrete terms, let us take the instance of the forest authorities in India. Forest departments tend to be much more authoritarian and controlling of forest lands and forest resources and consequently the people within their jurisdictions and territory. This authority of the forest department stems from historical factors and it has been further reinforced through the laws passed in the post-independence period regarding protection of wildlife and various resources and produces of forests. Moreover, as mandated in the Constitution of India, forests symbolize an essential aspect of the territorial integrity of the state. Hence, the powers that have been conferred, both constitutionally and by central governments and cabinet ministries on forest departments and officials over time, is more than the powers that have been granted to other state institutions and departments in the context of control over the state’s natural resources. Therefore, the manner in which forest departments function in relation with citizens as well as in relation with other state institutions and government departments produces and reinforces certain perceptions of the state i.e., authoritarian, autocratic, corrupt, wielding excessive power, curbing group liberties, punitive, among others. In yet some other aspects of governance and everyday life, we find that police forces have unlimited powers and depending on socio-economic status and networks, different citizen groups have different perceptions of and relationships with the police and therefore, of the state which the police forces represent. Groups living in slums and squatter settlements tend to fear and dread police forces most because these groups tend to be marked as criminal owing to their (supposedly) ‘illegal’ occupancy of state/public/private land which in turn makes them the first targets of law and order and markers of criminality. Hence, community based organizations (CBOs) train slum dwellers and squatters, foremost, on how to interact with the police, how to conduct themselves in police stations, and provide them with information regarding the laws and procedures which immediately affect poor people’s lives and their relationship with the police and law and order[iii]. On the other hand, vehicle owning populations tend to the loathe the police (mainly traffic police and beat station cops) for demanding unnecessary bribes and engaging in what are seen to be as extortionist practices.

At this point, it will be instructive and insightful to ask the questions who/what is the state and where is it located (both physically and symbolically). There are myriad answers to this question, as one strand of sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists variously studying the “everyday state” in India and across the world have demonstrated and argued. In the past, scholars such as Philipp Abrams (1988) have questioned whether the state really exists in reality or is it simply an idea, a powerful construct that has been passed down to us by history and theory? Abrams has simultaneously asked questions about the methodologies for studying the state – do we go back to histories and theories to locate and understand the state or do we examine the practices of state more carefully. Each of these approaches carries with it its own problems of studying and explaining the state. Abrams fundamentally suggests that the state is associated with coherence, homogeneity and compositeness, all of which are imaginary attributes that do not exist on the ground. Then, is the concept of the state useful at all and if so, why?

For the purposes of this series on the ‘responsive state’ as well as the larger monograph which tries to trace the history of transparency, ICTs, Internet and politics in India, it is necessary for us to deal with the idea and the different practices of state in as much entirety and variety as may be possible. This is because discourses of transparency, e-governance policies and programmes and the use of ICTs to create/reform citizen-government interfaces are based on a particular idea of the state i.e., a notion of order as stemming from conformity/adherence to law, ‘the state’ as the final arbiter of disputes between peoples, ‘the state’ as the provider of welfare and therefore, ‘the state’ as a benefactor and a benevolent leviathan, and ‘the state’ as rational and orderly and internally coherent, cogent and composite. As I will explain in subsequent posts, ICTs, e-governance systems and the Internet are deployed precisely to reinforce these ideas of the Indian state to the people as well as to reorder, realign and re-engineer processes and personnel who are seen as stepping outside the lines of law and due process. Whether such technological interventions and the technology itself succeeds in enforcing this vision of order and absolute alignment is an issue that necessitates asking several nuanced questions:

How does the state – primarily decision-makers and policy-makers – imagine and understand technology and its application?
How are e-governance policies interpreted and implemented by government officials (and even private parties) on the ground?
How do officials internalize the visions ingrained in e-governance policies and deployments of ICTs and how does this impact the manner in which they implement directives from the state in this regard and subsequently interact with citizens?
Who gains and who loses when ICTs, e-governance and the Internet are deployed to deliver services to people electronically, to provide information and to create better government-citizen interfaces?
How are gains and losses assessed and why are they assessed as such? Who assesses the gains and losses and why?
Are gains and losses absolute and irreversible?
Do some deployments of ICTs, e-governance strategies and the Internet produce impacts that can only be seen and evaluated in the long run?
How does the state – in terms of power, authority, implementation of law and order and preservation of territorial integrity – manifest through the various deployments of ICTs and e-governance policies in different contexts?

These questions regarding the impact of ICTs, Internet and e-governance programmes on different citizen groups as well as the notions and practices of the state require us to turn our attention towards understanding the concepts of government, governance and administration and grounding our understandings of these concepts in the manner in which various government departments and institutions interact with citizens, on an everyday basis, in the process of governing and administering. Revisiting and opening up these concepts is further essential because governments and administrators are responsible for interpreting (and therefore, translating) and implementing the state’s policies and visions on the ground. This does not imply that the state is separate from government and administration. In fact, as we saw in the example of the forest departments and police forces, certain arms of the government and administration can be highly statist in the manner in which they exercise powers, control resources, make decisions and interact with citizens. We also saw above that not all government departments and state institutions are equally comfortable with and aligned with the state idea i.e., in terms of notions of law, order, authority and power. It therefore, becomes necessary to understand how different government departments and administrators understand, embody and even negotiate notions of law, order and power, what are the historical, political and social sources which shape the functioning and ideologies of different government departments, and how are notions of law, order, responsiveness and transparency configured when these different government departments implement various e-governance policies and transparency initiatives in an effort to become responsive.

Let us briefly examine the concept of government and in the process, tackle the important issue of state-society relationship.

Government – the State in Society and the Society in State: Governments are the concrete face of the state and the state idea. They are bodies/institutions/organizations which perform duties of the state and discharge the state’s obligations towards its people. Some of the primary obligations include:

delivering the state’s welfare resources to different citizen groups,
attending to and fulfilling and/or negotiating people’s varied claims and demands for entitlements,
resolving people’s complaints, disputes and grievances,
maintaining law and order and ensuring compliance with law,
providing infrastructure and services that are considered necessary for people’s well-being as well as for the physical territory’s (i.e., the state’s) development and progress.

Governments are expected to function in ways that aid in maintaining the integrity of the territory and therefore, the authority of the state. Governments must therefore, follow the policies formulated by the state and implement them in letter and spirit. However, implementation rarely happens in the exact letter and spirit because of a variety of factors including:

1. Inadequate release of funds which in turn is triggered by factors such as competition over power, territory and loyalty, competition between political parties, poor allocation to essential budgetary heads in the programme implementation, desire within government agencies to curb the autonomy of individual departments/personnel by providing fewer funds, etc.

2. Existing competition between administrative agencies, government employees and decision-makers which can be altered because of implementation. This, in turn, can prevent implementation altogether or, the implementing authorities may implement policies in a way that aids in preserving certain kinds of autonomy, powers and interests of the implementing agencies.

3. Multiple claims that arise in the course of implementation which in turn puts implementation on a sticky course and alters the letter(s) and spirit of the original policies as government agencies, administrators and the various implementing authorities negotiate (and even suppress) the claims made by different interest groups (which includes citizen groups, government agencies themselves, middlemen, competing political parties, among others).

Essentially then, government institutions and departments – the concrete faces of the state – are mired in multiple claims and interests not only with respect to implementation but also in the way in which they function in everyday life. These claims are advanced not only by citizen groups but also by the very employees of governments and by agencies and authorities related with various aspects of the governments’ functioning. Here, we need to address the issue of state-in-society and society-in-state which tends to be overlooked and even ignored in accounts and theories about the state. The state – wherever is experienced and however, it is sighted – is part of the gamut known as society. This means that the people working as government employees/state employees are simultaneously members of other networks and social groups. Consequently, they hold and embody various views and ideas that may be in consonance with as well as contradictory to notions of power, authority, law and order. These government employees also compete for the resources of the state – water, sanitation, housing sites, roads, electricity – as much as they are responsible for delivering the same resources to different citizen groups. In the process of delivery of welfare and service provision then, interests are shaped from time to time depending on the socio-economic and political positions of the administrators, bureaucrats and people’s representatives in charge as well as their association with various kinds of networks that enable them to maintain/enhance their personal/institutional positions and powers. Some of these interests and networks also shape the roles of government employees and administrators i.e., elected representatives, municipal field staff, engineers, etc., can also become middlemen in the process of delivering services and resources. How they function as middlemen depends on the resources in question as well as the political, social and administrative contexts in which the services are provided.

This aspect of state-in-society which is visible when we closely examine how governments and administrative departments and institutions function is an important factor that not only shapes interests and policy implementation but also influences that manner in which the state – power, authority, law and order – manifests in the interactions between citizens and governments. Therefore, when attempts are made to reconfigure or reform the interfaces between governments and citizens by introducing e-governance tools and ICTs, essentially the entire gamut of networks, social norms, conventions and negotiations that underlies government-citizen interfacing is tried to be put in line with a rational conception of law, due process and order. This implies that certain arms of the state attempt to reinforce and reorder particular government departments and functionaries in line with the idea of the rational, orderly and law enforcing state. (These arms of the state could be the central government in New Delhi, central government departments in New Delhi and state governments trying to align departments and functionaries working at different levels in the federal system hierarchy.) In turn, this means that the complexities in government-citizen interfacing – middlemen, opaque procedures, inadequate information, use of personal discretion, mobilization of political, economic and personal networks - are tried to be straightened through the application of technology which is viewed as neutral and capable of enforcing order and uniformity in procedures and service delivery. Therefore, it becomes essential to understand how different government departments function and how various services are delivered in order to assess where technology is/gets situated and how technology reorders/realigns government functionaries in line with the statist notions of law, order and fairness.

By way of a conclusion …: I will end this post here, leaving it for readers to ruminate and think over the ideas presented here. I will return back in the next post with a more concrete history of how and why ICTs, e-governance and Internet have been deployed in India to usher transparency and responsiveness in the functioning of the state via government agencies and departments. The concrete description will help put into perspective some of the conceptual issues and insights discussed in this post.

Till then, adios!

References:

Abrams, Philip. March 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”. Journal of Historical Sociology. Vol. 1 (1): 58-89.

C. J. Fuller and V. Benei (eds). 2000. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. New Delhi: D. K. Publishers.

Corbridge, Stuart, Glynn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron. (2005) Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOS, Economic Development and the State in Cairo. Duke University Press: Durham and London.

Moore, Sally Falk. 1973. “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study.” Law and Society Review. Vol. 7 (4): 719-746.

Tarlo, Emma. 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Also see …

Gupta, Akhil and James Fergusson. 2002. “Spatializing States: Towards An Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality”. American Ethnologist. Vol. 29 (4): 981-1002. See mainly part one on conceptual issues – spatializing states.

[i] The concept of “field” is borrowed from Sally Falk Moore’s (1973) model of the “semi-autonomous social field”. Moore suggests that a ‘field’ is a concrete, observable arena that generates rules and is simultaneously influenced by agencies and forces from outside (720). The notion of the ‘field’ aids in more a concrete and nuanced study of institutions especially the immediate and larger contexts in which institutions function and how this influences their functioning, why actors make particular decisions in certain circumstances, and how rules are formulated, adhered and resisted. Analyses will vary depending on how we map the field and which actors and factors we include/exclude and give primacy to in the given field.

[ii] Here, it is important to note that despite advocacy and practice of independence of judiciary, the judicial system of a nation functions on the principle of the ‘law of the land’ and maintaining the integrity and compositeness of the physical territory. In this respect, belief in the state’s judicial system continues to perpetuate the belief that there is a singular and ultimate source and arbiter of law, in this case the judicial system, even when the judiciary can strike down the decisions made by the executive organs of the state. Therefore, even if the judiciary is independent, the way in which it functions is to maintain and preserve the state system (i.e. the territory) and the statist quo (i.e. the state system and authority).

[iii] Interviews with social workers from community based organizations in Mumbai, conducted between May and November 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/of-the-state-and-the-governments-the-abstract-the-concrete-and-the-responsive

UNESCO's Open Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:58:47Z

As UNESCO organized Freedom of Expression related workshops, this Open Forum will be dedicated to other key IGF topics, notably multilingualism in cyberspace, open access to scientific information, open educational resources, and accessibility for marginalized groups. In addition, UNESCO will take this opportunity to announce new initiatives and share experiences with participants. The interactive panel format will start with brief presentations from experts, followed by a moderated discussion with participants.

Organizer: UNESCO

Moderator:
Mr Jānis Kārkliņš, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO

Opening by Mr Jānis Kārkliņš

Introductory remarks

Mr Nitin Desai, Chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will speak about: The future of the IGF and UNESCO’s opportunities
Mr Rod Beckstrom, CEO ICANN, on cooperation with UNESCO, next steps

1. Multilingualism in cyberspace

Proposed speakers:

Mr Baher Esmat, Manager, Regional Relations – Middle East, ICANN
Mr Daniel Pimienta, President of FUNREDES (Fundacion Redes y Desarrollo) Saint Domingue, Dominican Republic

Open discussion

2. Open access to scientific information and open educational resources

Proposed speakers:

Mr Indrajit Banerjee, Director, Information Society Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
Mr Abel Packer, Director of the SciELO.org Open Access (OA) initiative

Open discussion

3. An initiative on developing inclusive information policies using ICTs in education for persons with disabilities

Proposed speakers:

Mr Axel Leblois, Executive Director, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communications Technologies 9G3ict), An Advocacy Initiative of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development
Ms Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society (India)

Open discussion

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/unesco-open-forum

A Talk by Charlotte Lapsansky

praskrishna — 2011-04-22T07:41:20Z

Charlotte Lapsansky will give a lecture on the "Mobile Voices project" at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Thursday, 16 September 2010.

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform will be designed in collaboration with its users, and will help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

In this talk, Charlotte will describe the Mobile Voices project and discuss key themes that have arisen for the Mobile Voices project team, including participatory technology design, community digital storytelling, and digital inclusion through mobile-phone based platforms. She will then describe the key technological and social issues that have arisen in the process of adapting Mobile Voices for India and the opportunities and challenges this presents.

About Charlotte Lapsansky

Charlotte Lapsansky is a PhD Candidate and American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Charlotte has a background in development communication and mass media campaigns addressing gender and health in India. At Annenberg, her research interests include communication for social change, participatory development communications, community mobilization and strategic campaign planning. For the past two years, she has been a team member for Mobile Voices, a participatory project which has created a Drupal-based digital storytelling platform for first-generation, low-wage migrant workers in Los Angeles, allowing them to create and publish stories about their communities directly from their mobile phones. Currently, Charlotte is collaborating with organizations in India to customize and adapt the mobile voices platform social endeavours in India.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/charlotte-lapsansky-talk

What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now

anja — 2011-08-02T09:25:39Z

In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?

Among those who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion, critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or adivasis, often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and intense. In a recent video posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist – called on the nation to support the adivasis and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested people to get off the Internet:

Is me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge.

[To the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach the common people, neither will we come to know the country's problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people].

Not everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online. But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the only way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the context of the Free Binayak Sen campaign, for example, there is considerable recognition that the website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of 2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist who had worked for more than twenty five years among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website, and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.

In this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres of movements are online, despite their protestations against online activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case, it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the kind of elements that determine whether you are an online activist. What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only work online is not sufficient.

Importantly, such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once come across “online activists” who started their conversation with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all. Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to identify as an activist among participants in the Blank Noise project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming), a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on here, (earlier posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why people refused the “activist” label was generally not because they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a clear difference between their own contribution and that of the full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process – the “jholawallahs”, as one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do, however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:

I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am convinced, that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference, you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.

Clearly, then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense, but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even though small that difference often may be.

In many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as contributions of non-activists have always played an important role in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free; lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return; people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much easier to contribute to publicising and building community around issues that are close to movements' heart as well.

So how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have platforms such as MoveOn or Avaaz, that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly embedded in communities of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists, from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media, valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can and does infuse the method, at least for now.

This, then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people willing and available to help building such communities in a more or less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core “activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more and more people start to care as the message of social movements is amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly, and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a forward-looking alternative to the existing progressive politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the space to such challengers.

The point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and minds of activists and non-activists alike.

With thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.

References

Angelina, M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague, International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now

Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report

rebecca — 2012-03-20T18:36:08Z

The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined.

The Environmental Scans are the first component of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay” global study, examining the sustainability of Free Access to Law (FAL) initiatives. The overall goal of this research is to respond to a need to study what free access to law initiatives do and how they do it. This will lead to an understanding of the effects FAL initiatives have on society and to an exploration of the factors determining their sustainability.

For the Environmental Scans, Local Researchers were asked to collect data according to the Environmental Scan Matrix and draft a synopsis of the data, highlighting the trends, risks and opportunities for the field of online legal research publication in general and for the FAL initiative in particular. In sum, the researchers looked at how the individual indicators listed in the Environmental Scan Matrix work together to impact free access to law. The results of the Scans provided the local researchers and their audiences with a rich knowledge on the field of law and informatics in each respective country examined.

The project covers the following regions: (1) Southern and Eastern Africa, (2) Western Africa, (3) Asia and the Pacific and (4) Canada. In order to complete a cross-case comparative analysis, countries have been selected to represent multiple legal traditions with FAL initiatives at various stages of development.

The report can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/free-access-to-law-is-it-here-to-stay-environmental-scan