Centre for Internet and Society

The Bilski Case - Impact on Software Patents

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T03:24:31Z

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.

The United States Supreme Court’s much awaited decision of last month in Bilski v. Kappos (2010) (Bilski), a case that was touted as a potential watershed in the debate surrounding patentability of software, was disappointing, even though it was not without any impact. While the Supreme Court affirmed the rejection by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) of a patent claim for a business method, it failed to define with clarity, any test for patentability which might have constituted a precedent for future cases involving patentability of software or business method. At the same time, it held that the “machine- or- transformation” test which was the test followed by the CAFC in rejecting the claim, was not the sole test to determine patentability, thus effectively providing no guideline to determine patentability of software or business methods in future cases.

The Supreme Court in Bilski, affirmed the rejection by the CAFC in In re Bilski (2008) of a patent claim involving a method of providing insurance against fluctuating energy prices due to changes in weather. The applicants, Bernard L. Bilski and Rand Warsaw filed a patent application for such a method of hedging risks – essentially a claim for a business method – under Section 101 of US Patent Act before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The examiner at the USPTO rejected the claim on the ground that the claim was not for patentable subject matter and that “the invention is not implemented on a specific apparatus and merely manipulates (an) abstract idea and solves a purely mathematical problem without any limitation to a practical application, therefore, the invention is not directed to the technological arts”. The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) took a re-look at the examiner’s decision and held that the “machine or apparatus” test was in itself insufficient to determine patentability since a claim that included transformation of a physical object from one state to another would also be patent eligible subject matter. The BPAI also struck down the requirement of the invention to be a “technological art”. Thus, it rejected the Bilski claim on the ground that it did not cause transformation of a physical object from one state to another, since transformation of financial liabilities and risks does not constitute transformation of physical matter.

In its decision on October 30, 2008, the CAFC affirmed the ruling of the BPAI and laid down the machine or transformation test for patentability and held that Bilski’s claim was neither tied to any machine or apparatus to derive the result nor did it cause transformation of any physical object from one state to another and is hence, unpatentable subject matter. The Court reasoned that the “machine or transformation” test was crucial for determining patentability as it ensured that the claim based on a fundamental principle did not preempt all other uses of the principle. This test was the first test since the US Supreme Court’s decision in Diamond v. Diehr (1981) – which held that laws of nature, mathematical formulae and algorithms are not patentable – that had a huge potential for laying down definitive rules for patentability including declaring software and business methods to be outside the realm of patentable subject matter. If this test was upheld in the Supreme Court, that would effectively put an end to the rise of software patents since software, in most cases, did not cause transformation of physical object from one state to another. Thus, the decision of the Supreme Court had huge stakes for both sides of the software patent debate.

In light of the same, the Supreme Court’s ruling holding that the machine or transformation test is not the sole test for determining patentability and at the same time, failing to provide any other test on which to determine patentability, was a sore disappointment. Though, it affirmed the rejection of Bilski’s patent claim on the ground that the subject matter claimed was abstract and thus not a patentable “process” under section 101, its core decision was only limited to this particular claim and it did not lay down a concrete and definitive guideline for future claims. However, one must not be too quick to dismiss this decision as either going against the interests of open society and free software or as a completely inconsequential case that simply maintains status quo. There are important takeaways for the patentability of software in the Bilski decision – The Court did not totally reject the machine or transformation test relied on by the CAFC. It only held that the machine or transformation test is not the sole test on basis of which the patentability of a subject matter of a claim can be decided. The Court, in fact, held that the “machine or transformation test” was a “useful and important clue, an investigative tool for determining whether some claimed inventions are processes under section 101.” This leaves open the possibility of using the test to determine patentability in future cases and this is good news for opponents of software patents since software (an algorithm designed to be operated upon by a computer) is merely an abstract idea which, in most cases, does not involve transformation of a physical object from one state to another.

Bilski’s claim was essentially interpreted to be a patent for a business method. The Supreme Court was completely silent on the issue of patentability of software in its decision and stuck to only the narrow issue in hand – that of the patentability of a particular business method. This means that the “machine or transformation test”, whose applicability was ruled out in this particular case, may still be applicable for software patents. Nothing in this case precludes an opponent of a software patent from urging the courts to use the “machine or transformation test” to rule on patentability. Thus, the very fact that the Supreme Court only dealt with the narrow issue in hand ensures that the “machine or transformation test” is not altogether dismissed.

The main ground on which Bilski’s claim was rejected was that the patent claim was for an overly abstract idea which was not patent-eligible. The Court held that the basic concept on which the claim was based – the concept of hedging risks against risk is an unpatentable abstract idea. Further, some of the claims are constituted by equations and are purely mathematical in nature and are abstract and thus not patentable. This means that basic concepts and use of mathematical formulae constitute abstract ideas which are unpatentable. This test can strike down many software patents as these are simply algorithms executed by a computer and incorporate very fundamental and basic concepts which are abstract in nature and are thus, not patentable. This test for determining patentability on the basis of the claim being abstract as laid down in Bilski reaffirms the patentability test laid down in Diamond v. Deihr which kept laws of nature, mathematical formulae and algorithms outside the scope of patentable subject matter. This may serve as an important test to determine and especially, limit the patentability of software in coming years.

Notwithstanding the fact that Bilski’s claim has been interpreted to be one of a business method patent, when examined in detail, the claims indicate that the ‘method’ cannot be implemented without a computer. Certain claims for calculating probability (and risk), although mathematical or algorithmic in nature, have too many variables to be executed in any way other than by using a computer.1 Such algorithms which can be executed only by a computer fall under the category of software and the patent is thus, also, a software patent. That being said, the ruling of the Court that the claim is for an overly abstract idea and thus not patentable lends credence and indicates that software patents can be validly claimed to be abstract ideas not falling under the scope of patentable subject matter.

Another important outcome of the Supreme Court’s ruling was the invalidation of the 1998 CAFC decision in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group2 which opened the floodgates for software patents by holding that a practical application of an algorithm or formula to produce “useful, concrete and tangible result” was sufficient to constitute patentable subject matter. The State Street test was too broad and afforded an opportunity for many frivolous patent applications to be admitted. In fact, Justice Stevens, in his concurring opinion, has stated that it would be a “grave mistake” to follow the test. By clearly striking down and dismissing such a test to determine patentable subject matter, the Court in Bilski has precluded future software patent claims for taking recourse to this test and has effectively, to an extent, made it that much harder for a software to be granted patent. The test in State Street Bank which opened the floodgates for software patents was definitively dismissed.

The Court in the 1978 case of Parker v. Flook, had rejected patent for a mathematical algorithm on the ground that an algorithm was a law of nature although its use was limited to a specific field in this case (the “field of use” test) and added an insignificant post solution activity (“post solution activity” test). The test laid down in Flook had been subsequently questioned and thus, subtly dismissed by the Court in Diehr in 1991. The Court in Bilski emphasized on the test for patentability laid down in Flook and opined that the two tests may well come in handy in future challenges or oppositions to a patent claim while determining if the claim pertained to an idea that was abstract and hence, not patentable. Thus, this test can be used in future for invalidating software patents which are characterized by broad claims adding insignificant post solution activity.

It is heartening to note that the Court looked at the importance of patent law while recognizing that patents are not always necessary to encourage innovation. It noted that patents could also limit competition and stifle innovation. They can have ill effects such as increasing prices while slowing progress and could actually be deterrent to free flow of information within society. By recognizing and validating this, the ruling not only helped increase awareness about the debate surrounding software patents but also showed that the Courts are open to such an approach to patent law in future. This can only be good news for busting software patents.

For further reading

Claim 4 of Bliski's claims is as follows - “perform a Monte Carlo simulation across all deals at all locations ... over the last 20 years of weather patterns and establish the payoffs from each deal under each historical weather pattern “ Such a simulation would involve multiple parameters such as deals, locations, weather patterns, to establish a payoff.
149 F.3d. 1368.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/bilski-case

July 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T09:41:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on our events and other updates for the month of July 2010.

News Updates

Call for Case Studies on ICT
CIS invites organisations to participate in a study focusing on best practices in the use of ICTs in education for persons with disabilities.
http://bit.ly/d03jS0

Networking? Not working
Concerns about privacy, wastage of time and trivialized communication are some reasons ‘refuseniks’ are going off sites such as Facebook and MySpace, writes Shreya Ray in Livemint.
http://bit.ly/dpdKhX

Digital them about yourself?
If you’re on Facebook or have a blog, you could be a digital native, says Akhila Seetharaman.
http://bit.ly/ahA6Ts

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig
Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.
http://bit.ly/cLN8XE

CIS featured in the Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India
Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.
http://bit.ly/9GJsJ7

UID Act may be released for debate, may be introduced in monsoon session
An article by Karen Leigh & Surabhi Agarwal in livemint on June 30, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9Hq5dg

A New Age in News
Citizen journalism and online piracy were key topics during the opening day of the Mekong Information and Communication Technology conference. The 2010 Mekong ICT conference in Chang Mai, Thailand, has brought together an experienced crowd of experts from all over the globe. They have gathered to discuss the status, trends and the current situation of the ICT world.
http://bit.ly/bdGzbQ

Activists welcome privacy Bill, but point out concerns
Experts have welcomed the government's move to bring in a law for protecting individual privacy, amid concerns about the potential misuse of personal data it is collecting to execute social welfare and security schemes.
http://bit.ly/bnddaJ

Upcoming Events

Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex: A Lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin
The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), IT for Change and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are hosting a lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies, Miami University, Ohio, USA at CIS, Bangalore on 23 July, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9zy2Fa

Promoting Education through ICT
ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations to begin soon!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK

Research

The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction
This post examines attention economy as a brief prelude to a paper and monograph to be published on it. It examines the current theses on attention economy and a few approaches to reading attention economy in gaming besides foregrounding the attention economy and its functions and influence in MMORPGs.
http://bit.ly/OP7QFl

The Making of an Asian City
Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.
http://bit.ly/MXxyXP

Internet, Society and Space in Indian City: First Report
This is the first report on the progress of the research on Internet, Society and Space in Indian City. The post is a collection of some of the initial focus of these studies. I have started simultaneously exploring and testing various arguments and have listed some key observations from the ones that are nearing completion.
http://bit.ly/Ndmday

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!
The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.
http://bit.ly/P4mCKv

Accessibility

NMEICT Funds Book Conversion Project for the Print Disabled
IIT, Kharagpur, Daisy Forum of India, Inclusive Planet and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands to undertake a project for the print disabled. The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) is funding this project.
http://bit.ly/bWHi00

Right to Read: Campaign Updates
A nationwide campaign on Right to Read was co-organised by CIS along with the Daisy Forum of India and Inclusive planet to highlight the lack of content in accessible formats and accelerate change in the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, which presently does not permit the conversion of books in accessible formats for the benefits the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The campaign is affiliated with the global R2R campaign started by the World Blind Union in April 2008.
http://bit.ly/akoaSj

Intellectual Property

Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010
CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.
http://bit.ly/KLBQDx

A Guide to Key IPR Provisions of the Proposed India-European Union Free Trade Agreement
The Centre for Internet and Society presents a guide for policymakers and other stakeholders to the latest draft of the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which likely will be concluded by the end of the year and may hold serious ramifications for Indian businesses and consumers.
http://bit.ly/Rw7whN

Openness

Open Access to International Agricultural Research
Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.
http://bit.ly/cspMYY

Telecom

Catching up on broadband
The govt can invest some of the Rs 1,00,000 crore from the spectrum auctions to help India catch up on broadband, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest article published in the Business Standard on July 1, 2010.
http://bit.ly/ag67TU

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

Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:50Z

Leading up to the 2010 IGF, The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Global Partners, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), IT for Change, and the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles are hosting, on 13 September 2010 in Vilnius, an event on 'Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment'.

Internet governance has significant impact on human rights. This is reflected by the inclusion of human rights considerations in the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Tunis Agenda, which gave the IGF its mandate. However, human rights discussions have not featured prominently at the IGF. What discussions there have been tended to focus on civil and political rights without also sufficiently considering how the internet relates to cultural, social and economic rights. The indivisibility of rights has not received the attention it requires.

The Internet governance and human rights communities work in different spaces and rarely have the opportunity to interact. The presence of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Frank la Rue at the 2009 IGF and again at the 2010 IGF shows that this is beginning to change. The 2010 IGF presents a valuable opportunity to place human rights more firmly on the Internet governance map and to identify opportunities for collaboration with mainstream human rights communities.

With an increasing emphasis on the development agenda in the IGF it is also a good opportunity to look at the links between human rights, development and the Internet.

Join the conversation with human rights, Internet governance and development activists as we review pressing IG issues such as access, diversity, equality, freedom, openness and development with a view to strengthening the human rights agenda at the IGF.

More concretely, we hope to:

continue building effective collaborations promoting human rights in Internet governance, and,
identify appropriate spaces for intervention in the 2010 IGF.

Agenda:

Moderator: Chad Lubelsky. Global Networking, Policy & Advocacy Coordinator,

Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

14:00 Introduction: Background and rationale of the session, aims and objectives. Anriette Esterhuysen (APC)

Keynote speaker : Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

Keynote speaker: Arvind Ganesan, Director or Business and Human Rights Program, Human Rights Watch.

14:45 Questions

15:00 Open discussion session on 'Human rights and internet policy: the interconnectedness of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights'. Moderated by Lisa Horner (Global Partners) and Anja Kovacs (the Centre for Internet and Society).

15:40 Coffee/tea break

16:00 Breakout group discussions

16:40 Report Backs

17:00 Plenary discussion on the way forward (Anriette Esterhuysen, APC and Parminder Jeet Singh, IT for Change)

17:20 Closing remarks

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/internet-governance-human-rights

Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps Towards an Open and Inclusive Internet?

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:34Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps Towards an Open and Inclusive Internet? at the Internet Governance Forum on

Although cyber-utopian visions have long been discredited, the promise that the Internet contains as a tool to work towards democratisation and greater social justice has not yet lost its attraction. This workshop will consider what kind of Internet architecture is needed, what kind of 'openness' and Internet 'freedom' is required to ensure that such visions can actually translate into reality. While the importance of freedom of expression has been fairly widely acknowledged, a concerted approach to many more Internet governance issue is urgently required if those who are at the forefront of struggles for social justice online are to continue to do their important work. The interplay between access to knowledge (including access to information and access to culture) on the one hand and human rights on the other, too, for example, requires our urgent attention.

The aim of this workshop will be, then, to come to a more in-depth and more rounded understanding of what issues impact the democratising potential of the Internet and how exactly they do so, so that we can also start communicating about these with greater clarity. To reach this aim, the workshop will bring together activists, researchers and other stakeholders with expertise on different regions of the world and, consequently, at times diverging opinions on what the problems and solutions with regard to Internet governance are, and will bring them in debate with each other.

The workshop will be organized in a roundtable format in order to increase the involvement of the participants. Initial remarks of the speakers will be followed by debate, and active moderation will ensure that the discussions are dynamic. The issues raised by the speakers will be grouped under several axes, including: (i) Civic empowerment online: towards a new public sphere?; (ii) governmental and private control over information and personal data; (iii) Cases of tension between copyright protection and access to knowledge online. Cases such as the adoption of laws following the three strikes model and the adoption of open data regulations will be taken into consideration.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:
Civil Society:
Robert Guerra – Freedom House, US
Anja Kovacs – Centre for Internet and Society, India
Kevin Bankston – EFF, US

Academics:
Marília Maciel - Center for Technology and Society - Brazil
Jeremy Malcolm - Consumers International, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Government:
Johan Hallenborg – Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden
José Murilo Junior – Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Brazil

Business sector:
Alan Davidson – Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for the Americas
Cornelia Kutterer, Microsoft, Belgium

Multistakeholder initiative:
Susan Morgan, Global Network Initiative

Remote moderator:
Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

(A moderator is still to be determined but will be chosen from among the civil society and academic speakers. All speakers have confirmed their participation)

Biographies:
There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation – civil society
Johan Hallenborg, Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs - government
Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society - civil society
Jeremy Malcolm. Consumers International - civil society
Marília Maciel - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation – civil society

Organization:Centre for Internet and Society, India, and Center for Technology and Society of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

Contact Persons: Anja Kovacs and Marília Maciel

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/freedom-of-expression

Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:22Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems at the Internet Governance Forum on 14 September, 2010.

Content regulation remains remains a critical area where competing rights and interests are played out. Within this, sexuality and sexual rights lie at the centre of the debate. Protection from the "harm" of pornography and other sexually related content are often the principal reason forwarded for regulating content. At the same time, the internet is a critical space for the exercise and realisation of sexual rights, especially by people who have less access to power and resources, such as migrants, sex workers, differently abled communities, young women etc. In recent years, internet content regulation has increasingly become more of a norm than an exception. Despite the slippery definitions of 'obscene', 'illegal' and 'harmful' content, governments, the private sector and civil society are shaping and implementing regulatory mechanisms, sometimes in partnership with each other.

To what extent has it worked to protect the rights of all users, particularly those that such regulations assert their protection over, such as internet users, young people and women? What can be some of the indicators to monitor and measure to what extent the internet is 'open', especially in relation to sexual rights? What happens when regulation works to instead compromise or infringe on users' sexual rights, including the right to access information, communicate, share knowledge, build communities, exercise control over their personal data, embodiment and spaces? What are some of the mechanisms of redress - both formal and informal - within existing regulatory systems, and how far are they able to respond to these issues? What is needed to ensure that transparency, accountability and a rights-based framework - principles that last year's IGF workshop participants agreed were key - are built into them?

Drawing from current research initiatives in this area, this workshop aims to facilitate an open dialogue and exchange of ideas, knowledge and best practices to respond to some of the questions above. Research papers will also be commissioned to investigate some of the key questions raised above to initiate debate and discussion prior to IGF, which will be shared at the workshop.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:
http://www.intgovforum.org/Athens_workshops/Content_Regulation.pdf (2006);
http://intgovforum.org/Rio_event_report.php?mem=19 (2007);
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?
chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=93 (2

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:

Nadine Moawad, Founder, Take Back The Tech Arabia; Project Leader, EROTICS - Lebanon
Dorothy Atwood, Vice President - Public Policy, and the Chief Privacy Officer of the telecommunications company AT&T, USA
Joy Liddicoat, human rights lawyer and Commissioner with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.
Clarissa Smith, Member of the Onscenity Research Network; Programme Leader, MA Media and Cultural Studies and MA Film & Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK.

Biographies:
There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme
Co-organisers:
Centre for Internet and Society
Alternative Law Forum

Organization:Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme

Contact Person: Jac sm Kee

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/sexual-rights-openness-regulatory-systems

UID Project in India - Some Possible Ramifications

Liliyan — 2012-03-21T10:13:27Z

Having a standard for decentralized ID verification rather than a centralized database that would more often than not be misused by various authorities will solve ID problems, writes Liliyan in this blog entry. These blog posts to be published in a series will voice the expert opinions of researchers and critics on the UID project and present its unique shortcomings to the reader.

Researchers at CIS have been grappling with the UID project from research, advocacy, and legal standpoints though all approach it from their own perspective and opinions are rarely duplicated. In an attempt to make their expert opinions more accessible to readers, a series of blog posts, this being the first, will be put up. These posts will not, and cannot because of its length and format, try to address all the possible issues the UID poses. However, they will present the bare bones of the arguments and research questions that the independent voices at CIS see as crucial. These posts will also ask many more questions than they answer, in an attempt to spur further dialogue about the UID project.

Central to understanding the nature of the UID project and its possible ramifications is the idea that technology is not merely a tool to be used by an unchanging, monolithic state. In fact, its very adoption can create ripple effects throughout the apparatus of the state. When the state adoptsa mainstream and ubiquitous technology, the structure of the government and methods of governance change. These changes are not always so dramatic as to be immediately noticeable without some informed inspection, but if one considers the way the state and the citizen interact the significance of these changes becomes starkly apparent. Can we trust the government to use touch screen voting machines like the ones we see every day at the bank? Do government surveillance cameras make us safer or introduce worrisome intrusion into our privacy, or both? Technology is not as neutral as it appears. That is not to say that it is inherently good or bad, but that it is not inert, it is transformative in nature.

The nation state as we know it is built on the printed word, or at least analogue technology. The ways in which we codify, distribute, and assimilate information have, for centuries, been dominated by the printing press. With the introduction of “database governance” there will inevitably be a shift, and a radical one at that. The Indian government has announced its intention to move towards “SMART” (simple, moral, accountable, responsive and transparent) governance, and this implies both an acceptance of the neo-liberal philosophy of government and techno-governance. To achieve a new level of transparency, accountability, and responsiveness, the move towards e-governance could be a major turning point, but how does this shift complicate and change the citizen-state relationship in India? How does this change shift the relationship of India with the rest of the international community?

The UID and Shifts in the Citizen-State Relationship

One way that the citizen-state relationship will change with the shift towards techno-governance, specifically in regard to the UID project, is that the UID posits the state as both the safe-keeper and arbiter of identity. Proponents of the UID project are adamant that it is a voluntary program, but even the UID website states that “in time, certain service providers may require a person to have a UID to deliver services”. As the UID becomes increasingly ubiquitous, could not having a number mean being cut off from some or many of the basic privileges of citizenship if one's identity is becoming more difficult to verify? If having a UID number is the most prominent marker of identity, then it is through state definition, arbitration and upon the state's technical capacity that all will rely.

Moreover, how do we begin to address the privacy issues raised by technological advances in relation to non-changing legal structures? What does it mean to capture all this identity data without introducing a new privacy legislation to protect the citizen? Without new legal accommodation, otherwise benign processes like a statistical census can become a potent tool in a shift towards a police state. As state apparatus's shift, there must be some paradigmatic shift in law to accompany these new technologies and government roles.

If the state transforms through the integration of e-governance forms, then there will inevitably be a recalibration of the relationship between the state, the market, and the citizen. Traditionally the separation of these entities creates arbitration and within a development paradigm there is dynamic, active triangulation. One way we can see this triangulation is through government intervention in markets on behalf of the citizen. There are certain spaces of consumption, for example, such as a cinema where state intervention against discrimination creates a marker for citizenship. That is, because I am able to access a cinema without discrimination, as one of my constitutional rights, this demonstrates my citizenship. However, with the introduction of public- private partnerships, or PPPs, the fact of having multiple stake-holders of political economy allows for the state to disinvest in the production and delivery of certain public services. Satisfying the needs of the citizen for services like sanitation, public education, delivery of power and clean water, maintenance of infrastructure like roads and bridges, can be handed over to corporate entities. The Indian government has enthusiastically embraced PPPs as a way to bring needed capital to the infrastructure demands that accompany their economic growth goals. However, how does this kind of task delegation affect transparency and accountability? If the state decides to stop producing or supplying a good or service, and instead turns this over to a corporation, can the mechanisms for state oversight realistically be trusted to make sure quality and accountability are not adversely affected and rectify the situation if they are? Where does the citizen come into all of this, in terms of what they stand to gain and lose?

The Definition of Citizenship and the UID

As the state and the market enters into new relationships the definition of citizenship changes. If the citizen is seen as the intended beneficiary of state programs, this new relationship between state and market begs the question “Who is subject to (or the subject of) the state?” When the corporate sphere creates micro-financing that helps farmers, they may help the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid manage their debt, but does it necessarily address the problems that created the debt in the first place? How does the market mediate the citizen-state dialogue? As the state and the market enter into new relationships there is a recalibration of the citizen-government relationship. Do market demands for an e-literate consumer put pressure on the state to create one where one did not exist before, and if so, can this not have profound implications for the definition of citizenship?

Part of the movement towards e-governance is signalled by the fact that there has been a shift away from state-sponsored literacy campaigns to e-literacy programs. Does this use of information and communications technology for development (or ITC4D) alienate significant portions of the population? Can such programs in fact widen the digital divide? With the introduction of e-governance the state asks the citizen to participate in governance by creating new avenues for civic participation, such as providing databases of information pertaining to the state that is freely accessible for analysis and manipulation by anyone with the skills to do so. But, if this makes it impossible for some portions of the citizenry to communicate effectively with the state, does this run the risk of making certain, traditional forms of citizenship redundant? How are people with low literacy and little or no access to the necessary technologies supposed to communicate with this new high-tech bureaucracy? Will those who cannot navigate the new systems be inadvertently relegated to second-class status?

This is of particular concern when thinking about the UID project. To properly manage and distribute social services, ID management in some form is crucial. However, when trying to make sure services are properly delivered to the uneducated poor the danger for digital-analogue slippage that is not in their favour increases, and accountability is not necessarily adequately addressed. For example, if I am an illiterate farmer entitled to a certain ration and the person conducting the transaction decides to defraud me, they can easily ask me to authenticate my biometrics, make it appear that they have been simply checking my identity when they have actually fooled me into authenticating the “completed” transaction and simply tell me the computer says, I've already received my share, that I'm only entitled to half of the normal amount, or some other such lie. In this scenario, how would I know this person wasn't telling me the truth? If they lie using a simple ledger, I can take the ledger itself or a copy of it to a literate friend and have them help me navigate the situation. I can seek redress and substantiate my claims more easily if I am not alienated by the technologies being used. Technologies can be empowering or dis-empowering depending on their application. How then, do we balance the demands of the market and the duties of the state against the rights of the citizen? Or rather, how do we apply technology in such a way that the demands of the market and the duties of the state mutually balance each other?

Centralization and Cost-effectiveness of the UID

While ID management is indisputably important, it does not require a centralized database. In the US there are multiple pieces of information, stored in separate databases that can be used to authenticate a transaction. No one can open a bank account with just a social security insurance number. You also need a separate form of ID, often two, that can be used to verify identity. In this way, the SSI number is a bit like a “username” and the other forms of ID, driver's license or passport, function like a corresponding “password”. With the UID project, however, the “username” (the number itself) and the “password” (the number holder's biometrics) are stored in the same place. Thereby, should the database be in some way compromised, all the information needed to verify and complete transactions would be available. If storing this information in a central database is really a good idea, then one must also accept the premise that merging all existing email servers into one monolithic server is also a good idea. Furthermore, centralization is not only more dangerous, it is totally unnecessary. Trillions of dollars worth of trade take place every year using PIN numbers issued by banks and verified without the verifying data being centralized. Having a standard for decentralized ID verification, rather than a centralized database would solve ID problems without creating a database that would be vulnerable to attack.

There are lots of examples of governments implementing costly safety measures that don't actually make anyone safer. Take for example the cameras put up all over London to monitor the movements of people. Unfortunately, something as low-tech as a hooded sweatshirt can thwart these attempts at surveillance. Moreover, if I am a criminal, I am going to make it a priority to know where the cameras are so that I can strategically avoid them. Another example is the millions of dollar the U.S. government spent on putting an armed Federal Air Marshal on every flight, post 9/11. While traditional intelligence gather has thwarted other attempted attacks since 9/11, Air Marshals have not been responsible for stopping any. Simply because the UID project is more technologically advanced does not make it more effective. It seems to greatly increase the risk of fraud that there can be so many separate biometrics machines scattered in different places to verify so many transactions. Having the machines sequestered in private businesses where they will not be constantly monitored or regulated seems to be both costly and easily subject to tampering. It seems to make more sense to have, say, one central, monitored machine per so many people that could be used to settle identity disputes when they arise rather than making the technology a part of every transaction.

Infallibility and Circumvention of the UID

The UID is not infallible and circumvention will certainly be a problem with the project. We find an analogy in the field of digital rights management. If I copy an mp3 without permission or payment, that is illegal. Digital rights management law was introduced to stop this practice, but it was circumvented. This legislation has not stopped the first crime. It has merely created a second, that of circumventing the law. The UID, in so far as it may be used to try to stop the crime of illegally siphoning resources such as, for example, grain intended to go to the poor, cannot stop people from circumventing the system. Circumventing the UID will be a crime. If doing so were truly impossible there would be no need to criminalize it. So, instead of preventing the initial crime of siphoning may not prevent the first crime, while introducing another.

There are basically two possible types of circumvention that are possible, though they might present themselves in various different forms. “Type A” or “the Mission Impossible” kind of fraud might involve fake thumb prints and contact lenses being worn by someone trying to fool the person conducting the biometric authentication. “Type B” occurs when the person operating the biometrics machine is working to defraud the system, most likely with one or many accomplices.

“Type A” involves one dishonest person, who is trying to access someone else's account or a ghost account, and there are various proposed methods to prevent against this type of fraud. To prevent against people using fake thumb prints, the biometrics machines will measure the heat of the thumb as well as the image of the thumb. With the iris scan, there will be a pulse of light to cause contraction in the iris so that a contact lens, which cannot adjust for light, can be detected. All of this will drastically raise the price of the machines in question. It is hard to imagine farmers and labourers defrauding the system with elaborate biometric defrauding devices, so these expensive machines are much more appropriate for monitoring the top of the economic pyramid, who steal in larger sums and have more sophisticated technology at their disposal.

“Type B” involves dishonesty either by the person in control of the biometric authentication, or both that person and others. This seems to be a much more likely and problematic scenario. Right now, bank accounts that are not connected to a name are regularly created so that people can cheat the tax man. Since the bank profits from these accounts, it's in the bank's interest to help people set up such accounts. Ghost ID numbers, and things like bank accounts that are connected to them, can still be produced with biometrics. How is this possible? Well, to make it possible for so many biometric authentications to happen every day, the whole set of ten finger prints won't be sent. That would be way too much data. So, instead of overwhelming the channels, only one thumb print will be sent. Even that many thumb prints would be an information overload, so each thumb print's image will be reduced to a set of 30 data points that will be compared against the original scans. So, where is there a possibility for fraud? When the scan of the finger is taken, and image is rendered. If someone wants to create a ghost ID they only have to manipulate this image, like with a Photoshop filter, and alter the data points. Once I've created a set of biometric markers that doesn't connect to anyone, I can conduct transactions for a ghost. One can easily imagine a market emerging for ghost IDs. People might start trying to pay foreign tourists for their biometric information, which could be sold to a local office. There are certain settings where biometrics works well, for example, at an airport. There, everything is under constant video surveillance. If someone were to tamper with or try to replace the machinery it would be quickly noticed by the cameras. Even if it weren't, different people would routinely be operating the same machine and this would be an added safe guard against fraud. However, at a bank, or any place where the machines used for verification are operated behind closed doors it is quite likely that the technology will be abused. This abuse could easily go unnoticed, because the draft UID bill has proposed strict accountability measures for the Authority, and has conveniently overlooked extending these to collecting and enrolling agencies.

Digital/Analogue Slippage

There is always the possibility of digital/analogue slippage or, more simply put, the computer records not reflecting what actually happened even if no fake identity was used. This happens all the time in IT buildings in the form of tailgating. Four people go out to lunch together and as they re-enter the building they're supposed to each swipe their ID card individually. It is easier and faster for one person to swipe for everyone so, despite signs discouraging this behaviour, this is a common occurrence. If you were to try to analyse the data collected after a day of such comings and goings it would be indecipherable.

I can also authenticate my biometrics, in order to authorize a transaction, without the transaction actually being complete. Let's say I'm a poor farmer entitled to a ration of 10 kilos of grain. The person who is supposed to give me the grain is not an honest person and insists that I authenticate the transaction before he or she gives me my ration. I do what I'm told but only receive 5 kilos. The computer record shows that I have gotten my full ration, so I have no grounds to contest. In this scenario, more complex technology does not necessarily mean greater accountability. Furthermore, even if I am illiterate, if there is a simple ledger that has recorded the transaction, I can physically take the ledger or a copy of it and show it to some literate person willing to help me. If the only record of the transaction is in a database that I can't access or can't understand it will be even more difficult for me to seek help. Moreover, if I don't understand the technology and the shop owner decides not to give me the grain at all they can simply say “Oh, I'm sorry, your account has been denied” or “The computer says you've already been given your ration” and I have little chance of successfully negotiating that situation. Built in to this example is the disadvantage that the illiterate and the computer illiterate face when dealing with this technology but, this is not necessarily always present in cases where digital/analogue slippage causes confusion or complication.

Commonly, things are bought by or registered to one person and used by another. For example, in a small office building, all the phone lines and computers may have been bought in the name of one person. Each office worker will not buy their own computer or equipment, but instead the computers will be bought in the name of the person who runs the organization or an administrator with financial authority. If someone in the office uses their computer to make a bomb or store child pornography, who is accountable? This is the problem when there is digital/analogue slippage. There is the digital record of events and then things as they really are, which are not always identical, and there is no accountability or safeguard against mistake. In the context of the UID, the possibility of such slippage is too high, and will work against the goal of delivering benefits to the poor instead of facilitating it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uid-in-india

Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T03:13:24Z

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.

Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with:

Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy?

He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:

"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."

Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution

It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication.

There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.

Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.

The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.

Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?

Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.

Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:

“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”

The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.

From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.

"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."

Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)

ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …

Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008

For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.

The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.

The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.

Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.

Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.

In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.

Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.

It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.

Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP

Country	Percentage
Japan	3.67%
Sweden	3.60%
Finland	3.48%
USA	2.70%
EU average	2.16%
China	1.40%
India	1.00%

In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity.

India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.

	India	China
MathSciNet, 2006	1,949	11,762
Engineering Village, 2006	25,954	199,881
SciFinder, 2007	41,697	235,309
Web of Science, 2007	35,450	98,241

Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.

But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.

Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly.

Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.

India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.

The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.

There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias.

India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.

India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.

But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting open source drug discovery and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.

Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.

India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.

Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow.

The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.

The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.

Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research.

A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.

The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”

Is anyone listening?

Universities	Scopus	Scholar	% Sco vs Sch
Univ College London	134,950	8,660	6.4
Univ of Cambridge	114,339	8,320	7.3
Univ of Oxford	99,723	7,800	7.8
Imperial College	91,537	4,720	5.2
Univ of Manchester	83,024	3,840	4.6
King's College London	60,407	1,100	1.8
Univ of Edinburgh	57,473	9,920	17.3
Univ of Southampton	44,013	14,000	31.8
Univ of Warwick	23,018	6,010	26.1
Univ of York	21,554	2,920	13.6
Loughborough Univ	18,902	4,030	21.3

This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.

UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.

The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.

Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet.

If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers.

The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA.

The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.

In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.

The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.

In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference.

If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks.

The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.

Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.

What is there already?

World-class Open Course Ware.
About 200 OA journals.
Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way.
A small group is promoting OJS.
There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.
There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,
Library and information science, Catalysis.
Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.
Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.
The Catalysis repository is not listed.
There are some efforts to digitize theses.
Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.
An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source.

But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches.

On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.

Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both.

Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.

International collaboration and ways forward

A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access.

The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.

India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.

eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!

We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.

OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship

June 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T09:38:46Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on events for the month of June 2010.

News Updates

Dont hang up on this one
Is 3G the next twist in the mobile phone growth story?
http://bit.ly/9NkaVP

Peeping Toms In Your Inbox
Nothing’s safe any more—not your mobile number, nor your e-mail—as they’re put on offer for the benefit of telemarketers, writes Namrata Joshi and Neha Bhatt in an article published in the Outlook.
http://bit.ly/ckmRRH

I don't want my fingerprints taken
Through this article published in Down to Earth, Nishant Shah looks at the role of the state as arbiter of our privacy.
http://bit.ly/aYdMia

An artist's hunt for lost stepwells
As part of the Maps for Making Change project, Kakoli Sen has brought to light some facts which she stumbled upon while mapping the stepwells in Vadodara. She mapped these and also discovered 14 such architectural heritage structures. The news was covered in the Times of India.
http://bit.ly/dxtwJU

Facebook, privacy and India
Does Facebook's decision to open out user information and data to third party websites amount to an invasion of privacy and should users' seriously consider getting out of the site? Sunil Abraham doesn't think so.
http://bit.ly/a2HzhT

APC starts research into spectrum regulation in Brazil, India, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa
Communication infrastructure is the foundation of the knowledge-based economy and while there has been a boom in the construction of undersea cables bringing potentially terabits of capacity to the African continent, the ability to deliver broadband to consumers is hampered by inefficient telecommunications markets and policies. Wireless connectivity offers tremendous potential to deliver affordable broadband to developing countries but inefficient spectrum policy and regulation means the opportunity to seize the advantages brought about by improvements in wireless broadband technologies are extremely limited.
http://bit.ly/a67ut8

WIPO Proposals Would Open Cross-Border Access To Materials For Print Disabled
The print disabled feel that the possible UN recommendations being negotiated upon may come up short, reports Kaitlin Mara in this article.
http://bit.ly/99kbS0

The Potential of Open Development for Canada and Abroad
IDRC held a panel discussion on 'The Potential of Open Development for Canada and Abroad' on May 5, 2010 in Ottawa.
http://bit.ly/aSp8J3

A letter to CGIAR in support of Open Access
Professor Subbiah Arunachalam wrote a letter to CGIAR apprising them of the need for, and advantages of making their research output Open Access.
http://bit.ly/doJmAe

Upcoming Event

The Internet, Culture, and Society - Looking at Past, Present, and Future Worldwide
It is now well known that with 4.5 billion mobile phone owners in the world and increased Internet penetration, global cultures and communities have experienced shifts in their economic, political, and social well-being due to the digital revolution. As a scholar and consultant who works worldwide, Prof Ramesh Srinivasan will illustrate how new media technologies have been used creatively to enable political movements in Kyrgyzstan, literacy and educational reform in India, and economic development across the developing world. In addition to this, he will discuss some of digital culture's biggest challenges, including considering how the Web can start to empower different types of cultural perspectives and knowledges.
http://bit.ly/c9cIvc

Research

Survey: Digital Natives with a cause?
This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.
http://bit.ly/cUtKhV

Queer Histories of the Internet: An Introduction
Nitya Vasudevan and Nithin Manayath introduce the Queer Histories of the Internet through this blog post discussing broadly the relationship between queer identity and technology.
http://bit.ly/9xdYRv

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'
This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.
http://bit.ly/9PV9YW

The power of the next click...
P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the Internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.
http://bit.ly/95twmz

Telecom

India's sorry spectrum story
In this article published in the Business Standard on June 3, 2010, Shyam Ponappa analyses the spectrum story in India. He says that the approach to spectrum management is an object lesson in how not to use information and communications technology for development.
http://bit.ly/cojFFT

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

The Making of an Asian City

nishant — 2012-08-10T08:33:48Z

Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.

The Promise of Invisibility: The Making of an Asian IT City

Abstract: This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material (re)construction of the city:

1. Built Form of the City: The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies.

2. Governance and Administration: The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the state.

These changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse, through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently – in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question as central to the phenomena.

Context

The 21^st Century has seen accelerated urbanisation and spatial restructuration of cities in emerging information societies around the world. These cities are created as global hubs that shall not only house the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, but also embody the aesthetics, politics, practices and lifestyles that the global cultural revolutions are bringing in. The technologies are significantly involved in the production of the dominant, the hegemonic and the coercive, all under the rubric of economic growth and development, and have affected domains of life, labour and language (Foucault,1998) in different contexts. It is easy to trace the ways in which lifestyle, cultural expression (Bagga, 2005), texture of social interaction and mobilisation, and political and administrative reorganisation (Roy, 2005) have changed in emerging contexts like India and China.

The efforts at creating ‘global countries’ (Kalam, 2004) that can harness the powers of ICT, have lead to three distinct forms of changes. These changes can be seen in the built form of the city, in structures of governance and administration, and in attitudes and Imagination of technologies as they emerge in popular discourse and cultural production. Each of these changes is articulated and explained through the tropes of Transparency and Access. The paper has a specific interest in looking at sites of dislocation and migration, to illustrate the arguments it seeks to make. The paper relies on secondary and tertiary literature (often in translation), unstructured interviews and participant observation to make an argument about how the aesthetics, mechanics and political [i] imaginaries of technology are a part of the physically changing and transforming IT cities in Asia. In order to make the argument, however, a brief context that explains the material signification of these three kinds of changes, is necessary to be explicated.

Beyond the Blogosphere

There has been an equal amount of optimism and scepticism when it comes to talking about the new public spheres that emerge with the Internet. Clubbed under the short-hand ‘Blogosphere’, both the evangelists and the critics of the blogosphere, have explored the Habermassian notion of the engaging public that is crafted with the emergence of new technologies of literacy, expression and participation. In many ways, the governance structures that have been discussed earlier, also endorse the positions taken by these interlocutors. However, much of the discourse, understands the blogosphere as contained in the digital domains. While a cause-and-effect model is often posited, the chief interest and focus remains on the new public, new voices and new spaces within the virtualities of the World Wide Web. This paper challenges such narrow definitions of the public sphere, and in fact, goes back to Habermass to locate technologies and public spaces within a certain historical context. In fact, this paper proposes that the increasing need for the faith in the blogosphere and the clamour that surrounds it is symptomatic of how the physical and built public spaces, in most Asian IT cities, is slowly diminishing.

In Shanghai, it is the loss of a political public space of socialist capital and industry that marks the beginning of this disappearance. 20 years ago, the announcer on every passenger train entering Shanghai would introduce the city as “the largest industrial city in China.” When W. E. B. Du Bois, an African-American writer, visited Shanghai in 1959, he was particularly invited to visit the balcony of Shanghai Mansion, which sits at the mouth of the Suzhou River and was the tallest building of its time, to catch a bird’s eye view of the new urban socialist landscape and the innumerable factory chimneys that speared the sky (Zhang, 2002).[ii] Indeed, an abundant number of factories, warehouses and dockyards cropped up in the three decades after 1950, and, together with the existing industrial constructions, made Shanghai a “new metropolis.” Some of them were clustered in suburban areas, more were scattered in the city area. Some were even squeezed into Longtangs (the narrow alleyways of old Shanghai). The industrial constructions include not only factory buildings but also workers’ residential buildings in factory-concentrated areas. The workers’ residential buildings were targeted primarily at the senior or skilled workers among the industrial population. Life in the residential buildings became an extension of factory life since neighbours were most probably co-workers in the same factory. It is precisely the great number of old and new industrial constructions and the rhythmic life going on in them that composed the socialist industrial space of Shanghai. Needless to say, it was the fastest growing space in the forty years after 1949.

However, nine out of ten such spaces have been wiped out during the fifteen-year urban renewal project, which is perhaps embodied in the restructuring of the Bund as a space of tourist attraction, and eventually the building of the Pudong skyline that has now become the iconic face of the city (Yatsko, 1996, pp 59).[iii] Factories—let alone warehouses—within the Inner Ring Road have either closed down or been removed. With the closing of the factories, the workers also have no place to work anymore. Dr. Wang XiaoMing, in his essay on the changing public space mentions how, once the factory he worked in “had its signboard removed in 1997, the workers have no place to work anymore. The inhabitants of Caoyang New Village have thrown away the signboard off the gate a long time ago and could barely remember that the place was once called the “Workers New Village.” Large factories located on the outskirts of the city are mostly shut down and the places are as quiet as cemeteries” (forthcoming, 2010).

As Americanised industrial parks sprout up in places such as the Pudong District of Shanghai, and Kunshan and Suzhou to the north of Shanghai, the socialist industrial space is shrinking rapidly both within and without Shanghai. Another space that has significantly diminished is the public political space. One of the most important requirements socialism places on urban space is to be able to facilitate large-scale political rallies and parades (Kewen 2006 and Liang 1959).[iv]

Therefore, apart from industrial constructions, the most eye-catching constructions in Shanghai’s new urban constructions from the 1950s to the 1960s were squares and large meeting halls, which include the People’s Square, the Sino-Russian Friendship Building, the Cultural Plaza, and so on.[v] Moreover, government agencies of all levels and factories endeavoured to build conference halls of various sizes for political meetings by transforming theatre halls or building new ones. In the past, tens of thousands of people have paraded down the People’s Square to pay tribute to the officials perched high above on reviewing stands. People rallying in various meeting halls, changing slogans to express joy, and echoing the instructions from the speakers on stage, were frequent occurrences. During the Cultural Revolution, the Rebels staged the final resistance here; in the late 1980s, fervent university students had swarmed into People’s Square to turn it into a place of revelry (Feuchtwang, 2004).

In the blink of an eye, these histories have faded from the public memory and been completely erased from the city’s architectural space. Sino-Russia Friendship Building is renamed Shanghai Exhibition Center, which hosts a constant blur of Expos. After repeated segmentation, People’s Square is now only a nominal square with a long and narrow driveway and most of its space has been occupied by new buildings such as the majestic Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum, the sunken commercial street and a parking lot. Cultural Plaza was first transformed into a large flower market which was later torn down and pushed to a corner to make way for the new “Music Plaza.” With mass meetings completely eradicated from the life of Shanghai’s residents, the numerous assembly halls and meeting places of various sizes have naturally been restructures for other purposes. People participate with zeal in large assemblies such as concerts, performance competitions, and so on, which have nothing to do with public politics. It is even possible to say that the audience’s shrieks in the stadium symbolize the massive decrease of the public political space in both architectural and spiritual sense (Tang, 2009, pp 327).

Another cluster of spaces that have significantly disappeared are the gossip centres concentrated in areas such as the mouth of NongTang, Lao Hu Zhao [vi], variety store and lane. It is a cultural given that the Shanghainese like to strike up a conversation with strangers and to engage in gossip; this is indeed one of the city’s hallmarks. The Shanghainese can always spare time for gossip: no matter how busy the atmosphere is, there are always some people who loiter around with hands in pockets; even the working class who work from dawn to dusk like to exchange a few words with their neighbours after work. It so happened that the living space was very cramped for the Shanghainese after the 1950s.[vii] The rich can idle away their time in places such as cinemas whereas the low-income people can only manage to find a free space of leisure near their residences. The first choice is the mouth of NongTang adjacent to the footpath, from which all the comings and goings of residents and the traffics on the streets could be perceived. There will always be a Lao Hu Zhao near the mouth of a big NongTang, where you can sit for a whole afternoon and exchange hearsays with neighbours coming for hot water over a cup of tea; or there is a family-run variety store whose female boss is quite fond of trading rumours and gossip with customers across the narrow counter. In times of local or national crises, this is always the first place where the news is spread and gets distorted.

Things have now changed. Lao Huo Zhaos are gone. Variety stores are quickly replaced by different kinds of convenience stores (Huang, 2004, pp 49-50). Although many similar or even smaller family-run variety stores are opened at the newly-formed district bordering the city, a stable communication space cannot form in these stores since the male or female boss is mostly “non-native population”[viii], who not only is unable to blend in with the local residents but also may move away at any time. Although being one of the hallmarks of old Shanghai houses, the nongtangs have been pulled down in large numbers. Those narrow, winding streets have been either diverted, or straightened and widened. Shabby houses on both sides of the streets have disappeared. Also gone are the hustle and bustle, the interfusion of public and private space, and street gossips, which have been replaced by heavy traffic with exhaust gas and noise. With the increasingly neat arrangement of construction space within the city, the influx of transient population, residents increasingly accustomed to shutting doors to the world and to their neighbours, the overwhelming clamour in the media, and the young people’s addiction to internet and game bars, the space where rumours and gossips are spread via mouths and pointing fingers is naturally contracted (Yeung, 1996, pp. 78-84).

These old spaces of early Shanghainese modernity are quickly replaced by three new built forms. The first are the various above-ground, underground, and overhead expressways. Intersecting and intertwining together, they make the whole city look as if it were trapped in a python’s nest. The second thing that comes to the mind is commercial space.[ix] Shopping malls[x] line both the sides of the streets in downtown Shanghai, whereas hypermarkets cluster at the periphery of the city (Diao, 2006)[xi]. With the speedy expansion of space (Li, 2006)[xii], the style of constructions are increasingly uniform: nearly all of them name themselves “squares”; shopping malls are lined with chain stores on every level; chain supermarkets create mazes of different sizes with dense goods shelves; in office buildings, glass doors and plastic boards partition the office into many honeycomb-like cubicles, making the people working in them increasingly look like worker bees; the hospitality industry is overwhelmed with chain hotels of similar facilities and styles, even customers often forget which hotel they stay in last time (Fulong, 1999). The accelerated standardization process in Shanghai’s space highlights a tendency to obtain the standard outlook of the imagined “international metropolis” and an urgency to erase the distinct features inherited from the past.

Thirdly, the office space of governments and state monopolies expands in a unique sense: although the floor area has increased significantly[xiii], it is the upgrading and the move towards luxury that marks the change. Since the early 1990s, luxurious office buildings with halls paved with marble floor, central air conditioning system, shiny wood floors, CEO office suite with separate bathroom, were built first by banks, then revenue departments, telecommunication agencies, newspapers offices, television stations, courts, and police stations of different levels, and at last governments of municipal, district and even lower levels.[xiv] Not only the connotation of “work” has been enriched, but also other business spaces outside the office have expanded with restaurants, coffee bars, official reception hotels, training centers and vacation centers located in the office buildings or on the outskirts of town or other cities (Leaf, 1997, pp. 156-159).

The changes in the built form of the new IT City that has emerged, are particularly important because they signal the ways in which certain kinds of populations are made redundant in the city as it grows physically more hostile to their life in it. The erasure of histories, of public spaces, of spaces of political negotiation is symptomatic of the new ideologies, policies and dreams that Shanghai-Pudong embody. Most of the studies that look at these changes, concentrate only on the physical and material aspects of it, and ignore the aesthetics, politics, and changes that Internet technologies are bringing in, not only in the imagination of what constitutes a city, but also in the material and lived practices of the people in it (Appadurai, 1990). Government policies that ignore technologies, come to dead-ends in their intervention, as they fail to recognise the new geographies and terrains that the technology users navigate through. Interventions by the Development Sector or the Civil Society Movements often fail to recognise the structures of governance as informed by internet technologies, thus perpetrating the very evils that they fight against. Dislocation and Migration, which are complex issues, get reduced to only geography and physical places – leading to a simplified structure of rehabilitation, largely propelled by the vocabulary of the market and the state. Remunerations, economic rights and livelihood are the only questions addressed. In the process Community rights, structures of communication and networking, relationships within families and societies, ineffable ties and bonds that keep the communities coherent – these affective categories which are dislocated and forced to migrate because of the presence of technologies, fail to register either in the scholarship or in the practices in these areas.

This is where the blogosphere needs to be located – as not merely producing a new space of engagement, but helping in recovering the lost spaces of public participation and community communication. The blogosphere is not merely the invention of a technology marked digital native or the discovery of groups seeking alternative narratives. It is recognition of the fact that the regular mainstream public discourse, interacts with the social transformations and politics of our time and depend on the sustenance of public spheres for the socio-cultural categories like communities, neighbourhoods, public space, etc. to survive. The blogosphere, in the quickly changing, hyper-real landscape of Shanghai-Pudong’s geography is the new variety store, the new location for the Lao Hu Zhao and the space that the labyrinthine networks of nongtangs are mapped on.

e-Governance and its discontents

The change in the physical reorganisation of the city is not only a pragmatic decision. This disappearance of the public space of gossip, information dissemination and distortion, of informal conversations and deliberations tied in closely to the three levels of government in Shanghai – district government, street office and alley office – being able to increasingly control the leisure life of the Shanghainese through administrative planning and organisation (Zhang, 2004). There is a clear link between the government’s imagination of its own territory, the notion of the citizen who is to occupy these spaces, and the material practices that happen in these technology marked spaces (Feuchtwang, 2004). While it is an acknowledged fact that the Chinese government does not follow the structures and paradigms that a North-Western Democratic Liberal ideology that has produced the category of Nation-State in most contemporary discourse, there are still two specific forms of technology inflected governance structures which China seems to share with other contexts which might be geo-politically different.

The e-Governance models, which find resonances in most emerging contexts in the Global South, seem to develop two simultaneous and often ironically related approaches towards citizenship and administration, especially in the context of China. With its already forked governance policies, which treat HongKong – its colonial success story – differently from the rest of Mainland China (and the added complication of Taiwan) the governance structures are marked by technology in significant ways. These structures are suffused with irony, because of the tropes of transparency and invisibility that they use to articulate their rationale and processes.

The first is the approach of Rural Development through ICT networks, positing an access based model of participatory citizenship (Tarlo, 2003) and continuing the Development rhetoric of uplift and reform of the deprived citizen. This particular kind of governance structure re-imagines the beneficiary of state/government processes as existing in a condition of invisibility, and outside of the folds of technology. The particular emphasis on e-government, while it is located in the urban settings, is actually intended for reaching the citizen in the remote parts of the country, who does not have any engagement or direct interaction with processes of governance. Despite China’s three tiered government structure, the imagination of e-governance hold a strong currency because it makes visible, the people, practices and communities which otherwise exist in the subliminal and grey areas which were hitherto not in the focus of the government. Fuelling the rhetoric of e-government is the premium on information dissemination and transparent administration in order to enhance the domains of life and labour in the rural parts of the country.

This approach draws its strength from the Development agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’. However, the valourisation of transparency goes hand-in-glove with the production of the invisible (but cognisable) citizen who needs to be reproduced within the paradigms of technology. The peasant, who has been at the back-bone of China’s socialist political ideology, under this new articulation of transparency, becomes invisible – robbed of the historicity, the cultural iconoclasms and the empowerment that such policies earlier provided. Instead, the peasant becomes a worker who needs to be rehabilitated into the changing geographies of Pudong, the new IT city that requires a worker equipped with new skills and lifestyles. This approach draws its strength from the Developmental agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’ (Jaswal, 2005) and offers ICT enabled development as the panacea for the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, chronic poverty, etc. This approach is made manifest in the establishment of Telecentre kiosks, rural BPOs, e-literacy schools and mobile vans, setting up of mobile and internet technology centres, digitisation of the state’s resources, digital access centres to important data-sets, initiation of projects like ‘One Home One Computer’, the e-literacy campaigns, and the building of special economic zones (SEZ) and IT Corridors under the aegis of e-governance (Hawks, 2009).

The second approach is invested in the massive restructuration of the urban spaces to create infrastructure that attracts foreign investment and ICT enabled multinational corporations. This approach uses the language of creating a S.M.A.R.T. (Smart, Moral, Accountable, Responsive, Transparent) State, modelling the new spaces and politics around the new models of capital modernity (Appadurai, 1996) like Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei. This model is nuanced by a vocabulary of ‘global citizenship and globalised economy’ (Abbas, 1997), glorifying the new economic opportunities, flows of foreign capital, enhancement of lifestyle, and the promise of hypervisibility in the globalisation networks. The building up of network-neighbourhoods (Doheny-Farina, 1996), spaces of incessant commercial consumption, post modern digitalised aesthetics of living and housing, (Mitchell, 1996) infrastructure for ICT augmented lifestyles, spaces for sculpting hyperspatial bodies, and recreational zones that offer apolitical aesthetics of living (Chua, 2000), are all a part of this restructuration.

Contemporary analyses that deploy both these approaches are often contained within the language and the universes created by these approaches. Studies on e-governance concentrate on the processes of infrastructure development, the economic parameters of efficient administration, questions of rights and transparency and impact analyses of the public private partnership which is at the basis of most e-governance projects in India. Urban restructuration has found critique from disciplines that focus largely upon the promissory implementation of State policies, on the imbalance in the urban eco-systems, the new patterns of migration in the city, the cultural and class mobility that the new economies offer, and the emergence of the new middle class that becomes the figurehead of the IT revolution (Huang, 2005). Most studies look upon technology as incidental or instrumental; a tool towards an end. The relationship between ICTs and the State, and the kind of technosocial evolution they produce are generally zones of silence in most discourse. Both these discourses produce a certain hyper-visual citizen subject who is either the champion of the new Information societies or the victim of the digital divide that has ensued.

ICTs are often posited as neutral and transparent because they allow us to look at these two kinds of citizenships on the opposite end of the digital spectrum. It can be argued that the divides of ICTs are transparent and hence it offers clearly defined spaces of intervention and uplift. The development sector around the world has accepted this as a given and hence, along with the Governments, they have also been urging a blanket development of infrastructure of access to technology for a particular section of the society, in an attempt to ‘cure’ certain long standing problems. As in the case of India, China is also fuelled by this transparency rhetoric, which allows for the production of the power-user versus the un-networked and has pinned its hopes on the transformative powers of Internet Technologies. With more than two decades of ICT development in the country, and especially in spaces like Shanghai-Pudong, behind them, China seems to be facing a moment of crisis. On the one hand is its promotion and adoption of internet and digital technologies, which encourages younger users entering in “schools, colleges, universities and workforces to transform the economic conditions” (Heng, 2006). On the other hand is the imagination of these IT forces as transgressive, uncontrollable and in need of constant supervision in order to retain existing government-citizenship relationships and power structures. In the middle of this crisis, is another factor that the obvious suspects and users of technology, who are more under the radar, are not the people who are deploying technologies for political negotiation and using technology platforms for political mobilisation. Despite the efforts at green-washing its technologies and the production of the infamous Great Fire-wall of China, there has been a sustained use of internet technologies for resistance and subversion.

The spaces for subversion rises from the fact that with the making of the IT city, there has been a complex phenomenon of dislocation and migration, as several communities were made redundant in the logic of the IT City and were removed from the city. Many people from these communities re-entered the city as the new IT workforce after going through a ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘skill building’ to not only be a part of the IT labour groups but also to support the IT industry in the construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, there has been a steady flow of anonymous ‘outsiders’ who have found homes in the older nontangs and factories, and are in the subliminal zones of regulation. As the city is re-formed to make these people invisible (Abbas, 1997), their leisure space and time shrink and they find themselves increasingly forming the new prosumers of internet in Shanghai. However, in the transparency discourse that unfolds, these populations remain invisible and find spaces of resistance and political negotiation that their invisible status provides them. The promise of Invisibility that treats them as Wetware (the biological combination of a network consisting of Software and Hardware), allows for hope in the otherwise diminishing spaces of political articulation in a growing authoritarian regime in China.

Invisibility, Transparency and the Internet

The paper ends by re-formulating the relationship between the making of an IT City and the way in which transparency as a rhetoric and technology-as-instrumental method fail to account for the different kinds of changes that accompany the restructuring of these cities. On the one hand, there is shrinkage of physical space and built form, as new forms of technology infrastructure, global lifestyle and late capitalistic economies expand to fill up the spaces which were earlier available for political mobilisation, organisation and inhabitation. On the other, there is a diminishing political landscape, where, with the integration of the government with the market, there is a tendency to establish larger regulation and censorship in order to retain the status quo relationship between the government and the citizen, in the face of massive governance transition. Both these conditions are produced by the rise and spread of Information Technologies.

In the process, there are also only two kinds of citizenships that are addressed by the e-governance structures which work on a double edge: Firstly, they make the direct access (defined either by abundance or lack of access) citizenships hyper-visual, robbing them of nuances and looking upon them as implicated only in the discursive practices of Internet technologies. Second, they render invisible, the other supporting structures in order to highlight and focus on the economic development and growth propelled by the rise of the IT industries. In other words, they make the citizens who are central to the discourse, invisible, by treating them as embodiments of the new economic markets and aspirations, removing them from their traditional contexts, histories and spaces. Moreover, they make invisible/transparent, populations who are not marked by the aura of the Internet technologies, in order to bring into focus, the extraordinary changes – both in the physical built form as well as in the realms of governance – that have been initiated and accomplished with the making of the IT City Shanghai-Pudong.

References:

Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "The Coming Community." In Global Culture, edited by Michael Featherstone. London: Sage.

Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2004. Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China. New York: Routledge Cavendish

Hawks, F.L. 2009. A Short History of Shanghai: Being an account of the growth and development of the international settlement. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.

Hiibbard, Peter. 2008. The Bund Shanghai : China Faces the West. Odyssey Books and Guides.

Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. 2004. Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers : Illusions of open space in HK, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Leaf, Michael. 1998. ‘Urban planning and urban reality under Chinese economic reforms’, Journal of Planning Education and Research. 18(2): 145–153.

Li, Heng. 2006. “Behind the Spectacle of Commercial Real Estate,” Xinmin Weekly, 3rd issue (2006)

Mirsky, Jonathan. 2008. The Britannica Guide to Modern China : A comprehensive introduction to the world’s new economic giant. London: Constable and Robinson Ltd.

Diao Wenjun, “Analysis of the Present situation and Development Trend of Hypermarkets in Shanghai,” Shanghai Articles, 3rd issue (2006)

(STSN) Shanghai Times Square Newsletter. 2008. Issue No. 4. Shanghai.

Shu, Kewen. 2006. “the dynastic History of Tiananmen Square”, Life Week, Issue 11. 27^th March.

Sicheng, Liang. 1959. “Tiananmen Square”, Architectural Journal Issue 9-10. pp. 12.

SSY (Shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 1986, Shanghai Statistics Bureau, (September, 1986), p18, p412.

SSY(a) (shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 2005. Shanghai Statistics Bureau. China Statistics Press. August 2005.

Stanat, Michael. 2005. China’s Generation Y: Understanding the Future Leaders of the World’s Next Superpower. NY: Homa and Sekey Books.

Tang, Shih-che. 2009. ‘The club and the carrot of China’s globalization.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Volume 10, Number 2. Delhi: Routledge Journals.

Wu, Fulong. 1999. ‘The global and local dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’. Urban Studies, 37(8): 1359–1377.

Xixian, Xu and Xu JianRong. 2004. A Changing Shanghai. Shangai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House.

Yeung, Yue-man. 1996. Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization Under China's Open Policy. Shanghai: Chinese University Press.

Zhang, Jishun. , “The Linong of Shanghai: the political mobilization of grass-roots and the trend of national social integration (1950-1955),” Chinese Social Sciences Today, 2nd issue, 2004

Zhang, Xudong. 2002. “The Construct of Shanghai: Criticism of Urban Idols, Non-mainstream Writing and the Diminishment of Modern Myths” Literary Review, the 5th edition

[i] The project wants to emphasize that it is not attempting a historiography of the building of the IT City of Shanghai-Pudong. Instead, by drawing selectively, different ways in which the technology imaginaries (technopolises, intellectual labour, globally homogenous geographies and time-lines, bodies marked by technology in their material practices, etc ) of the Internet, find structure and form in the emerging IT cities in Asia.

[ii] Zhang Chunqiao, Secretary of the Culture and Education Department of the Shanghai Municipal Committee who accompanied DuBois to Shanghai Mansion, specially mentioned DuBois’ visit in an article entitled “To Climb the New Summit of Victory.”.

[iii] In 1994, one Shanghai government officer stated, “the government plans to remove or close down two thirds of the factories located within [the range of] 106 square kilometers from the city centre, namely, within the Inner Ring Road.”. Due to different reasons (one of the main reasons is the increase of transferee cost because unsolved problems, such as the proper placement of a large number of former workers, have been bundled with the factory buildings and factory land), some factories still remain in their original places, although most of them have already stopped manufacturing and the workers dismissed. The industrial life/space has disappeared with the disappearance of the factories. Ruins of this life/space become some sort of commodity only because the land under the ruins still has some value.

[iv] On the day (1 October 1949) of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong suggested rebuilding Tiananmen Square and making it a “grand and magnificent square.” See (Kewen, 2006). Liang Sicheng, who always insisted on preserving the old Beijing and opposed massive makeover, finally realized that the makeover was never about architecture but about politics: “As for the scale of Tiananmen Square … apart from considering the scale of man as a biological being and the scale of construction appropriate to the man’s physiology, we should also take into account the scale for the great collective requested by the political men in the new society.” Liang, 1959, pp 12).

[v] The People’s Square, transformed in 1953 from the original racecourse (which was nationalized in 1951 by the Municipal Military Control Commission), surrounded by woods, and paved with tiled and cemented floor, is the largest public space in Shanghai and can accommodate over one million people. The Sino-Russian Friendship Building, which was built in 1955 and was covering an area of 80,000 square meters, was the city’s largest building after the liberation of Shanghai and still ranks top in terms of its indoor space in today’s Shanghai. The Cultural Plaza, transformed in 1952 from the Greyhound Racecourse, had 12,500 seats and was the largest indoor hall in Shanghai.

[vi] It is a unique store that sells boiled water in Shanghai.

[vii] Shanghai’s housing shortage started in the early 20th century instead of the 1950s. The living space within Shanghai city is 16,100,000 square meters in total but 3.9 square meters per capita. During the 32 years from 1952 to 1985, 21,720,000 square meters of housing were built within the city and the registered population increased from 5,300,000 to 6,980,000. The housing shortage was still serious since by 1985, the living space had only reached 5.4 square meters per capita. (SSY, 1986). What needs to be clarified is that the statics of 1949 does not include the shabby slum houses commonly referred to as “gun di long.”

[viii] This is an increasingly popular new word in Shanghai over the last 20 years, which refers to the people who come from other provinces, especially the rural areas, and live in Shanghai but do not have permanent residence in Shanghai. According to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau’s report on March 2006, the immigrating labor population in Shanghai was 3,750,000. 2,840,000 of this population is in the manufacturing, construction, retail, and catering industry and engaged in low-income manual work. The immigrating population should be over 4 million if the large number of people (such as those in the household service business) and their children be taken into calculation.

[ix] In Shanghai, the floor area of shops has increased seven-fold from 4,030,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,857,000 square meters in 2004 and that of hotels has increased three-fold from 6,580,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,204,000 square meters in 2004. The increase of commercial space is even greater if that of commercial office buildings is calculated as well. (SSY(a), 2005, pp. 198)

[x] Take the area around Zhongshan Park for example, although it was one of the earliest developed leisure areas in Shanghai, there was only one small department store in the mid-1980s and the retail business developed slowly. However, within these ten years, with the completion of Zhongshan Park Station along the subway line 2 and light rail line 3, five multi-story shopping malls have been built, all within a radius of 500 meters. The newest among them is a 58-storey building with four levels of basement and nine levels of shopping mall.

[xi] By the end of 2005, hypermarkets measuring over 5000 square meters within Shanghai have reached 97 and 28 more have chosen their locations and would be opened soon. Because of a large number of hypermarkets and the intense competition brought about, a considerable number of them mainly profit from land appreciation rather than from retail.

[xii] By the end of 2005, the commercial real estate in Shanghai has reached a total of 2,900,000 square meters with 2.6 square meters per capita, far exceeding Hong Kong’s 1.2 square meters per capita.

[xiii] Barely 6 million square meters in 1990, the floor area of office buildings in Shanghai reached a total of 4,012,000 square meters in 2004. See Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2005. Edited by Shanghai Statistics Bureau, published by China Statistics Press in August 2005, p 198. The statistical material on the increase of floor area of commercial office building cannot be found for the present. Even if the material were obtained, it would not be enough since a large area of commercial office building has been rented by many state-owned monopoly agencies. However, the expansion of government office space is great even if it take up only one tenth of the space of office buildings.

[xiv] Such phenomenon exists not only in Shanghai but all over the country, especially in cities and towns of low economic level. The towering and luxurious government, bank, taxation, and police buildings create an ironic contrast with the low and shabby constructions close by.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper

Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010

pranesh — 2011-09-21T06:01:54Z

CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.

The full submission that CIS and 21 other civil society organizations made to the Rajya Sabha Standing Committee on HRD (which is studying the Bill) is available here. Given below is the summary of our submissions:

Existing Copyright Act

The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 has been designed from the perspective of a developing country. It has always attempted a balance between various kinds of interests. It has always sought to ensure that rights of authors of creative works is carefully promoted alongside the public interest served by wide availability and usability of that material. For instance, our Copyright Act has provisions for:

compulsory and statutory licensing: recognizing its importance in making works available, especially making them available at an affordable rate.
cover versions: recognizing that more players lead to a more vibrant music industry.
widely-worded right of fair dealing for private use: recognizing that individual use and large-scale commercial misuse are different.

These provisions of our Act have been lauded, and India has been rated as the most balanced copyright system in a global survey conducted of over 34 countries by Consumers International.

The Indian Parliament has always sought to be responsive to changing technologies by paying heed to both the democratisation of access as well as the securing of the interests of copyright holders. This approach needs to be lauded, and importantly, needs to be maintained.

Proposed Amendments

Some positive amendments

Fair Dealings, Parallel Importation, Non-commercial Rental: All works (including sound recordings and cinematograph films) are now covered the fair dealings clause (except computer programmes), and a few other exceptions; parallel importation is now clearly allowed; and non-commercial rental has become a limitation in some cases.
Persons with disabilities: There is finally an attempt at addressing the concerns of persons with disabilities. But the provisions are completely useless the way they are currently worded.
Public Libraries: They can now make electronic copies of works they own, and some other beneficial changes relating to public libraries.
Education: Some exceptions related to education have been broadened (scope of works, & scope of use).
Statutory and compulsory licensing: Some new statutory licensing provisions (including for radio broadcasting) and some streamlining of existing compulsory licensing provisions.
Copyright societies: These are now responsible to authors and not owners of works.
Open licences: Free and Open Source Software and Open Content licensing is now simpler.
Partial exemption of online intermediaries: Transient and incidental storage of copyrighted works has been excepted, mostly for the benefit of online intermediaries.
Performer’s rights: The general, and confusing, exclusive right that performers had to communicate their performance to the public has been removed, and instead only the exclusive right to communicate sound/video recordings remains.
Enforcement: Provisions on border measures have been made better, and less prone to abuse and prevention of legitimate trade.

Some negative amendments

WCT and WPPT compliance: India has not signed either of these two treaties, which impose TRIPS-plus copyright protection, but without any corresponding increase in fair dealing / fair use rights.
Increase in duration of copyright: This will significantly reduce the public domain, which India has been arguing for internationally.
Technological Protection Measures: TPMs, which have been shown to be anti-consumer in all countries in which they have been introduced, are sought to be brought into Indian law.
Version recordings: The amendments make cover version much more difficult to produce.
Moral rights: Changes have been made to author’s moral rights (and performer’s moral rights have been introduced) but these have been made without requisite safeguards.

Missed opportunities

Government-funded works: Taxpayers are still not free to use works that were paid for by them. This goes against the direction that India has elected to march towards with the Right to Information Act.
Copyright terms: The duration of all copyrights are above the minimum required by our international obligations, thus decreasing the public domain which is crucial for all scientific and cultural progress.
Criminal provisions: Our law still criminalises individual, non-commercial copyright infringement.
Libraries and archives: The exceptions for ‘public libraries’ are still too narrow in what they perceive as ‘public libraries’.
Educational exceptions: The exceptions for education still do not fully embrace distance and digital education.
Communication to the public: No clear definition is given of what constitute a ‘public’, and no distinction is drawn between commercial and non-commercial ‘public’ communication.
Internet intermediaries: More protections are required to be granted to Internet intermediaries to ensure that non-market based peer-production projects such as Wikipedia, and other forms of social media and grassroots innovation are not stifled.
Fair dealing and fair use: We would benefit greatly if, apart from the specific exceptions provided for in the Act, more general guidelines were also provided as to what do not constitute infringement. This would not take away from the existing exceptions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/copyright-bill-analysis

Open Access to International Agricultural Research

praskrishna — 2011-08-25T08:13:43Z

Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.

CIS Distinguished Fellow, Subbiah Arunachalam and 15 other open access advocates wrote to the top management of CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, requesting them to mandate open access to all research publications from all CGIAR centres. The letter was addressed to Dr. Carlos Pérez del Castillo and Dr. Katherine Sierra and it was copied to the Director Generals of all the 15 CGIAR centres.

A permanent member of the prestigious Harvard University Trade Group, Carlos Pérez del Castillo has received the highest decorations from the Governments of Brazil, Chile, France and Venezuela. Carlos Pérez del Castillo also served as the Chairman of the WTO General Council and as Vice-Minister and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay (1995-1998) and as Permanent Secretary of the Latin American Economic System (1987-1991). He is a member of the Board of the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council (IPC), and a small cattle farmer.

Katherine Sierra, CGIAR Fund Council chair, is the World Bank vice president for sustainable development responsible for people and programs in environmentally and socially sustainable development and infrastructure. Sierra chairs several international consultative groups. These include the World Bank-WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Cities Alliance, Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme, and Water and Sanitation Program. Other international groups that she chairs are InfoDev, which supports information and communication technologies for development, and the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility, which promotes private participation in infrastructure.

The Letter

Dear Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr. Kathy Sierra:

Subject: Please make all CGIAR research publications open access

About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr. William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr. Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."

ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the National Institute of Technology-Rourkela. ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.

Since then Institutional Repository is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.

We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.

As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. The full list of ~220 mandates worldwide is available at the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies.

We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.

Regards
Sincerely,

Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]
Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]
Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]
Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]
Jean-Claude Gudon [University of Montreal, Canada]
Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]
Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]
Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]
Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]
Heather Morrison [University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada]
Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]
T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]
Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]
Alma swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]
John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative Commons]
John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]

Status Report on a Suggestion made to CGIAR

Sixteen open access advocates wrote to the CGIAR leadership – Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo and Dr. Kathy Sierra – on 19 May 2010, requesting CGIAR to adopt an open access mandate for all research publications from CGIAR centres. [As the names of the signatories were arranged in alphabetical order, my name appeared on the top of the list. I am one of the group and not the leader.] Mr. Richard Poynder posted a write-up on the letter in his famous blog ‘Open and Shut’.

The letter led to a flurry of activity among the ICT-KM professionals of CGIAR. I have heard from ICRISAT (Dr. William Dar, Director General), ILRI (Dr. Peter Ballantyne, Head, Knowledge Management and Information Services) and CIAT (Dr. Edith Hesse, Head Corporate Communications and Capacity Strengthening).

Dr. Dar welcomed the suggestion. Incidentally, he is a champion of open access and is on the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS). He was also the first in the CGIAR system to mandate open access to all research publications from the centre he heads.

From the mails of Dr. Ballantyne and Dr. Hesse, I could perceive some misgivings about the letter to CGIAR among knowledge managers of some CGIAR centres. In contrast, Dr. Francesca Re Manning of CAS-IP, CGIAR, expressed complete agreement with the proposal made by the OA advocates.

The response of Dr. Enrica Porcari, Chief Information Officer of CGIAR, was ambivalent, almost a tightrope walk. She didn’t say that OA was not acceptable to CGIAR and yet she was not willing to accept OA mandating as an option. She said: “Rather than a policy on ‘open access’ limited to journal articles, I would instead prefer to see us develop a strong and clear CGIAR view and set of practices that balance the need for high quality science with highly accessible outputs, and reinforces the substantial progress we have already made across all the Centers…I would advocate for a concerted effort to ‘opening access to our research’. Is not providing open access to research publications the obvious first step in opening access to our research?”

Probably, Dr. Porcari also thought that the advocates were promoting open access journals. Both Richard Poynder and I clarified that what we suggested for CGIR was open access and not open access journals and explained the difference between the two. Richard clarified that our emphasis was actually on open access archiving.

Dr. Peter Bloch and Dr. Kay Chapman of CAS-IP thought that some of the ideas we put forward were astute and relevant but had some concerns about making papers for which the copyright vests with journal publishers open access as well as papers co-authored with non-CGIAR researchers. In response we pointed out how other organizations which have mandated open access have dealt with these issues.

Prof. Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management , Ahmedabad, and founder of the Honey Bee network that disseminate the innovations of thousands of farmers, craftsmen, artisans and the lay public, endorsed the suggestion stating that Harvard made it obligatory for all the papers published by its faculty to be openly accessible. He said that "once this is made into a policy by CGIAR, the publishers will have to fall in line."

Prof. Michael Gurstein, editor of Journal of Community Informatics, welcomed the idea of making CGIAR research open access, and suggested that we should go one step further and see to it that the research is also made easily applied by the farmers and other ultimate users. Others who endorsed the suggestion include Professors Bill Hubbard, Stephen Pinfield and Chrisopher Pressler of the Nottingham University, David Bollier, Co-founder of Public Knowledge, Prof. Helen Hambly Odame of the University of Guelph.

In the meanwhile, I found that "the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all. This means working with organisations that hold information or that creates new knowledge – to help them disseminate it more efficiently and make it easier to access. CGIAR, FAO and DFID are CIARD partners.

I refer to the CIARD Manifesto here. It is all for open access. Both DFID and FAO also have adopted open access. Please refer to the R4D portal of DFID. Why R4D? In the past it was difficult to find out what research topics, projects, and programmes DFID was funding or had funded. Researchers all over the world (and even DFID staff) had to rely on a network of personal contacts or inspired detective work to discover who was already working in a particular area, what was already known, and what lessons had been learned. R4D responds to a demand expressed by many DFID stakeholders for better and open access to all this information. It is and will always be only one piece of the jigsaw, but it is a high-quality piece, as in order to have received DFID funding the research posted on R4D will have met strict criteria and quality standards in both formulation and execution.

FAO has complied with all the 13 CIARD requirements for developing institutional readiness and increasing the availability, accessibility and applicability of research outputs. Indeed FAO is the only institution to have done so.

Dr. Ballantyne of ILRI himself has championed open access. Responding to New publication: Learning to Share Knowledge for Global Agricultural Progress, he wrote on 21 March 2010, "Great to see this experience all written up. I was going to complain at the lack of open access to this CGIAR research output… but then I found the author version ‘available’ in full on the CIAT website. Excellent example of I can’t remember which CIARD pathway! Would be even better if your author version was ‘accessible’ in a proper CGIAR/CIAT repository that is harvestable, etc., and not just uploaded on the web!" This is precisely what the 16 signatories to the letter to CGIAR want for all of CGIR research publications!

There should be no difficulty for CGIAR – the Consortium Board, the Science Council and the Programme Committee to accept the suggestion that they adopt an open access mandate for all their research publications.

It is likely that a few knowledge managers were unhappy that people outside the system made the suggestion. It may be their immediate response. It should not be difficult for them to realize, on sober reflection, that all we mean is to bring access to CGIAR research on par with access to research done at some of the best institutions in the world such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Southampton, and to make CGIAR policy the best in the world – even better than the OA policies of NIH, the Research Councils of the UK and the Wellcome Trust. We assure those who have any misgivings that our intentions are honourable, our suggestion was made in the best interest of CGIAR, and they can cast away their misgivings.

Regards,
Arun

The Central Advisory Service for Intellectual Property (CAS-IP of CGIAR) organised a successful workshop in Rome in early July. CAS-IP hopes to conduct a workshop on open access for all CGIAR librarians and knowledge managers before the end of the year.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-international-agricultural-research

A Guide to Key IPR Provisions of the Proposed India-European Union Free Trade Agreement

glover — 2011-08-30T13:06:03Z

The Centre for Internet and Society presents a guide for policymakers and other stakeholders to the latest draft of the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which likely will be concluded by the end of the year and may hold serious ramifications for Indian businesses and consumers.

In its ongoing negotiation for a FTA with the EU, a process that began in 2007 and is expected to end sometime this year, India has won several signicant IP-related concessions. But there remain several IP issues critical to the maintenance of its developing economy, including its robust entrepreneurial environment, that India should contest further before ratifying the treaty. This guide covers the FTA's IP provisions that are within the scope of CIS' policy agenda and on which India has negotiated favorable language, as well as those provisions that it should re-negotiate or oppose.

Download the guide here, and please feel free to comment below.

You may also download a chart comparing the language proposed by India and the EU respectively with that included in the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Following is a summary of CIS' findings:

India has become a de facto leader of developing countries at the WTO, and an India-EU FTA seems likely to provide a model for FTAs between developed and developing states well into the future.
The EU has proposed articles on reproduction, communication, and broadcasting rights which could seriously undermine India's authority to regulate the use of works under copyright as currently provided for in the Berne Convention, as well as narrowing exceptions and limitations to rights under copyright.
The EU asserts that copyright includes "copyright in computer programs and in databases," without indicating whether such copyright exceeds that provided for in the Berne Convention. Moreover, by asserting that copyright "includes copyright in computer programs and in databases," the EU has left open the door for the extension of copyright to non-original databases.
India should explicitly obligate the EU to promote and encourage technology transfer -- an obligation compatible with and derived from TRIPS -- as well as propose a clear definition of technology transfer.
The EU has demanded India's accession to the WIPO Internet Treaties, the merits of which are currently under debate as India moves towards amending its Copyright Act, as well as several other international treaties that India either does not explicitly enforce or to which it is not a contracting party.
In general, the EU's provisions would extend terms of protection for material under copyright, within certain constraints, further endangering India's consumer-friendly copyright regime.
An agreement to establish arrangements between national organizations charged with collecting and distributing royalty payments may obligate such organizations in India collect royalty payments for EU rights holders on the same basis as they do for Indian rights holders, and vice versa in the EU, but more heavily burden India.
The EU has proposed a series of radical provisions on the enforcement of IPRs that are tailored almost exclusively to serve the interests of rights holders, at the expense of providing safety mechanisms for those accused of infringing or enabling infringers.
The EU has proposed, under cover of protecting intermediate service providers from liability for infringement by their users, to increase and/or place the burden on such providers of policing user activity.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/a-guide-to-the-proposed-india-european-union-free-trade-agreement

From Archive to Application (and Back): A Workshop with Pad.ma

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:08:36Z

The first workshop Open House and Participation will be held on Friday, 16th July at 6.30 p.m at 1, Shanti Road, Bangalore. This will be followed by weekend workshops at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 17 and 18 July, 2010.

For about two years now, Pad.ma has been running as an online archive of digital video with text annotations. During this period, the focus has been on gathering materials, annotating densely, and building an archive. At present, pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 "events". Almost all of this material is fully transcribed and is often mapped to physical locations. Essays have been written over videos, and narratives created across different clips in the archive. The focus has been on pulling material into the archive.

What are ways to start thinking about pulling material out of pad.ma? From the onset, pad.ma has had an API, a programming interface that allows you to pull out videos, perform searches, seek to exact time-codes in any video, fetch transcript and map data, and display all this however you please. Also Pad.ma's General Public License is designed specifically for the reuse of the material on pad.ma. Through the experience of running the archive, there have been various imaginations of multiple and layered forms of time-based annotation over video, including for: pedagogical tools for learning and discussion; presentation tools that combine text and video in new ways, essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and context-specific media.

At this workshop, we hope to explore some of these ideas for video on the web, and video's new qualities as a result of online practices. We invite video-makers, coders, writers, artists, students, and other enthusiasts to participate. Considering the term "application" in a broad sense, we invite video material, texts or software that, combined with existing materials and tools in pad.ma, can become innovative kinds of "output", or new forms. These would also then feedback into the archive, and how we imagine its future.

After a hands-on introduction to pad.ma and its possibilities and tools, the workshop will break up into streams for content and code. On day two, these streams come back together.

In the content stream, participants could:

bring in their own footage, clips from popular or unpopular cinema, science or lab videos, ads or news, artworks or documentary films, to assemble into new forms, using pad.ma's tools.
bring together shots, scenes or sounds from fiction or non-fiction films, and make a new 'movie' or create a 'running commentary' alongside.
write over video in pad.ma critically or creatively: theorise or contextualise footage, write collaborativey, or weave fiction and/or poetry with moving images.
create teaching units or illustrated lectures using pad.ma
begin a research project or map a phenomenon through video and text.

In the code stream, participants could:

devise new ways in which video and text can speak to each other, and to an online audience

For developers, this 2-day workshop is an opportunity to experiment with the newest web-video technologies. Concretely, we will cover some background and history of HTML 5 <video>, understand how the pad.ma website works with time-based annotations, server-side seeking of video, etc. and finally work on hacking on applications / prototypes using the pad.ma API. The developer track of this 2-day workshop is open to all, but knowledge of HTML, CSS and / or javascript would be useful.

By end of day 1, we hope to have interesting content and application projects that could be developed (individually or in groups) through the night and following day. Planning ahead will help, so: video-makers, artists, writers, researchers and coders, may write to pad.ma with a one-line bio and project idea, and a confirmation of your participation at pad.ma@pad.ma.

For more information, visit the following links:

http://pad.ma/newsletter/2010-05-26.html

http://pad.ma/texts/10_Theses_on_the_Archive.html

http://files.pad.ma/beirut/Archive_Reader/

How to use pad.ma guide: http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/HowTo

Pad.ma API : http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API

About Pad.ma

Pad.ma is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma creates access to material which is easily lost in editing processes, in the filmmaking economy, and in changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike Youtube and similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and reference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/pad.ma-workshop

Enabling Access to Education through ICT

praskrishna — 2011-08-31T10:41:15Z

ICT workshop in Delhi...starts from Wednesday, 27 October 2010...ends on Friday, 29 October 2010.

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.

Agenda

EDICT2010: Enabling Access to Education through ICT

How can accessible information and communication and assistive technologies for persons with disabilities be best deployed in schools and universities?

October 27-29, 2010

India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, India

Co-organized by:

Event Sponsor:

Media Partners

Enabling Access to Education through ICTs: How Can Accessible Information and Communication and Assistive Technologies for Persons with Disabilities be Best Deployed in Schools and Universities?

An international inquiry organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in cooperation with G3ict, an advocacy initiative of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development with the support of UNESCO, the International Telecommunication Union, the DAISY Consortium and the World Intellectual Property Organization

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

08.30 – 09.30 Registration opens

09.30 – 11.00 Opening session

Welcome note from the organizers, CIS, G3ict, UNESCO, ITU and WIPO

Key note address by Smt Vibha Puri Das, Secretary, Higher Education, Ministry for Human Resource and Development

Introductory remarks by Dr.Indrajit Banerjee, Director, UNESCO

– 11.15 Tea break

11.15 – 13.00 Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict: ICT Accessibility and Reasonable Accommodation in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Implications of Article 9 and 24 for State Parties and Education Ministries

Why Accessible and Assistive Technologies Matter? – An Overview of ICT Barriers to Access and Solutions

Live examples and case studies of ICT accessibility issues and solutions in education. The topics – (access to websites), (published works and libraries),(classroom materials and tests), (hardware and software) and (K to 12 and university perspectives)

Speakers

Cyndi Rowland, Associate Director, Center for Persons with Disabilities: Visible and Hidden Barriers for Students and Faculty

Dr. Sushmita Mitra, Director, Student Support Services, National Institute of Open Schooling: School Textbooks and Educational Resources – Making Distance Education Work

Dr.Hemalata, Deputy Director, NCDS, IGNOU: Information Communication Technology (ICT) for Inclusion
Mr.S.C.Kunthiya, Joint Secretary Elementary Education, Ministry of HRD: Barriers and Initiatives of the HRD Ministry

James Thurston, Senior Strategist for Global Policy and Standards, Microsoft: Accessibility Guide for Educators

Q & A discussion
Moderator- Ambassador Swashpawan Singh

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

14.00 – 15.30 Beyond Accessibility: Implementing Assistive Technologies for Students with Disabilities

Live examples and demos. Topics - (input / output devices), (screen readers), (text to speech and voice recognition), (language support) and)

The need for individual solutions and
Training and support essentials

Speakers

Srinivasu Chakravartula, Accessibility Manager, Yahoo India: World of Assistive Technologies

Prof S R Mittal, Professor in Education, Department of Education, University of Delhi: Challenges faced by Students with Disabilities in Higher Education

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society: Open Educational Resources
Arun Rao, CEO, The Deaf Way Foundation: ICT Applications in Deaf Education

Prof Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Coordinator, Equal Opportunities Cell, Delhi University: Education of Students with Disabilities: An Evaluation of the Indian Educational Policies

Moderator: Mrs. Mala Ramadurai

15.30 – 16.00 Tea break

16.00 – 17.30 Shifting Paradigms for Accessible and Assistive Solutions: Can India Schools Leapfrog Current Solutions?

Speakers

Prabir Purkayastha, President, Centre for Technology and Development, Chairperson of Knowledge Commons, Vice President, Delhi Science Forum and Chairperson of Program Review Committee on Perception and Control, ASTeC Programme, Ministry of Information Technology
Mandar Naik, Director - Platform Strategy with Microsoft India: Open Source Software and Proprietary Software, The Need for Interoperability

Susan Schorr, Regulatory Officer of the Regulatory and Market Environment Division of the Telecommunication Development Bureau, ITU: Connecting Schools: Global Challenges and Solutions

Claudio Giugliemma, President, Dominic Foundation (Switzerland): Accessible e-learning

Professor Kenryu Nakamura, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Tokyo: 99 Tips in My Pocket In-Class Use of Mobile Phones for Students with Disabilities

Moderator: Noopur Jhunjhunwala

17.30 Adjournment, Announcements for Next Day Program

Thursday, October 28, 2010

09.30 – 11.00 Morning Session – UNESCO-CIS Case Studies Overview Education in ICTs Initiatives in the Asia Pacific Region: Success Stories

Speakers

Nirmita Narasimhan, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet and Society: Presentation on UNESCO case study

James Mathew- Insite, Project Coordinator of Insight: Insight ICT for the Differently abled

Professor Mamoru Iwabuchi, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology University of Tokyo: Development of ICT based Assistive Technology for Minority Languages

Sachin Malhan, CEO and Co-founder, Inclusive Planet: The Global Social Library for the Visually Impaired

Moderator: Dr.Indrajit Banerjee

11.00 – 11.20 Tea break

11.20 – 13.00 Plenary Session with DAISY Speakers - The New Frontier for Access to Published Works: Success Stories and Roadblocks

Speakers

Hiroshi Kawamura, President, DAISY Consortium: Daisy Consortium Presentation
Viji Dilip, International Program Manager, Bookshare: The Bookshare Success Story

Mr.Andrew Tu, Senior Advisor to Assistant Director General of WIPO: Facilitating Access to Copyright Works for Visually Impaired Persons – The WPO VIP Initiative

Mr. Vivek, Mehra, MD and CEO Sage publications
Dr. Sam Taraporevala, Associate Professor and Head of Department of Sociology, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai: India’s situation

Discussion and Q & As

Moderator: TBC

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

14.00 – 15.30 DAISY Best Practices for Educators

Speakers

George Kerscher, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and President of the International Digital Publishing Forum: Latest Technical Developments and Sample Implementations such as in DAISY Mathematics

Prashant Ranjan Verma, Consultant, DAISY Consortium: Over view of Hardware and Software Tools for Authoring and Playback of DAISY Books

Birendra Raj Pokharel, President, National Federation of the Disabled-Nepal, Convener, DAISY Nepal Foundation, Vice Chair, DPI Asia Pacific and Chair, DPI South Asia: Sharing of Experiences on Implementation of DAISY Book Production and Distribution in Developing Countries

Michael Katzmann, Chief of the Materials Development Division, National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, USA: Best Practices in Providing Accessible Materials to Persons with Disabilities

Moderator: George Abraham, CEO, Score Foundation

15.30 – 16.00 Tea break

16.00 – 17.30 Break-out Sessions:
Group 1: Primary education

Group 2: Secondary education
Group 3: Tertiary education
Group 4: Vocational and lifelong learning

Each group covers

Covers 2 to 3 case studies presented by field practitioners with Q&As
Discuss key challenges and success factors as described by field practitioners

Agreed on key policy recommendations to be presented in plenary session

Facilitator: Sunil Abraham

Moderators and rapporteurs to be identified for each group

17.30 Adjournment

19.30 Conference Dinne at Gymkhana Club being coorganised by Daisy Forum of India, Bookshare and CIS

Friday, October 29, 2010

09.30 – 11.00 Developing an ICT Accessibility and Assistive Technology Support Eco-system for Educators

The topics – (centers of excellence and peer support), (training the trainers), (employing disabled persons as trainers), (resources for field practitioners), (role of universities), (standards), (public procurement), (international examples), (discussion with selected case studies leaders and participants and India’s Ministry of Education officials)

Speakers

Cyndi Rowland, Associate Director, Center for Persons with Disabilities: Impact of Lack of Accessible ICTs for Students with Disabilities – An International Perspective

Arun Mehta, President, Bidirectional Access Promotion Society: Opportunities and Challenges for Education in a Neuro-Diverse World
Joyojeet Pal, Visiting Assistant Professor, Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a Computing Innovation fellow at University of Colorado Boulder: Developing a curriculum in Disability Studies and Assistive Technology for higher education
Shanti Raghavan, Founder and Managing Trustee, Enable India: Centres of Excellence, Train the Trainers, Employing Disabled Persons as Trainers

Moderator: Geet Oberoy

11.00 - 11.20 Tea break
11.20 – 13.00 Wrap-up session presentation of group work, feedback and action points. On site web based survey of participants on policy priorities. Will be used to edit white paper.

Facilitator: Axel Leblois

13.00 – 14.00 Closing lunch

14.00 – 15.30 Afternoon Organizer’s Private Session

Summarizing key findings
Looking at on-line survey results
Drafting key points of white paper
Drafting table of contents

Next steps

15.30 – 16.00 Tea break
16.00 Adjournment

Download the agenda

For details on the event in the digital LEARNING newsletter

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/education-through-ICT

Catching up on broadband

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-05-10T10:32:27Z

The govt can invest some of the Rs 1,00,000 crore from the spectrum auctions to help India catch up on broadband, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest article published in the Business Standard on July 1, 2010.

When it comes to broadband, India is “notably lagging its peers”, to quote Booz & Co, an international consulting firm.1 Its report recounts our pathetic coverage — less than half the anticipated 20 million — and recommends that both industry and government must act in concert. Spelling out the roles for both, it concludes that we need a national policy to improve fixed-line infrastructure more rapidly than the current market-based approach does, as well as satellite-based communications.

The report recommends this because advanced economies have broadband on widespread fixed-line networks, and many are pursuing strategies to further empower their citizens through state action, as before. The effects are many, but let’s start with examining costs. Figure 1 shows the relative cost of broadband in a sample of countries.

India seems favourably placed with its low purchasing power parity (PPP) cost. However, relative to costs in India, this is about 6 per cent of average monthly gross national income (GNI) per capita, ranked 78th, as shown in Figure 2. In comparison, the first 23 countries — Macao, Israel, Hong Kong, the US, Singapore, etc., Greece and Spain included — have costs below or close to 1 per cent; the next 16 have costs below 2 per cent. As the 39 countries have PPP costs of only 0.25 per cent to twice India’s cost, India’s cost as a percentage of its GNI is six times theirs, i.e. Indian users have to pay relatively more. Increasing GNI, while desirable, is harder, more complex, and will take much longer. By contrast, costs can be reduced quickly by sharing network resources and limiting government collections to a reasonable percentage of revenues, instead of auctions and arbitrary levies.

Broadband leaders

Wired Asian countries like Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea already offer broadband on the next generation of high-speed networks. Singapore’s approach especially should be of interest to India, with policies supporting a blend of public subsidies and private investment, while separating three activities: infrastructure, network operations (wholesale), and user services (retail).2

Two years ago, Singapore set out to create an environment with more open access to downstream operators by separating the building of infrastructure from the running of the network. It drew on the experience of local community networks in countries like Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Three Singapore companies partnered with Axia Netmedia, a Canadian broadband company, to form a consortium called OpenNet, the infrastructure operator. OpenNet uses one partner’s existing network (SingTel’s) as a base. With a government grant of 750 million Singapore dollars, OpenNet is building an extensive fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) grid to be completed by 2012. The second partner is a subsidiary of Singapore Power, SP Telecommunications, which leverages Singapore Power’s experience in developing infrastructure. The third, Singapore Press Holdings, is a leading media services company.

The network operator, a subsidiary of StarHub (a cable and phone operator), is Nucleus Connect. Residential services at 100 mbps have been announced, to be provided by over 10 retail service operators. While some analysts opine that increased competition may not lead to appreciable cost reduction, Singapore is already ranked fifth-lowest in cost as a percentage of average monthly GNI per capita.

Can India do some catching up?
a) Can India do something similar? Don’t we need to? How?

The answer to the first question is: only if the government decides on a concerted drive.

To the second: yes, to be competitive.

To the third: with a comprehensive, integrated systems approach. It is insufficient if only one or a few ministries and agencies are involved, because the development and execution of solutions require cutting across turf boundaries. The conventional approach of the ongoing Trai consultation followed by recommendations addressed by the DoT is simply inadequate, because their charter is too limited. Many issues concerning commercial and user decisions, particularly of government agencies and the Department of Defence, and radical changes in approach need active participation from these players as well as the private sector for resolution. Examples are Booz & Co’s recommendations of a better fixed-wire network, and satellite communications in the Ka band, or the possibility of exploiting the cable and satellite TV network of around 110 million households. The entire communications network, or at least the backbone, needs to be shared for efficiency, unlike the existing limited tower-sharing. Also, state governments need to be closely involved in issues like Rights of Way and user needs.

b) Governments at the Centre and all states need to facilitate the productivity of their citizens, instead of hamstringing them with taxes, levies, auctions and dysfunctional policies. This is more easily said than done, with our predatory history, fractious coalitions at the Centre and states, and freewheeling, combative state governments. Governments at all levels have to coordinate this problem-solving initiative for all stakeholders, adapting the experience of leading broadband countries, instead of predatory behaviour seeking personal gains. The consultative process needs to agree on goals, and then figure out practical ways to achieve them.

c) With inspired leadership and a constructive approach, half of the over Rs 1,00,000 crore from the 3G and BWA auctions could support a broadband gambit drawing on concepts like Singapore’s public-private partnership, instead of being just a damaging revenue-collection exercise. Again, easier said than done, but with result-oriented, strong leadership to elicit enlightened employee engagement, even MTNL and BSNL could be partners in a core network in a role like SingTel’s. A public-private network-builder can draw on the combined strengths of its participants to provide a platform for a number of private operators. Separating the infrastructure building and operations from wholesale network services and end-user services could make this feasible and practicable.

“Bringing mass broadband to India: Roles for government and industry”, Booz & Co, June 7, 2010: http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/Bringing_Mass_Boadband_To_India.pdf.
“Singapore gets wired for speed”, Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/technology/15iht-rtechbroad.html?ref=internet.

Read the original in Business Standard

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