Centre for Internet and Society

Thank You To Our 2014 Sponsors

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T14:27:26Z

Today’s the last day of work in 2014 for the editorial team at MediaNama, though we’ll run a Holiday Wire update intermittently this week, we’ll have a brief year end review for each major segment. Thank you for reading us in 2014, and have a great Christmas and New Year.

The blog entry was published in Medianama on December 22, 2014.

From the business side, it’s been a great 2015 for us, and we really appreciate the support we received in 2014 from all our sponsors, especially Spice Digital, our annual sponsor, and Antfarm, which supported us for almost the entire year. We’re still working, for an idea of our 2015 plans and editorial calendar, please see the presentation here.

Annual Sponsor:

- Spice Digital Ltd: a part of Spice Global Group – US$2 Billion conglomerate promoted by Dr. BK Modi, is one of India’s leading Mobile Value Added Services company and offers innovative solutions for Telecom Operators, Enterprises and Government using mobile connectivity media – Voice, SMS, USSD, WAP & 3G. We are preferred partner of all major telecom service providers in India and providing services to international telecom players in over 20 countries across the globe. We are pioneers in innovation and technology and committed to deliver excellent Award winning products and services to the customers.

We have exclusive tie-ups with Hungama and PPL for music streaming services.
We have acquired two leading international VAS players, MMS (Indonesia) and Beoworld (Malaysia).
Recently, we had a major financial investment from MediaTek (Taiwan).

Our sponsors during 2014:

- Antfarm is an innovation sandbox based out of Mumbai. It is led by a team of blue sky thinkers, entrepreneurs and professionals. The company takes great ideas with disruptive potential, puts together all the key ingredients of people, technology, strategy, marketing and capital to build these into scalable companies. The ultimate aim is to create global businesses that are ideated and built out of India. The first set of companies launched are Stylista.com, Arrive.com, Fork Media, and the farm is currently scaling up ideas in education, travel & leisure, retail, ad-tech and healthcare.

- Astro-Vision is a name easily recognized and held in great esteem in the world of astrology services. Its products range from software that run on the latest operating systems to web based solutions for major portals and the latest range of mobile phones. Astro-Vision’s focus has always been on providing innovative astrology solutions using the latest technologies in the field of IT and communications. From Desktop PCs to internet portals and mobiles phones, Astro- Vision’s range of solutions includes stand alone applications, online apps and astro content services. The company has strategic tie-ups with major IT enabled service networks like Suvidhaa, Reliance world, One stop shop and many networks under the Government of India’s CSC scheme, including Spanco and GNG. Many popular Indian websites today are powered by Astro-Vision’s web based astrology solutions and astrology content.

– Bruce Clay

- Buongiorno, founded in 1999, is known in the worldwide mobile commerce ecosystem for developing and managing paid apps and content that help consumers get greater enjoyment from mobile devices. On July 2012, after the settlement of a successful public tender offer, Buongiorno became a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT DOCOMO – a global leader in mobile telecommunications technologies and services.

With direct connections to more than 130 telecom operators in 25 countries, over 10 years’ experience and a team of 600 professionals, Buongiorno makes the mobile internet experience happen for consumers globally.

- CCAvenue is India’s largest payment gateway solution powering 85% of the eMerchants in India across all verticals & has played the role of a catalyst to the growth of ecommerce with real time, multi-currency, multiple payment options online payment processing services. The solution is powered by proprietary technology that integrates transaction-processing, advance shopping cart, Invoicing, mobile page, risk assessment and fraud control, smart analytical dashboards, live monitoring of bank gateways, financial reporting etc. CCAvenue is the only complete PG solution in the country that has the unique ability to offer the full spectrum of 100+ Internet payment options.

5 Credit Cards
50 Debit Cards
6 ATM cum Debit Cards
50+ Netbankings
Mobile Payments
4 Cash Cards
CCAvenue PhonePay IVRS Based Payment Systems.

– The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government data, free/open source software, open standards, open access to scholarly literature, open educational resources, and open video), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

CIS critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange.

Hosting and Support

- E2E Networks: India’s most clued in dedicated hosting company founded by geeks. E2E Networks Private Limited has been into the business of providing Low latency Dedicated Servers and VPS Servers in India since 2009. E2E Networks goes way beyond merely provisioning servers/cloud infrastructure. Our expertise includes strategies and managed services help for implementing the most suitable cloud architecture based on public, private or hybrid cloud platforms for your web facing or enterprise applications.

- Fortumo allows any developer to set up payment processing for web and mobile services, games or apps using carrier billing. Payments work for PC applications, web services and HTML5, Android, Windows Phone & Windows 8 apps. Fortumo supports payments in 81 countries through 300 mobile operators. Get started with our self-service setup (no monthly fees or minimum volume commitments) at http://fortumo.com.

– Getit Infomedia is India’s digital supermarket for SMEs to get relevant business leads. We seamlessly deliver excellent value across all media platforms be it Voice, Mobile Applications, Online, WAP, Web chat, Print etc. The services provide presence, enquiries and leads to its advertisers while ensuring end users (consumers) have access to the best information, benefits and offers.

Event Sponsor

- Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. Google’s innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top internet property and its brand one of the most recognized in the world.

- India.com is a joint venture between two media giants – Zee Entertainment Enterprise Ltd (ZEEL) and www.PMC.com is all about the new India that is funny, witty, shocking. It shows the new age Indian in their language. India.com provides a perspective that is reflective of the changing dynamic of the role media plays in India. Find out what the new India is saying only at india.com. Discover India and Indians at india.com for no one covers the new India as india.com! Get the latest updates follow @indiacom on Twitter.

– Info Edge (India) Limited is among the leading internet companies in India. Info Edge runs leading internet businesses – Naukri.com -India’s no. 1 job site, Jeevansathi.com – one of the leading matrimonial portal,99acres.com – India’s No.1 real estate portal and Shiksha.com – India’s leading education portal. The company also owns Quadrangle – an offline executive search business, and Naukri Gulf (a leading jobsite in the Middle East market). Info Edge also owns Brijj.com, a professional networking site and Allcheckdeals.com, an online real estate brokerage firm which is run as a subsidiary company.

- OnMobile Global Ltd. is a pioneer in white-labelled, Value Added Products and Services [VAS] for mobile, landline and media service providers. The #1 VAS specialist in emerging and high-growth markets, OnMobile touches the lives of over 1500 million mobile users across 55 countries each month. With our diverse product portfolio of Mobile Music, multi-screen Video Gateway and delivery solutions, Phone Backup and Personal Cloud Management solutions, Voice and Video portals, M-Commerce products and services, we generate 2 – 5% contribution for top customers and top line revenues of over US $800 million for over 92 customers globally. We deliver our products by the best combination of a hosted Cloud with on-site operations at the customer premises or through products deployed in customer networks.

Founded in 2000, OnMobile has business spread across India, U.S., LATAM, Africa, Australia, Middle East and Europe. The company was publicly listed in India in 2008. Recent acquisitions include Voxmobili (2007), Telisma (2008), Dilithium Networks (2010) and LiveWire (2013).

OnMobile is the first Indian telecom VAS Company to go public. The company’s shares are listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) as on March 31, 2010

– Qualcomm Ventures is the investment arm of Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), a Fortune 500 company with operations across the globe.As the Venture Capital investment arm of Qualcomm, the world leader in next-generation mobile technologies, Qualcomm Ventures has been making strategic investments in early-stage technology companies since 2000. With a $500 million fund commitment, Qualcomm Ventures seeks to make strategic investments in early stage high-technology companies that have the potential to dramatically transform our world.

QPRIZE (www.qprize.com)

QPrize™ is Qualcomm Venture’s Seed investment competition. It’s designed to provide entrepreneurs their first level of funding so they can launch their idea into a successful start-up business. The QPRIZE competition was first launched in 2009 to promote innovation in the technology industry and is designed to identify the industry’s most promising early-stage technology companies. We are looking for bright, energetic and resourceful entrepreneurs who have a passion for bringing new technologies and services to market. Our goal is to have QPrize act as a catalyst for our winners, providing the initial capital to launch their great ideas and support the company to its first institutional funding round.

– Times Internet (TIL) is a premier digital product company and the digital arm of The Times of India Group. It reaches over 100m visitors and serves 2 billion pageviews every month across web and mobile, with businesses across news, entertainment, sports, local, ecommerce, classifieds, startup investments, local partnerships, and more.TIL’s key properties in the news category includetimesofindia.com, economictimes.com and navbharattimes.com. Under its fold are topmost internet entertainment portals in India — Gaana.com – the music broadcasting service and BoxTV.com – the video streaming site. Indiatimes Shopping emerges as one of the top five e-commerce companies in India & TimesCity, a lifestyle destination covering recommendations across Restaurants, Movies, Events, Nightlife in your city. Times Internet has also entered into partnerships with global companies offering them its tremendous reach through online media platforms under its initiative called Times Global Partners(TGP). The TGP portfolio ranges from licensing partnerships to investments and acquisition. In the last year, TGP has made four acquisitions, twelve global partnerships, four minority investments and over 20 investments into start-ups through TLabs in the Indian ecosystem.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/medianama-december-22-2014-thank-you-to-our-2014-sponsors

Ten Telugu Books Re-released Under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License

rahim — 2014-07-08T05:29:39Z

For the first time in the history of Indian books, 10 Telugu books by a single author were released under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 3.0) on June 22, 2014 at 10 a.m. at Golden Threshold, Abids, Hyderabad.

The event was organised by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team.

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Telugu Wikipedians in convincing Indu Gnaana Vedika to re-release 10 of their books under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license which is compatible with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Unlike the predominant digitization efforts (which only makes scanned images available), these books will be uploaded on Telugu Wikisource (www .te .wikisource .org) and converted into Unicode (searchable) text. This will ensure that these books are freely read, both online and offline in various formats like PDF, epub, mobi, text, etc. This is a major milestone initiative by CIS-A2K to make the sum of all knowledge in Telugu freely available to all Telugus over the internet and is part of its Telugu language area plan.

Telugu Wikipedia has been in existence for 10 years and has 57000 articles on various topics. Telugu Wikisource is one of the sister projects of Wikipedia which has more than 9600 pages and 100 books, it is the largest online Unicode book library available today at the service of Telugu people.

The Programme

The event started with invocation by Indu Gnaana Vedika followed by introduction of Chief Guest and Guest of Honour.

The patron of Indu Gnaana Vedika, Sri Sri Sri Prabodhananda Yogeeswarulu presided over as the chief guest and N Rahamthulla, long time wikipedian and Special collector, Srisailam project, Kurnool was the guest of honour.

Addressing the gathering, Prabodhananda emphasised on the importance of availability of knowledge in ones own mother language, and also why knowledge should not be confined to books alone, but should be brought onto various platforms, internet being one among them. This would not only ensure wider reach for the books, but also enable the language to survive in the fast changing era.

Then, a video interview of guest of honour, Rahamthulla was played, where he spoke about creation of new technical jargon in ones own mother language and how Telugu was being used as administrative language in his office among his subordinates.

Rahamthulla also spoke on the practices he brought into in his own office to adopt mother language at work and gave out suggestions that would effectively help all in adoption of mother language at work places with Telugu as an example.

This was followed by Veeven’s talk on “End-User’s perspective of free licenses”, where he spoke about importance of open content, free software and free licenses.

Then, program director of CIS-A2K, T. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the importance of creative commons licenses in the context of Indian languages in Internet. In his speech, Vishnu informed that there is enormous literature and content available in Indian languages which is unusable because of ignorance of licenses. He listed out guidelines that would help writers to have their work reach millions through releasing it under a free license.

Then, in a formal manner, the copyright holder of the books signed on the documents, specifying that the books are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. In the tea break that followed, participants enquired experts on free licenses.


Above: Prabodhananda handing over the signed agreement to Vishnu Vardhan (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, CC-BY-SA 3.0 License)

A Wikisource demonstration by Rahmanuddin Shaik was shown followed by Q & A session.

Then there was a panel discussion on “CC licenses” which saw participation from one each of a free license expert, writer and end user. This brought in awareness and more deeper thought into bringing in more literature in Telugu into CC licenses.

An outcome of the event was:

N Rahamthulla promised to re-release his books under CC license.
Mandali Buddhaprasad, Deputy Speaker, Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly, gave permission to release 4 of his books under CC license.
Several other writers have come forward to re-release their books under free licenses.

Given below is the certificate signed by Sri Sri Sri Acharya Yogeeshwarulu giving permission to publish his works under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License:

For additional details of the event, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ten-telugu-books-re-released-under-cc-by-sa-license

Telugu Wikipedians create Articles on Punjab in Telugu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T14:02:20Z

Telugu Wikipedians created articles on Punjab in a national level contest. Telugu Wikipedians received a trophy during the closing ceremony of Wiki conference India at Chandigarh.

Telugu Wikipedians created more than 450 articles about Punjab in Telugu Wiki and shared their experiences with English and Malayalam Wikpedians. Along with Pranay Raj, Pavan santhosh worked in co-ordination and Viswanadh in organizing support for this edit-a-thon. Venkata Ramana, Meena Gayathri, Ravi Chandra, Pavan Santhosh, Murali Mohan, Sujatha, Sultan Khadar, Viswanadh, Bhaskara Naidu, Manikantha, Rahmanuddin, Rajasekhar and few others participated in this edit-a-thon and created Punjab related articles such as Punjab cuisine, Punjabi language, history of Sikhism, Punjabi way of dressing, Punjabi dialects and many such aspects. Telugu Wikipedians also made a presentation on the various developments in Telugu Wikipedia.

Media Coverage

Telugu regional press covered the Punjab edit-a-thon and about the Telugu Wikipedia winning the trophy. The Centre for Internet and Society provided support by releasing an open press note that could be edited by the Wikipedia community in Village pump for press relations.

Coverage in Sakshi

Coverage in Eenadu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/telugu-wikipedia-articles-on-punjab-media-coverage

Telugu Wikipedia stall at Vijayawada Book Festival

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-15T16:23:32Z

The Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the Vijayawada Book Festival in January, in order to increase reach of the regional language encyclopaedia.

Last in a series of book stalls set up across the Telugu-speaking region, the Telugu community set up shop at the 27th Vijayawada Book Festival from 3 to 11 January 2017 at the PWD Grounds. The community had previously set up similar book stalls in Rajahmundry and Hyderabad. Considered one of the largest book festivals in India with deep-rooted cultural significance in the Telugu literary circles, the Telugu community aims to increase the reach and visibility of Telugu Wikipedia through the setting up of this stall.

The book festival, open for the public from 11 am to 11 pm, was inaugurated by Kendra Sahitya Akademi winner Rachapalem Chandrasekhar Reddy, with a collection of 235 stalls to browse from. The festival was organised in partnership with the Andhra Pradesh Department of Language and Culture and NTR Trust. The stall was set up by Telugu Wikipedia community members with support from CIS-A2K and NTR Trust.

More than 150 individuals were engaged through this event. Interested members of public would receive follow-up through "Know-How" videos of Telugu Wikipedia. This provides basic information regarding editing and contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects. They would also receive invitations to offline events taking place in Vijayawada in the future.

Telugu Wikipedia editor User:Pranayraj1985 said of his experience in talking to the public about Telugu Wikipedia, "I learnt a lot about what people know about Wikipedia and what they didn't know. In general, many of the visitors exclaim when they [come to] know, there is Wikipedia in Telugu language. But, in contrast, here in Vijayawada, we could at least find handful of people who knew there is something called Telugu Wikipedia.

The link to the events page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-vijayawada-book-festival

Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (PUBL) v Competition Commission of India and Anr

praskrishna — 2016-04-20T15:58:21Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telefonaktiebolaget-lm-ericsson-publ-v-competition-commission-of-india-and-anr

Telecom Path-Breaker?

Shyam Ponappa — 2011-11-18T05:42:00Z

Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on November 3, 2011.

There’s much to criticise the government about for not initiating systematic reforms. Yet, the draft National Telecom Policy 2011 (NTP-2011), announced three weeks ago, is a stunner.[1] It begins with a solid, integrated-systems preamble to IT, Communications and Electronics, followed by an excellent vision statement: “[to provide] secure, reliable, affordable and high quality... telecommunication services anytime, anywhere.” A sound beginning, although open-ended in terms of how the details could evolve.

There are potential problems with such high-level pronouncements, of course. A number of commentators castigate the motherhoods in the draft. With a lofty perspective and few details, much depends on how the open-ended possibilities develop, including the difficulties of execution in dealing with ground realities and obstacles.

An Assessment

NTP-2011 addresses six major areas: spectrum, licensing, broadband, convergence, roaming, and manufacturing. Focusing on the first two, there are sweeping proposals:

licences will not be linked to spectrum; and
spectrum sharing will be permitted.

Some view the separation of licences and spectrum as retrograde, because spectrum is essential for service delivery. Others suggest that transgressions that led to the scams are now being inducted as new policies, e.g., operators accessing networks they do not own, which is characterised as being against the public interest. Some heap opprobrium, alleging that like the previous policy, NTP-99, which they call retrograde (although it led to the phenomenal growth in mobile telephony), its main purpose is to allow companies to avoid paying licence/auction fees to the government.

The last expostulation is the most ludicrous, because revenue collections after NTP-99 far exceeded estimated fees foregone: Rs 20,000 crore estimated “loss” by March 2007, but Rs 40,000 crore actually collected, and Rs 80,000 crore collected by March 2010.[2]Add tax collections on exponential growth with increased profits, and the result is even higher total government revenues.
Opposing operator access to networks arises from confused objectives; blocking access is like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The purpose of the sector is to provide services and access to users for legitimate activities. The public interest lies in facilitating access on appropriate terms.
To evaluate licensing and spectrum, begin with the premise of shared spectrum. Spectrum is essential for effective service provision, particularly in the rural and semi-urban areas with about 70 per cent of the population. An aspect not commonly known is that larger bands of spectrum enable more efficient throughput. For example, 1 MHz of a 12 MHz band carries 50 per cent more traffic than 1 MHz of a 6 MHz band. An estimate of the benefit to Indian operators of more bandwidth at international norms is a reduction of 20 per cent in operating costs.

Spectrum Occupancy

In practice, assigned spectrum is idle much of the time, except during the busy hours in India’s heavy-traffic metros, for extraneous reasons: too many operators, with too little spectrum, in too- narrow bands. This aspect becomes clear from spectrum utilisation or occupancy studies. For instance, the chart shows spectrum occupancy in Bangalore, Edinburgh and Stony Brook (New York) sometime in 2011.

The low readings (250 to 850 MHz in Bangalore, 600 to 950 MHz in Edinburgh, and 500 to 850 MHz in Stony Brook, NY) indicate available “white spaces” that can be better utilised.

High-traffic cities like Delhi and Mumbai have much higher utilisation than cities elsewhere in the world. It comes at increased costs to operators, because of advanced equipment and the closer spacing of towers, as well as having negative environmental effects. If a system with on-demand access to centralised, more efficient spectrum bandwidth were available, the capacity would be much higher, while operators would gain tremendous savings.

Another aspect has to do with the structuring and pricing of shared spectrum. One scenario for sharing is to enable operators to share assigned bands on mutually acceptable terms, leaving the onus of structuring and deployment on the respective operators, as for mobile telephony towers. As with the towers, there are likely to be coalitions of operators/independent entities who are able to work out arrangements among themselves, while not attaining the ultimate efficiency of unified coordination. For instance, participants who share towers in India share passive but not active infrastructure, and a critical element of active infrastructure is spectrum.

An alternative scenario would be mandated spectrum sharing. Spectrum on demand could be made available to any operator/counterparties for the duration of every communication “transaction”. This would need a database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Assignment facility, as deployed by Spectrum Bridge in the US. The more efficient throughput would mean higher traffic capacity for a given investment through better utilisation.

The distributed processing alternative through cognitive radio in every user device is (a) much less efficient, and (b) far more expensive. The market consolidation-through-acquisition approach, with more auctions, is the least efficient and most expensive.

Common-Access Networks

There would be further efficiencies if the entire network (and not just the spectrum) were accessed on-demand for payment per use. Another benefit from a public perspective would be much lower collective investment in resources, because of better utilisation. A third benefit would be the reduced environmental impact because of a lower carbon footprint and radiation from two or three common-access national networks (assuming competition is essential for effectiveness and efficiency).

In other words, database-driven, shared spectrum and networks have to be organised and managed as a coordinated unit if the potential benefits are to be realised. America is doing this with TV white spaces/the digital dividend, through the appointment of 10 database administrators (including Spectrum Bridge, Google and Microsoft). This should elicit our interest.

Once the government and stakeholders accept these concepts, the next major task is structuring the networks as consortiums to align the interests of operators and network providers, with state-of-the-art lead partners. In this process, incorporating and reorienting BSNL and MTNL as guardians of national interests with oversight by an adequately empowered regulator will be the remaining major tasks.

[1].http://www.dot.gov.in/NTP-2011/NTP2011.htm

[2].TRAI, 2005: http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/StudyPapers/2/ir30june.pdf
CAG: http://cag.gov.in/html/reports/civil/2010-11_19PA/Telecommunication%20Report.pdf

Shyam's article was originally published in the Business Standard. It can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/telecom-path-breaker

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-06-06T06:30:09Z

Accountability Initiative (AI) held a bar-camp on “Technology, Transparency and Accountability” on 5th June at Google office in Gurgaon. Pranesh Prakash participated in this bar-camp.

The camp brought together technology enthusiasts, coders, hackers and policy-thinkers together in a collaborative environment to develop innovative solutions to accountability and transparency challenges in India.

Agenda

10:00 AM - Introduction
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Combined sessions at the cafe
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo sessions in the cafe
1:30 PM - Lunch
2:30 - 5:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo session in the cafe
5:30 - 6:30 PM - Deciding the future of the camp and creating blueprints for further collaboration
6:30 PM - Ending session

Some of the topics being talked about thus far

Social accountability tools and how can technology be used for this?

Public finance tracking and PAISA
Participatory budgeting
Participatory research for tracking outcomes
Citizen report cards
Social audits

Open Data and why it is important for transparency

Where can you find government data
Scraping government data using Needle Base
Why is visualization important?
Some examples of how open Data is changing the world
Akshara's work at the Karnataka Learning Partnership and the need for open educational data.
Data-mashups
The draft policy on open data in India
One stop govt ports

Technology innovations for improving the Right to Information

A wishlist
Shouldn't the replies to RTI be in the public domain?
Filing an RTI: Problems and Prospects
RTI Question and Answer Portal
How do you file an RTI though an SMS?

Egovernance initiatives that are leading to greater accountability and transparency

Mahima Kaul - Digital Empowerment Foundation

Making the links between politics and businesses transparent

Rohit Chandra

Electoral accountability

‘Improving and Strengthening Democracy in India’ - Lessons from Election Watch Process

Crowd-sourcing actionable data

An example of crowd-sourcing - Powercuts.in

Transparency in diplomacy

Using online tools to engage and be engaged by the public.

How should we look at technology when dealing with grassroots situations?

How can programmers help in making governance more transparent?

Perspectives from the Government

Perspectives from the NIC
Perspectives from the NEGP
Perspectives from the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Making conversation: citizens and their government

Making visual sense of Data and Policy

Policy to Practice: From the lab and to the people

How can legislators and parliamentarians and MPs be tracked by citizens?

Research Tools to work with large amounts of data

Other interesting ideas that have come up

Panini Keypad - Mr Abhijit Bhattacharjee
How Ashok Leyland dealt with its problems of too many layers between the customer on the ground and the top management - Its implications for the government

The Speakers

Nikhil Dey - Nikhil Dey has done more to fight for the rights of people than he will ever allow the world to find out. Always far from the spotlight, he has worked quietly to shape legislation, lobby governments and politicians and build grassroots campaigns.Born in 1963 in the city of Bangalore, Nikhil was educated in India and the US. Before the formal completion of his graduate course at the George Mason University, he left to ‘follow his bliss' and came to India. His initial work was with the Kheduth Mazdoor Chetna Sangathan in Madhya Pradesh. He then joined Aruna Roy and Shankar Singh in 1987 to go to a village called Devdungri in Rajsamand district, Rajasthan. Devdungri was soon to become the head office of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a peasants-workers-women organisation founded by the trio in 1990. He currently is the Convener of the National Campaign for People's Right to Information.

Shri Sailesh Gandhi - Shailesh Gandhi is one among the handful of people whose dogged perseverance has demonstrated that the Right to Information Act is a valuable tool that can be used by ordinary people to resolve issues and to clean up public life. Currently one of the Information Commissioners of India, Mr Gandhi is a graduate from IIT-Mumbai and first-generation entrepreneur.

Prof Trilochan Sastry - Prof Trilochan Sastry has a Bachelors in Technology from IIT, Delhi, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA. He taught for several years at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad after which he moved to IIM, Bangalore. He is currently Dean at IIM Bangalore. He has taught in other Universities in India, Japan, Hong Kong and United States and has published several academic papers in Indian and International journals. Has received national award for research and teaching. He was part of the cofounding team of ADR India in 1999.

GVL Narasimha Rao: Rao is a well known Psephologist who has been predicting Indian elections for two decades for various leading media organisations in the country. He is the founder of Development & Research Services Pvt. Ltd., a leading research organisation offering professional research services for various governmental, international and commercial organisations. Formerly, he was a Columnist for MINT newspaper and regularly writes in various newspapers on politics and elections.

Rao is presently Media Adviser to Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh in the rank of a state minister. He is also a member of the BJP’s National Committee on Electoral Reforms under the guidance of BJP’s senior Leader Mr. L.K. Advani.

Rao is President of VeTA (Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability) and has organised various efforts in highlighting the lack of transparency and verifiability in Indian EVMs. He has authored a book titled “Democracy at Risk! Can We Trust Our EVMs?” which became the intellectual basis for the campaign for EVM reform. He had highlighted the vulnerabilities of India’s EVMs in a round table international Electronic Voting Workshop in Washington D.C. last year which was also attended by the Election Commission of India. Rao has blogged extensively on the vulnerabilities of EVMs at www.indianEVM.com which exerted huge pressure on the Election Commission of India and even served as an eye opener for laying bare hitherto unknown vulnerabilities (brought out by the research of Hari Prasad et al.) and raising uncomfortable questions regarding the pitfalls in EVM procurement, storage and field administration.

Mahima Kaul - Mahima Kaul is a writer/journalist and has worked with different formats - print, video and online. She has written for The Indian Express, Sunday Guardian, PBS World Focus and also worked on video programming for Al Jazeera and PBS. She was the India producer for PBS's special coverage on the Mumbai Terror Attacks, which was nominated for an Emmy Award. She has a blog that has been picked up by (among others) OpenDemocracy, Global Voices, Huffington Post and Ground Report.

She is deeply involved in ICT4D -- Information and Communication Technologies for Development -- sector. She has worked with Video Volunteers, a community media organization, and helped launch India's first community TV channel, India Unheard. She is a consultant with the Digital Empowerment Foundation where she manages the Digital Knowledge Center, the first information portal in India on best practices in ICT4D. Mahima has also established The Open Communication Foundation as a multidisciplinary platform devoted to ICT4D.

Rohit Chandra - Rohit Chandra is an engineering graduate currently doing research in the areas of power, energy and natural resources at the Centre for Policy Research. He will be discussing a nascent idea at the Accountability Initiative which hopes to map the links between businesses and politicians.

Sukhman Randhawa - Sukhman has completed her Masters in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK and has obtained a BA in English Literature (Hons.) from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University. She is also an honorary fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. She has worked as a Research Associate at the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), a high level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India, on the focus areas of Higher Education, Libraries, National Portal for Teachers, National Environment Portal, National Biodiversity Portal, Quality of Life, and worked on compiling the final report of the Commission. At NKC, she also worked with State Governments for implementation of NKC recommendations and preparing blueprints for action. She has also worked with IL&FS Education and Technology Services Ltd in Delhi. Currently she is working at the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Gautam John - Gautam used to be a lawyer with a focus on copyright laws and has also been an entrepreneur. He is passionate about education, equality and equity and focuses on 'access' as a way to achieve these. Gautam was a TED India Fellow in 2009 and is a Creative Commons supporter. He works with the Akshara Foundation where he manages the Karnataka Learning Partnership project, Pratham Books and is an advisor to Inclusive Planet. He is a founder member of Wikimedia Chapter (India) and currently serves as Secretary on the Executive Committee.

The Karnataka Learning Partnership is a multi-party, multi-stakeholder platform to bring transparency in the public preschool and primary education space. Karnataka Learning Partnership is also a public space where citizens can contribute to the cause of ensuring better schools and schooling for our children.

Raman Jit Singh Chima - is a senior analyst, Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India.

Pranesh Prakash - Pranesh Prakash is a programme manager with the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit research and advocacy organization. He is a lawyer by training who's comfortable at a bash prompt. He works mostly around issues of intellectual property rights reform, promoting IP alternatives and transparency through different kinds of 'opennesses'—open standards, free/open source software, open government data, open access to law—as well as issues of freedom of speech and expression and privacy that relate to the Internet.

Last year, Pranesh along with Glover Wright, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, prepared a report around open government data (OGD) in India as part of a series of studies commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative . In that report they looked at the existing ecosystem in terms of data practices, the policy environment (RTI, copyright, standards, NeGP, NKC's recommendations, etc.) , and specific OGD case studies of governmental organizations, civil society organizations, public-private partnerships, and civic hackers. The report then charts out challenges any campaign for OGD in India must address, as well as observations on how the very conceptualization of OGD must be different in India, and strategic recommendations on how to grow the OGD movement in India.

Rishabh Verma - A Python enthusiast, FOSS contributor,loves data mining and is always upto finding unusual patterns in large datasets. Organizer of Tech & Entrepreneurial events, he digs data-contextualization books when he should rather be preparing for his board exams.

Thejesh N - Thejesh GN is a Technologist. His area of interests are web, Open Data and Open Source technologies. He moonlights visualizing public data. He loves blogging and hacking open source software. You can find more about him here.

Chakshu Roy - Chakshu is a lawyer who specialised in real estate law and commercial agreements before joining PRS. He has earlier worked in corporate law with the Chamber of Law, New Delhi. He holds bachelors degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi University. Chakshu Roy heads technology initiatives at PRS Legislative research, developing a comprehensive technology strategy to engage large sections of the Indian population in policy making.

Vinay Kumar - Vinay Kumar is the chief strategist at Digital Greens. He currently manage operations of Digital Green and contribute to its organizational development. He is also a consultant to Translational Health Science & Technology Institute (THSTI) at Department of Biotechnology. Prior to this he was at India Operations Director at PATH and Regional Operations Manager for Asia / Near East with IntraHealth International. Earlier he was with the Reserve Bank of India. I have an MA in Political Science and M. Phil. in International Relations from JNU and MBA from FMS.

Manu Srivastava - Manu Srivastava works as Vice President - Delivery at eGovernment Foundation, a not-for-profit trust that was founded in Feb 2003 by Nandan Nilekani & Srikanth Nadhamuni with a goal of creating an eGovernance system to improve the functioning of City Municipalities leading to better delivery of services to their citizens. He has been in the field of Municipal Governance for the last 7 years and focusses on supply side, with the Municipal Governments, to create sustainable, efficient, transparent and accountable Municipalities. eGovernments Solutions have been deployed in more than 250 municipalities across the country.

Dinesh Shenoy - Dinesh Shenoy is a business developer at Palantir. Palantir is a firm believer in the fact that well-informed citizens lead to better government, and making government data available is certainly an important first step. In practice, however, information is scattered across countless domains, and combining such widely dispersed knowledge in a meaningful way is a technical challenge beyond any private citizen's capabilities. Palantir has eliminated this barrier, democratizing the data and providing the tools to place a new world of analysis at your fingertips.

Palantir has developed AnalyzeThe.US which allows anyone to to explore vast amounts of data, including key datasets from www.data.gov. It brings critical knowledge together on a single stage, while providing rich analytical applications that enable anyone to develop an intuitive picture of the complex flow of resources, money, and influence that affect how our government functions. Ultimately, by allowing citizens to analyze our democracy, AnalyzeThe.US democratizes analysis.

Paul Culmsee - Paul Culmsee is a dialog mapper based in Perth, Australia. He has faciliated a number of meetings and done lot of dialog mapping particularly for the public sector in the areas of urban planning and health. He is the only certified dialog-mapper in the Southern hemisphere. He has also dialog-mapped politicians. His work has culminated in soon to be released book called "Beyond Best Practices", which outlines IBIS based techniques - a radically inclusive approach to knowledge management that allows groups to capture and make sense of unstructured knowledge during project meetings. and case studies. The book goes beyond the tool of mapping and the concept of wicked problems to look at what is needed to create and maintain a "holding environment".

Frederick Noronha - Frederick Noronha is a journalist, writer, publisher and photographer from Goa, India. He is known for online community building, and for promoting the cause of Free Software in India. Among the other campaigns he has been actively associated with are the successful community radio campaign, right to information initiatives, sharable content (including the information commons, Creative Commons, Wikipedia). He has been active in mailing lists within India, and has undertaken blogging assignments in Uganda, Malaysia and Thailand. He is on twitter at @fn and shares his links via Facebook and del.icio.us (fredericknoronha)

Nikhil Pahwa - Nikhil Pahwa is a media junkie, journalist and a blogger. He has covered the digital media business for more than 3 years. He has helped bringing a pan-media perspective to digital media reportage, highlighting industry issues, identifying opportunities and problems, and questioning the efficacy of decisions being made by some large media companies. Nikhil Pahwa undoubtedly is one of the popular names in the business of digital media coverage. Companies referMedianama for the latest breaking news in the digital media industry.

Kohl Singh Gill - Dr. Kohl S. Gill is the President and founder of LaborVoices, Inc. Dr. Gill served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow for the U.S. Departments of Energy and State, most recently as the South Asia and Middle East Labor Affairs Officer for the Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Prior to federal service, Dr. Gill was an Indicorps Fellow in the slum areas of Delhi, India, serving as a volunteer paralegal with local residents, using transparency legislation to fight both petty and grand corruption at the local level. Dr. Gill is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his work in quantum computing and semiconductor physics.

Aaditya Dar, Dhruv Suri and Ritwik Agrawal - Aaditya, Dhruv and Ritwik are interested in exploring and evolving innovative interventions to improve governance in India. They have varied backgrounds - economics, policy research, law, advocacy [and even math!] and have worked together in the past on education and governance related issues as part of United Students.

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya is a development professional with hands-on experience in institution development, development research, communication systems and grassroots networking. He has considerable experience in developing systems and platforms for enabling enterprise support. Vijay is an Electrical Engineering Graduate with a Post-Graduation in Management from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, M.P., India. Vijay is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ekgaon.

The other speakers were:

Vivek Joshi
Siddhant
Mudit Tuli
Ankit Rastogi
Nirmesh Singh
Manish Shekhar
Shashank S
Mandira
Tonushree
Shomikho Raha

The rationale behind the camp

Founded in 2008, AI is a research initiative that aims to improve the quality of public services in India by promoting informed and accountable governance. To this end, one of AI's key efforts is to develop innovative models for tracking government led social sector programs in India. The Centre for Policy Research, an independent and non-partisan research institute and think-tank, is the institutional anchor for this initiative.

It is now widely accepted that greater transparency – access to information and data on the day to day functioning of government – is key to creating accountable and effective governance systems. The Right to Information Act (2005) has played a significant role in strengthening transparency by committing the government to both proactively providing citizens with information and also responding to specific information requests. While the Act has met much success – RTI applications are growing by the day - there remain concerns related to quality, and reliability of information and data provided. Moreover, there are still many gaps in the Government’s efforts to proactively disclose information and data of public relevance.

Technology is one of many tools that can help address these gaps. There are some incredible initiatives taking place across the world on opening government data and on getting data to work for ordinary citizens. [See below for a sample of initiatives] Through the bar camp, we hope to create a platform for technologists to share these technologies and contribute to the debate on strengthening accountability and transparency.

Equally, we believe that technology solutions can be significantly enhanced if they are developed in consultation with people working on the ground, people who deal with the challenges of our current governance systems in India. By organizing a bar camp, we at AI want to initiate a conversation between technology specialists and people working on the ground. Through the bar camp, we intend to create a space where people can share their knowledge about how best to use new technologies to make our government really work for the people.

Online conversations

To faciliate conversations between interested people and for people who are interested in being a part of the planning process, we created a Google-Group. To send in your suggestions for the camp, both on what you would like to hear, and on what sessions you would like to take, you can use the google-group or send in your entries through our Facebookpage, our Twitter handle or through comments on this blog post. Our entry on the official bar-camp page is here. To tweet about us please use the hash-tag #TAC1.

Do you need more ideas?

To spark your thought processes, we consolidated a list of websites which deal with "Technology, Accountabilty and Transparency". Have fun!

A compendium of ideas from across the world can be found here.
The Sunlight Foundation does some excellent work on technology and transparency issues.
The technology for transparency network maps technology initiatives across the world.
Code for America brings together techies from across the world to use their skills for the greater common good.
Civics Common is another organization working on using technology for common good, and this involves a lot of transparent data.

For any other information, please contact lemmanuel @ accountabilityindia.org.

See the entire details on the Accountability Initiative website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/notices/technology-transparency-accountability

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:54:21Z

Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these critically in order to build a better learning environment for themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.

Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.

As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction and learning.

The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:

The Costs of Belonging

Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend circles within the college environment.

It was particularly insightful for us to understand that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping ‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers, internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways, these students were digital natives if defined through access, because they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.

Based on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting, exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel excluded from the power of the digital.

The Need for Diversity

It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us. Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English, fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.

Such an idea might also help in reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find themselves tentative and intimidated online.

The breakthrough that the participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning lesson for us.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

As a part of their orientation to the world of the digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.

Working together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories, emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated special trainings with different experts in areas of language, communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure that is different from the regular classroom learning.

What would happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities, where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities, cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys, ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.

Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies. How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we organise a faculty training workshop later in December.

These three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream learning within higher education in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education

Technology for Accessibility in Higher Education

nirmita — 2012-01-31T06:29:03Z

Education for students with disabilities has long been a serious cause of concern in India, as also in other countries around the world. A person with a disability studying in mainstream educational institutions in India experiences many difficulties in navigating through the obstacle course of the Indian educational system, writes Nirmita Narasimhan in this IIMB Journal brought out on the occasion of the conference 'never-the-less - Enabling Access for Persons with Disabilities to Higher Education and Workplace - Role of ICT and Assistive Technologies.

Problems exist in many areas – course content, staff, facilities, resources as well as the educational and examination process. The relative physical inaccessibility of educational institutions, unavailability of accessible content in different languages, lack of trained and sensitive teachers, and the lack of awareness about developments in enabling technologies have hitherto rendered the educational environment itself rather difficult to access. In addition to the long waiting periods in getting the course materials digitized into accessible formats, as well as the assignment of scribes unfamiliar with subject topics for students to write the examinations put students with print disabilities at additional disadvantage – as if there weren’t enough problems already! Thus the educational experience often becomes a nightmare for a student who is disabled. However, compared with the situation from a decade earlier, the education scenario for persons with disabilities has, thanks to the sustained advocacy and interventions of disability organizations, gradually improved and promises to get better in the years to come.

Today, technology has made it possible for persons with disabilities to read and work independently. Some institutions for higher learning around the country, like St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Delhi University and Loyola College in Chennai have already set up ICT centres which facilitate reading and working students who are print impaired. They offer support through digitization, training, and facilities. Organisations like National Association for the Blind and other Daisy organizations convert study materials for blind students and make them available in formats and media of the students’ choice. Students themselves, through peer to peer networks and mailing lists are able to collaboratively produce and share accessible study materials on a variety of subjects ranging from graduation to competitive exams. Another really big boon is the advent of the mobile phone as a suitable platform for listening to books. Today, two international mobile screen reader software - Nuance Talks and Mobile Speak - are available in the Indian market at competitive prices and this has led to an increase in the incidence of mobile adoption amongst persons with print disabilities, at least in the metropolitan cities.

There are many areas of improvement, which institutions of higher education can adopt for enhancing the education experience for students. For instance, the provision of digitized reading materials, access to computers with assistive devices, choice of examination methods, maintaining accessible web sites, promoting open access and open educational resources will go a long way in furthering education amongst students who have disabilities. Institutions could explore new models of imparting education which are proving successful in other parts of the world. Furthermore, existing sources of information and knowledge, such as information in the public domain and knowledge imparted through distance education should be made accessible to a wider audience.

Click here for the conference details held in IIM, Bangalore on 20 and 21 January 2012.
Download the original published in the Journal: Enabling Access for Persons with Disabilities to Higher Education and Workplace [PDF, 1422 KB]

Nirmita Narasimhan is a Programme Manager with the Centre for Internet and Society and works on policy research and advocacy related to IP reform and technology access for persons with disabilities. She received a National Award from the President of India in 2010 recognizing her contribution to the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/accessibility-in-higher-education

Technology and Gender Based Violence

praskrishna — 2014-12-09T16:32:34Z

Rohini Lakshane was a speaker at this event organized by the Bachchao Project on November 24, 2014. Rohini spoke about various strategies that women use to respond to online harassment, such as reporting the abuser, and enlisting support from online followers, or friends or family in order to deal with the abuser.

Click to download the event report (PDF).

Date : 25/11/2014
Time : 6:15pm to 8:15 pm
No. of attendees : 14 ppl
Organisations Involved: The Bachchao Project , CIS , Amnesty International , Breakthrough , Take Back the Tech.Venue : Center for Internet and Society , Domlur

The Bachchao Project is a community effort to build Open Source Technologies with the following aims :

1. Personal Safety with focus on women.

2. Empowering prevention of Gender Based Violence.

3. Enabling fight against Gender Based Violence.

On 25th November we honored the UN’s “ End Violence against Women” day by conducting an event where we invited various NGOs and experts to come join us in our effort by :

1. showcasing how technology has been used to fight gender based violence

2. talk about how technology has added more mediums for gender based violence

3. And discuss how we could make better solutions to fight .

Talks given :

A show case of The Bachchao Project initiatives :

Speakers : Chinmayi S K , Ankitha Herurkar and Yogesh Londhe.

The Bachchao Project talked about their applications : ( thebachchaoproject.org)

Bachchao - A distress application used to send SOS msgs and record evidence in case of a distress
Pehara - A community monitoring system. Which sends distress and alert information in case of any distress reported by anyone in the community to friend , family and the police
i-rode : An Application used to rate public transit and display the safety of a public transit.
Gender Sensitivity of public space : an initiative to provide an interface to rate gender sensitivites of public spaces based on certain questions.
readytoreport.in, an initiative by Amnesty International :

Speaker : Gopika Bashi

Gopika Bashi from Amnesty International spoke about their effort to educate and encourage women to file an FIR when an incident occurs to them . readytoreport.in is a website which educates about all the legal option and the rights of a abused .It also provide answers to their minor questions.

How Breakthrough is using technology to solve problems :

Speaker : Manoj M

Manoj spoke about two of the many initiatives breakthrough has undertaken .

Board the Bus Campaign : This was a gamification solution used by breakthrough to encourage using public transport by women. Where in for every action the woman takes they were given some points which could be

converted into incentives.

Trainer App : This was used to interact with the various trainer at breakthrough who conduct sexual harassment seminars in various States of the country.

Online Harassment in the Indian context :

Speakers :(Rohini Lakshane and Chinmayi S K )

The speakers talked about various forms of Online Harassment . They spoke about the various contextual forms of Harassment in india because of the cultural practices . That included not understanding consent and not understanding the online spaces are an extension of Physical spaces.

Rohini spoke about various strategies that women use to respond to online harassment, such as reporting the abuser, and enlisting support from online followers, or friends or family in order to deal with the abuser. Very few women take legal recourse due to lack of faith in the law, or the time-consuming, emotionally taxing and financially draining nature of legal processes, or negative experiences with law enforcement and the police. Rohini also spoke about how laws don’t necessarily take into account the consent of women and that there are grey areas where it is difficult to distinguish between sexual expression, obscenity and pornography using the existing legal framework in India.

Chinmayi also spoke about take back the tech and how it is fighting online harassment.

Discussion Takeaways :

Panelists :

Ushashri TS - MD , Manhattan Associates , India

Gopika Bashi -Women's Rights Researcher & Campaigner at Amnesty International India

Rohini Lakshane - Researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society

Manoj M - Media and technology Consultant at breakthrough

“one plug fits all” - might not be a adage that might not be applicable for technology solutions in gender based violence
Response of the application or the device needs to be time bound depending upon the application need not be real time always
Application for crisis should be time bound , should consider the limitations like battery and should provide as much accuracy in terms of location.
Technology should take into consideration environments ( rural vs urban) , Cultural tendencies and interactions .
Applications needs to simple to use to make it universal
Validation should be an important part of the technology since there is a chance of a lot of garbage data .
Attitudinal changes will support the usage of technology in a proper way esp in a country like India .
Similar apps for the same purpose without seriously considering the quality of service and sustainability can be harmful .
Everything cannot be an application .
Technology needs acts like a service provider in solving the issues.
There is need and use of technology in counselling and education.
Some technologies should not be done like online FIR since then the authorities might shy away from responsibilities. But some people might have a need for such technologies hence the implementation and validation must be thought through. Also the police would not welcome digital avenues to file FIRs. This is because they try to gauge if the complaint is false by speaking with a complainant who pays a visit to the police station. This is their way of weeding out false and frivolous complaints, and sometimes of thwarting genuine complaints because more FIRs mean more work for the police. They lose this option when FIRs are submitted through digital channels.

Harass Map Egypt is an good example of how technological projects should be implemented with 1000 volunteers working on ground tirelessly to ensure the repeated mapping and stopping of street harassment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/technology-gender-based-violence

Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010

pranesh — 2012-05-17T16:51:38Z

In this post Pranesh Prakash conducts a legal exegesis of section 65A of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, which deals with the stuff that enables 'Digital Rights/Restrictions Management', i.e., Technological Protection Measures. He notes that while the provision avoids some mistakes of the American law, it still poses grave problems to consumers, and that there are many uncertainties in it still.

Technological Protection Measures are sought to be introduced in India via the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010. This should be quite alarming for consumers for reasons that will be explained in a separate blog post on TPMs that will follow shortly.

In this post, I will restrict myself to a legal exegesis of section 65A of the Bill, which talks of "protection of technological measures". (Section 65B, which talks of Right Management Information will, similarly, be tackled in a later blog post.)

First off, this provision is quite unnecessary. There has been no public demand in India for TPMs to be introduced, and the pressure has come mostly from the United States in the form of the annual "Special 301" report prepared by the United States Trade Representative with input coming (often copied verbatim) from the International Intellectual Property Alliance. India is not a signatory to the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) which requires technological protection measures be safeguarded by law. That provision, interestingly, was pushed for by the United States in 1996 when even it did not give legal sanctity to TPMs via its copyright law (which was amended in 2000 by citing the need to comply with the WCT).

TPMs have been roundly criticised, have been shown to be harmful for consumers, creators, and publishers, and there is also evidence that TPMs do not really decrease copyright infringement (but instead, quite perversely through unintended consequences, end up increasing it). Why then would India wish to introduce it?

Leaving that question aside for now, what does the proposed law itself say?

65A. Protection of Technological Measures

    (1) Any person who circumvents an effective technological measure applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act, with the intention of infringing such rights, shall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to two years and shall also be liable to fine.

    (2) Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from:

        (a) doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act:

          Provided that any person facilitating circumvention by another person of a technological measure for such a purpose shall maintain a complete record of such other person including his name, address and all relevant particulars necessary to identify him and the purpose for which he has been facilitated; or

        (b) doing anything necessary to conduct encryption research using a lawfully obtained encrypted copy; or

        (c) conducting any lawful investigation; or

        (d) doing anything necessary for the purpose of testing the security of a computer system or a computer network with the authorisation of its owner; or

        (e) operator; or [sic]

        (f) doing anything necessary to circumvent technological measures intended for identification or surveillance of a user; or

        (g) taking measures necessary in the interest of national security.

Implications: The Good Part

This provision clearly takes care of two of the major problems with the way TPMs have been implemented by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States:

In s.65A(1) it aligns the protection offered by TPMs to that offered by copyright law itself (since it has to be "applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act"). Thus, presumably, TPMs could not be used to restrict access, only to restrict copying, communication to the public, and that gamut of rights.
In s.65A(1) and 65A(2) it aligns the exceptions granted by copyright law with the exceptions to the TPM provision. Section 65A(1) states that the act of circumvention has to be done "with the intention of infringing ... rights", and s.52(1) clearly states that those exceptions cannot be regarded as infringement of copyright. And s.65A(2)(a) states that circumventing for "a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act" will be allowed.

A third important difference from the DMCA is that

It does not criminalise the manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools (including code, devices, etc.). (More on this below.)

Implications: The Bad Part

This provision, despite the seeming fair-handed manner in which it has been drafted, still fails to maintain the balance that copyright seeks to promote:

TPM-placers (presumably, just copyright holders, because of point 1. above) have been given the ability to restrict the activities of consumers, but they have not been given any corresponding duties. Thus, copyright holders do not have to do anything to ensure that the Film & Telivision Institute of India professor who wishes to use a video clip from a Blu-Ray disc can actually do so. Or that the blind student who wishes to circumvent TPMs because she has no other way of making it work with her screen reader is actually enabled to take advantage of the leeway the law seeks to provide her through s.52(1)(a) (s.52(1)(zb) is another matter!). Thus, while there are many such exceptions that the law allows for, the technological locks themselves prevent the use of those exceptions. Another way of putting that would be to say:
The Bill presumes that every one has access to all circumvention technology. This is simply not true. In fact, Spanish law (in Article 161 of their law) expressly requires that copyright holders facilitate access to works protected by TPM to beneficiaries of limitations of copyright. Thus, copyright holders who employ TPMs should be required to:
- tell their customers how they can be contacted if the customer wishes to circumvent the TPM for a legitimate purpose
- upon being contacted, aid their customer in making use of their rights / the exceptions and limitations in copyright law
How seriously can you take a Bill that has been introduced in Parliament that includes a provision that states: "Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from operator; or" (as s.65A(2)(e), read in its entirety, does)?

Uncertainties

As mentioned above, the provisions are not all that clear regarding manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools. Thus, the proviso to s.65A(2)(a) deserves a closer reading. What is clear is that there are no penalties mentioned for manufacture or dissemination of TPMs, and that only those who circumvent are penalised in 65A(1), and not those who produce the circumvention devices. However:

On "shall maintain" and penalties

In the proviso to s.65B(2)(a), there is an imperative ("shall maintain") requiring "any person facilitating circumvention" to keep records. It is unclear what the implications of not maintaining such records are.

The obvious one is that the exemption contained in s.65(1)(a) will not apply if one were facilitated without the facilitator keeping records. Thus, under this interpretation, there is no independent legal (albeit penalty-less) obligation on facilitators. This interpretation runs into the problem that if this was the intention, then the drafters would have written "Provided that any person facilitating circumvention ... for such a purpose maintain/maintained a complete record ...". Instead, shall maintain is used, and an independent legal obligation seems, thus, to be implied. But can a proviso create an independent legal obligation? And is there any way a penalty could possibly be attached to violation of this proviso despite it not coming within 65A(1)?

On "facilitating" and remoteness

The next question is who all can be said to "facilitate", and how remote can the connection be? Is the coder who broke the circumvention a facilitator? The distributor/trafficker? The website which provided you the software? Or is it (as is more likely) a more direct "the friend who sat at your computer and installed the circumvention software" / "the technician who unlocked your DVD player for you while installing it in your house"?

While such a record-keeping requirement is observable by people those who very directly help you (the last two examples above), it would be more difficult to do so the further up you get on the chain of remoteness. Importantly, such record-keeping is absolutely not possible in decentralized distribution models (such as those employed by most free/open source software), and could seriously harm fair and legitimate circumvention.

More uncertainties

It is slightly unclear which exception the bypassing of Sony's dangerous "Rootkit" copy protection technology would fall under if I wish to get rid of it simply because it makes my computer vulnerable to malicious attacks (and not to exercise one of the exceptions under s.52(1)). Will such circumvention come under s.65A(2)(a)? Because it does not quite fall under any of the others, including s.65(2)(b) or (f).

On "purpose" as a criterion in 65A(2)(a)

A last point, which is somewhat of an aside is that 65A(2)(a) states:

Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act.

There's something curious about the wording, since the Copyright Act generally does not prohibit any acts based on purposes (i.e., the prohibitions by ss.14 r/w s.51 are not based on why someone reproduces, etc., but on the act of reproduction). In fact, it allows acts based on purposes (via s.52(1)). The correct way of reading 65A(2)(a) might then be:

Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from doing anything referred to therein for a purpose expressly allowed by this Act.

But that might make it slightly redundant as s.65A(1) covers that by having the requirement of the circumvention being done "with the intention of infringing such right" (since the s.52(1) exceptions are clearly stated as not being infringements of the rights granted under the Act).

Conclusion

It would be interesting to note how leading copyright lawyers understand this provision, and we will be tracking such opinions. But it is clear that TPMs, as a private, non-human enforcement of copyright law, are harmful and that we should not introduce them in India. And we should be especially wary of doing so without introducing additional safeguards, such as duties on copyright holder to aid access to TPM'ed works for legitimate purposes, and remove burdensome record-keeping provisions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment

Technical Alternative to Encrypted Media Extensions

gupta — 2016-10-20T00:16:05Z

This post is an analysis of the various technical alternatives to EME (encyrpted media extensions) that have emerged from the discussions at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These alternatives and the proposed EME specification along six dimensions are examined.

Introduction

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) are a draft specification^{^[1]} to standardize digital rights management (DRM) for audio and video at the browser level. The specification has been very controversial in the software community since it was first drafted in 2012. It was proposed by content providers and streaming service operators to ensure that content delivered to legitimate users is inaccessible to pirates. However, the proposed solution raised salient questions about interoperability, privacy, accessibility and implementation in Free and Open Source (FOSS) software.

Several parties have, over the course of the discussion at W3C, proposed several alternate technical alternatives. This report aims to analyze these alternatives and the proposed EME specification along six dimensions; technical copy protection, legal copy protection, interoperability/entry barriers for browsers, privacy, accessibility, and user security.

Aims of the Specification

Make it technically hard for a malicious user to pirate a particular media

Have sufficient legal barriers to deter infringement

At the same time:

Ensure interoperability and make sure there are no entry barriers for new browsers
Protect privacy of users
Make sure the system doesn’t bring about security vulnerability
Maintain accessibility for a person with disabilities

Metrics of Comparison

Technological Copy Protection

During the transfer of video content from the web server of the content provide to the user, there are multiple points where a malicious entity can capture the copyrighted content.

We classify the technical strength of a DRM system depending on the point in transition where the capture can take place. Assuming the server is itself secure, the first point where the adversary can capture the media is during the transition from the server to the user’s device. Preventing such kind of interception is a standard problem and is in solved by the use of HTTPS. After the media stream reaches the device of the intended user, she can capture the before it is played on the media software. For example, in case of images or text, the user can usually save the media without the need of any special software or specialized technique. So the next step from content providers side is build restrictions in the software playing the media. The usual way to do this is by making sure that the media can be played only on certain software which doesn’t allow the user to copy the media. The software restrictions can be implemented using arbitrary codecs, scrambling or encryption. Technical restrictions at software level are always prone to be captured by screen capturing softwares, and hardware emulators which appears as output devices to media software but are used to save the media instead. To prevent capturing at software level there exists technologies such as HDCP^{^[2]} which protects the media during its transition from the media software to the output device. Although such technologies are also fallible to a user holding a video camera in front of the monitor. This weakness of the DRM systems is known as Analog Hole.

Technological Copy Protection is:

High: Infringer needs specialized hardware to capture the copyrighted content.
Medium: Infringer needs specialized Software to capture the copyrighted content
Low: Infringer needs only commonly available software and hardware to capture the copyrighted content

Copy Protection (Legal)

Jurisdictions across the world have laws which make it illegal to circumvent technological protections methods for the protections of Copyright. The most famous of them is the Section 1201 of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For content providers who wish to use TPMs to prevent piracy of their copyrighted work, these laws provide additional layers of protection. DMCA disallows circumventing a technical measure which effectively control access to copyrighted work, also it disallows the “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component” which is primarily designed to circumvent a DRM. .^{^[3]}

Legal protection against infringement is high in DRM system if:

High: Circumventing the DRM and creating tools to enable that is illegal unconditionally
Medium: Circumventing the DRM and creating tools to enable that is illegal depending the intent and circumstances
Low: Circumventing the DRM and creating tools to enable that is legal.

Security

DRM systems have been criticized for leaving users’ devices vulnerable.

Security of a user using the DRM system is:

High: The system don’t require any elevated permissions
Medium: The system only requires elevated software permissions
Low: The system requires both elevated hardware or software permission

Privacy

Privacy of user using the DRM systems is:

High: The system doesn’t collect minimal information
Medium: The system only collects non personally identifiable information
Low: The system collects personally identifiable information

Accessibility

DRM systems can turn out to be problematic for providing accessibility for disabled persons. In case of video service can be made accessible by providing access to closed captions for a video and by modifying the stream to make it accessible to color blind people. However, a DRM system could present unnecessary barriers for people trying to provide accessibility solutions. There can be technical barrier in the process of handling the video stream

W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) suggested following guidelines to maintain accessibility in Encrypted Media Extensions:^{^[4]}

ensuring that media content may be redirected to certain system services
ensuring that every piece of digital content is available in its original form (for example, subtitles are not blended into video, etc)
ensuring that standard operations (adjusting contrast, using third-party subtitles or audio-stream) may be applied to restricted media
ensuring that restricted media from different sources provided by different EME systems (for example, video from one source and sign-language interpretation of that video from another source) may be used simultaneously

We say accessibility in a DRM system is:

High: If all the of the guidelines are met
Medium: If two more points in the guideline are met
Low: If less than points of the guideline are met

Interoperability

Interoperability of any system is important to keep the entry barriers low for a new producer to enter the market. Interoperability of a DRM system for browsers is:

High: The full spec is available for implementation on royalty free basis
Medium: The full spec is not available, but can be implemented through reverse engineering without legal barriers.
Low: Third parties may restrict new browsers from implementing the spec through legal means.

Specifications

EME Specification

EME specification only defines the javascript component of the system and the large component called Content Decryption Module(CDM) is left undefined. The CDM can be hardware based using technologies like HDCP, which prevents screen capture. The CDM can be software based and can return the decrypted video to the browser to render, or it can use its own media stream and render it by itself. Most of the CDMs in use are proprietary but there can exist CDMs which are fully specified and are open source. The implications for copy protection, privacy, accessibility and security depends on the CDM used. Interoperability of EME spec is very low because there are not only technical barriers due lack of full specification but also legal barriers as browsers may need to get into a contract with the dominant CDM providers to add support for their CDM.

Obfuscation (Arbitrary Codec)

Charles Pritchard pointed out the HTML5 video specification is codec agnostic, hence the content providers can stream the media using an arbitrary codec which only supported by the media provider.^{^[5]} So even if the user captures the video stream it cannot be pirated without reverse engineering the codec. Although reverse engineering is usually allowed by DRM laws hence the legal protection is low.^{^[6]} Since the codec support is provided through OS, there is no need to modify the browser and the system can be supported by any browser without any technical or legal barriers.

HTTPS and JS encryption

Tab Atkins proposed using JS encryption using browser and <video> element^{^[7]}. Since the technique requires the a malicious user to implement the full <video> spec to decrypt the video, the scheme provides moderate technical copy protection.

Encryption using video tag

According to David Singer encrypted video can be played through the existing <video> tags where the content file says its content-ID and is marked as protected, someone who has the DRM to play the content installed and has brought the keys to play it can watch the video.^{^[8]} As a concrete example he talked about protected .m4p audio files from iTunes library, which plays just fine on Safari.^{^[9]}

Plugin System (Flash)

Existing plugin system, mainly Flash is be used to as a technical measure to prevent copyright infringement. It is more interoperable than EME because any browser with a correct implementation of NPAPI can provide support for Flash^{^[10]}.

Technical Alternative	Copy Protection Technical	Interoperability	Copy Protection Legal	Accessibility	Privacy	Security
Obfuscation (Arbitrary Codec)	Medium	High	Low	Depends on Implementation Details	High	High
Encryption using video tag	Medium to High^{^[11]}	Medium	High	Depends on Implementation Details	Depends on Implementation Details	Depends on Implementation Details
HTTPS and JS decryption	Medium	High	High	Depends on Implementation Details	High^{^[12]}	High
EME	Depends on CDM^{^[13]}	Low	High	Depends on CDM	Depends on CDM	Depends on CDM
Plugin (Flash)	High^{^[14]}	Medium	Medium	Medium^{^[15]}	Low^{^[16]}	Low

^{^[1]}Encrypted Media Extensions W3C Candidate Recommendation https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/. For a general overview see https://hsivonen.fi/eme/

^{^[2]} HDCP Whitepaper, https://web.archive.org/web/20080920191718/http://www.digital-cp.com/files/documents/04A897FD-FEF1-0EEE-CDBB649127F79525/HDCP_deciphered_070808.pdf

^{^[3]} Section 1201, US Digital Millennium Copyright Act

^{^[4]} https://github.com/w3ctag/eme/blob/master/EME%20Proposal.md#accessibility-1

^{^[5]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0328.html

^{^[6]} Section 1201, Digital Millennium Copyright Act

^{^[7]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0456.html

^{^[8]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0422.html

^{^[9]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0433.html

^{^[10]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Feb/0427.html

^{^[11]} Using HDCP is possible with compatible hardware

^{^[12]} The implementation itself doesn’t require additional cookies

^{^[13]} The Spec allows CDMs which do not act as DRM, but the content providers may not support them.

^{^[14]} Adobe’s new Flash DRM comes with selective output control

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/05/adobes-new-flash-drm-comes-with-selective-output-control

^{^[15]} Flash Player provides some accessibility functionalities https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/captions.html

^{^[16]} Soltani, Ashkan and Canty, Shannon and Mayo, Quentin and Thomas, Lauren and Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, Flash Cookies and Privacy (August 10, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1446862 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1446862

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/technical-alternative-to-encrypted-media-extensions

Tech transformation: how agriculture is being redefined through digital innovation and startups

Admin — 2018-07-06T15:39:53Z

At a recent YES Bank panel and digital startup competition, it was evident that India’s digital boom was lending the Indian startup ecosystem a distinctly agri-flavour.

The blog post was published in Your Story on June 29, 2018. CIS was mentioned in the report.

The convergence of mobile networks, broadband internet, cloud platforms, IoT, AI and open data is helping transform one of the world’s oldest professions. This is of great significance as agriculture and related sectors like dairy production form the backbone of the Indian workforce. Today, tradition is merging with technology as the IT services sector is helping open up new opportunities for both seasoned and emerging entrepreneurs.

New fronts are opening up across the sector from organic farming and hydroponics to drones and agri apps. Startups are also playing a key role in transforming agriculture, which accounts for half of India’s workforce, but only about 13 percent of its GDP.

Entrepreneurship trends

An interesting trend to watch for is the rise of the number of agri-entrepreneurs, many of whom have no background in agriculture. There is more interest now in this sector compared to even five or ten years ago. Another indicator is the number of agri-tech competitions, awards and investors that are emerging. India’s demographic dividend is also attracting more youth segments to the agricultural sector, with cross-fertilisation across states, economic sectors, and scientific fields.

The challenges seem formidable, but need to be acknowledged and tackled. Thousands of farmers commit suicide each year due to debt problems, as documented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This is a sad reality in states such as Maharashtra, Odisha, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and others.

Many issues being tackled by startups relate to productivity and distribution, according to Sahil Kini, Vice President, Aspada Investment. There are large yield gaps in Indian farming as compared to its global counterparts, due to inadequacies in domains ranging from farm inputs and equipment to farming practices and retail connects. Multiple intermediaries, poor refrigeration during transportation, small farm sizes, and lack of fairness in financial stakeholders are other challenges.

Agri-tech startups

Today, the agri-tech sector is witnessing a number of startups in India disrupting everything from organic farming and equipment rentals to connected supply chains and cloud-based analytics. The startups in this report showcase the diversity in the sector, followed by an analysis of the broader ecosystem. Some cover pricing of produce, others include equipment marketplaces; still others cover digital workflow and smart supply chains.

Farms2Fork offers farmers water monitoring solutions that ensure better productivity by reducing water wastage. The solution includes IoT wireless soil sensors, AI support, and real-time analytics. While earlier agri-tech solutions were based on batch processing of data, Farms2Fork operates on real-time data.

Agribolo, founded in 2015, is a farming services platform spanning activities such as information dissemination, quality input procurement, market linkages, irrigation facilities and farming equipment. The franchise network, launched in Rajasthan, uses the aggregator model to connect farmers to experts, development institutions, financial services, and training institutes.

AgroWave, founded by an IIT Delhi alumna in 2017, aims to optimise agriculture supply chain using research, analytics, and technology. Demand and supply analytics connect farmers in Panipat, Sonipat, Harpur, and Rajasthan to caterers, retail shops, restaurants, and canteens.

Truce, founded by an IIT Bombay alumnus, is a B2B web and mobile platform that directly connects farmers and suppliers to wholesalers and retailers. The app is available in Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati, and enables tracking quotes and orders.

Farm Again has converted 2,500 acres of land into organic farms, along with tech tools to trace the product’s origin, when sold in outlets such as Reliance Retail, Big Bazaar, and More. IoT devices are used to monitor and record moisture content and soil conditions, with pipes for water and fertiliser inputs.

Crofarm, a Delhi-headquarted agri-supply chain startup founded in 2016, buys fresh produce directly from farmers and supplies them to online and offline retailers. It supplies nearly 8-10 tonnes of fruits and vegetables from its two distribution centres in Delhi NCR, and connects 100 retailers to more than 5,000 farmers.

Aibono improves farm yields by using AI on a cluster of parameters like weather and soil condition. The testing and measurement services indicate parameters such as crop stress, along with recommendations on the right fertiliser mix to be used based on the soil condition.

Gold Farm, founded in 2012, helps farmers book farm equipment such as solar-powered pumps in districts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Beneficiaries have included over 25,000 farmers on ground, who tap the services of 250 booking agents and over 500 tractor owners connected via a mobile app. The equipment is also tracked with IoT devices, resulting in rich data sets for analysis and forecasting.

Earthy Tales, founded in NCR in 2016, works with farmers across 11 states to provide chemical-free fruits, vegetables, groceries, and dairy products. These include snacks, jams, preserves, and pickles, provided direct to consumers. Other services include mentoring for farmers and farm cooperatives.

ONganic Foods works with small farmers to boost their organic produce. Based on contract farming, it identifies higher-priced grains and spices and gives quality inputs to farmers to increase their yield. It connects farmers to various government schemes as well as e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Spencer’s Retail.

Oxen Farm Solutions offers agricultural equipment on rent using a ‘Farming as a Service’ (FaaS) model. The platform connects farmers, farm equipment manufacturers, and government schemes. Access to such machinery can boost farm productivity in an affordable manner. The company operates in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, and connects to corporates such as PepsiCo and Yes Bank.

Farmizen is a mobile-based platform that lets users grow vegetables and fruits on mini-farms, and monitor the process of growing food on a real-time basis. Located in the outskirts of Bengaluru, users get pictures and live videos of their farm plots. The startup also provides recommendations based on real-time inputs from the field as well as pre-defined schedules for over 50 different types of crops.

Harvesting, founded by in 2016, has offices in California and Bengaluru, and offers smart farming solutions based on analytics and AI. It also uses farmer profiles to build creditworthiness profiles for financial organisations. The idea is to provide both increased farm productivity and better financial services.

SatSure uses IoT and Big Data to provide financial security to farmers, via its 15-year database of satellite images. It makes recommendations clustering techniques for farmers to get an estimate of the total agriculture production, and provides this data to agri-insurance companies as well.

Organic Thelawala enables a transparent pricing mechanism so that the consumer knows the price of the produce as well as how much of the selling price actually goes to the farmer. It is s assisting 13,000 farmers to switch to organic farming, thereby, creating a positive impact on bio-diversity, soil contamination, water, and air pollution. Further, by providing free thelas (pushcart), the team promotes micro-entrepreneurship among pushcart vendors and farmers.

Earth Food, based in Pune, provides chemical-free produce at market price. It has collaborated with Reliance Fresh and Nature Fresh. It uses a healthy mix of traditional methods and innovation to keep pollution and wastage to a minimum, thereby benefitting both consumers and the environment.

Jayalaxmi Agrotech, founded by alumni of IIMB and VEC helps farmers minimise crop loss and improve productivity via its many crop- specific mobile applications in local languages that provide timely information on agriculture and animal husbandry.

Gramophone, based in Indore, is a platform that combines both advisory and sale of inputs under a single roof. Farmers can access mentors for help with everything from crop selection to land productivity and more.

Triton Foodworks, based in Delhi, is a hydroponics startup growing fruits and vegetables. It has reportedly set up more than 2 lakh sq ft of hydroponic farms across three locations in India, and produces more than 700 tons of fruits and vegetables each year.

vDrone, based in Bengaluru, uses drones and thermal imaging to increase yield. It analyses areas of the farm that need attention, and helps the farmer cater to these needs. Parameters include soil, cropping pattern, and use of fertilisers.

Ninjacart, based in Bengaluru, enables retailers and merchants to source fruits and vegetables directly from farmers without resorting to middlemen. It connects 2,500 farmers and handles 14,000 tons of fruits and vegetables, accounting for revenue of around Rs 4 crore every month.

BigHaat, based in Bengaluru, is an online agro e-store for farmers that lets them buy seeds, crop protection nutrients and solutions, and agro instruments. Last-mile connectivity is enabled via logistics partners like India Post and Ship Rocket. The footprint spans 50,000 farmers across 20 states.

Ravgo is an agri-equipment rental marketplace based on the model of the sharing economy. It is solving the farm mechanisation problem among India farmers who cannot afford to buy the farm machinery. The target market is currently small farmers based in Punjab.

Kisanmade, launched in Moradabad, UP is an e-commerce platform set up in Moradabad to empower farmers by eliminating the intermediary between the farmer and the consumer. It also aims to increase the farmer’s income and decrease the kitchen’s expense by 10-15 percent.

FlyBird Innovations, founded in Bengaluru, uses sensors in the soil to detect moisture content and control irrigation in farms across South India. The information is used to optimise irrigation practices, improve crop yield, and save water, time, and labour. It claims 25-30 percent savings of water and improvement of crop yield by 10-15 percent.

Kamal Kisan reduces labour costs with innovative agri-equipment, with reported savings of up to 50 percent. Tools include sugarcane planters, versatile mulch layers, bed makers, vegetable handy planters, and power weeders.

farMart connects farmers who own machinery with those who need it but don’t have access to it. Large farmers put underutilised agri-machinery up for rent on the farMart platform, and are connected to farmers who need such machinery; they can then book it via app or call centre. The database includes 300 villages and 1,500 farmers.

AgroStar, a Pune-based m-commerce startup, sells agricultural inputs directly to farmers. The platform can be accessed online or giving the company’s 1800 number a missed call. Products are sourced from national and multinational brands, and include seeds and nutrients.

CropIn leverages GIS and data science to deliver a range of services apps to farmers and other players in the agri chain. It feeds real-time data and advice on practices related to a range of crops.

Other notable agri startups are NubeSol (soil fertility maps) and Sree Sai Aerotech Innovations (drones for monitoring crop health). Some industry players are also leveraging the platform model – such as Trringo, launched in 2016 by India’s largest tractor maker company, Mahindra and Mahindra. The franchisee network enables farmers to access tractors at an affordable price. Over 100,000 farmers have signed up, from West and South India.

There are also international players in the Indian agri market, such as PEAT. The German startup is working with 30,000 farmers across India to help mitigate crop damage. It identifies patterns of plant diseases, pests, or nutrient deficiencies via crop images.

Ecosystem

The broader agri startup ecosystem includes a number of think tanks, research labs, incubators and accelerators. For example, ONganic is supported by the Technology Development Board, Government of India and Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprise and incubated at the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.

Goa has an agri-focused incubator called Centre for Innovation and Business Acceleration (CIBA). TiE Bangalore and NUMA have held startup showcases in collaboration with Villgro, featuring agri-entrepreneurs.

At the recent YES Bank Transformation Series (YBTS) speakers and panelists included Ramanathan Ramanan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog; Raju Kapoor, Head, Corporate Affairs, Dow AgroSciences India; Hemendra Mathur, Venture Partner, Bharat Innovations; Nitin Puri, Senior President, Food and Agribusiness Strategic Advisory and Research, YES Bank; and Amardeep Sibia, CEO, SatSure.

At the 2017 edition of YBTS three agri-tech winners were awarded out of 15 finalists. Winners included teams from IIM Shillong (Rs 5 lakh for a smart soil sensor proposal), IIM Bangalore (Rs 3 lakh for a solar-powered drip technology proposal), and ISB Hyderabad (Rs 2 lakh for IoT-based SIM-enabled farm data sensors).

The Government of India is also catalysing agri- entrepreneurship with programmes like the Agri-Udaan Accelerator and the Agri Grand Challenge. Government-backed funding agencies like the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) is incentivising banks to lend at highly affordable rates to startups.

Incubators in this space include Villgro, a-IDEA, ABI-ICRISAT, Startup Oasis, IIMC Innovation Park, IIT Kanpur SIIC, KIIT TBI, and CIIE, IIMA. They provide mentorship and connects to farmer cooperatives, NGOs, channel partners, and individual farmers in some cases.

Indigram Labs Foundation (ILF), supported by Department of Science and Technology via the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, Government of India, is a technology-based incubator founded in 2015 to promote creativity and innovation in agriculture, renewable energy, and rural healthcare industry. Its host organisation is Indian Society of Agribusiness Professionals (ISAP).

ISAP has set up more than 1,800 agri-based ventures through its Agri-Clinics and Agri-Business Centres (ACABC) programme and has around 50 agri-business experts in various verticals who help in mentoring incubates, according to Manisha Acharya, CEO, Indigram Labs Foundation.

It has graduated 18 startups, such as New Leaf Dynamic Technologies(refrigeration system powered by farm waste), Intello Labs (AI-based deep-tech solution for crop inspection and agricultural products grading), Sainhun Ventures(honey by-products), Nutrelis Agro Foods (organic groceries, beverages), and Innosapiens Agro Technologies (phenomics device for pre-detection of pests).

Indigram takes an equity of up to 5 percent in the startup. In the long run, agri incubators need support in areas like trained manpower, pilot testing costs, rural outreach, and patent advisory services, according to Acharya.

International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) hosted an agri-business investors camp in Hyderabad on June 12. The camp addressed three themes: agri-technology, agri-engineering and food processing.

IIM Ahmedabad’s technology business incubator, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), has launched a food and agri-business accelerator in partnership with a-IDEA, the business incubator at Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s (ICAR) National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM). Top teams are provided seed investment of up to Rs 30 lakhs each. CIIE also has a sustainability focused fund called Infuse Ventures.

Funding

Recent reports have tracked the investment line-up for Agricx Lab (Ankur Capital, CIIE), Agrostar (IDG Ventures, Aavishkaar Venture Management), Agrowave (Daffodil Software), Airwood (StartupXseed Ventures), Arya Collateral (Aspada), Farm Taaza (Epsilon Venture Partners), Farmizen (Venture Highway), FarmLink (Pioneering Ventures, Syngenta), Gobasco (Matrix Partners India), KisanHub (Notion Capital, IQ Capital, Calibrate Management), KrishiHub (INVENT accelerator, Villgro Innovation Fund), NinjaCart (Trifecta Ventures), RML AgTech (IvyCap Ventures), Utkal Tubers (CapAleph Indian Millennium SME Fund, Zephyr Peacock India), and VillFarm (Unitus Seed Fund, Rianta Capital).

Crofarm has received funding from angels such as Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India) and Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU India). Gold Farm raised funds from Infuse Venture and the Mahindra Group. Truce was funded by 3one4capital, Beenext, FreeCharge founders, Snapdeal founders and Anupam Mittal, CEO, People Group. CropIn, raised funds from Ankur Capital; Agrostar received investments from Aavishkar. Other active agri-focused funds include Omnivore Partners and Rural Agri Ventures; Germany development agency GIZ has also roped in international partners for further cooperation.

Among Indian states, Karnataka formalised an agri-startup fund in 2017 through K-BITS with a corpus of Rs 10 crore, with an additional Rs 8 crore planned for 21 agri-startups this year. A centre of excellence for agriculture is also planned, where startups will work with farmers.

Other government initiatives, according to Sahil Kini of Aspada Investment include Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme, 2008; and Money Lending (Regulation) Act, 2008.

Entrepreneur tips

A number of mentor panels and pitch jurors have offered guidance for agri-entrepreneurs. These include, for example, the importance of customer immersion. Here are some of the tips they have shared.

On-the-ground realities in emerging economies are shifting rapidly, and founders should have a finger on the pulse of effective trends and aspirations.
Disciplines like design thinking offer useful and actionable frameworks.
Metrics should be holistic and include activity, business, and social impacts. There should be one or two key success metrics for primary focus, and the rest should be supporting or complementary metrics. This helps founders monitor their progress and assists investors in assessing the long-term viability of the venture.
Founders should build a well-rounded team, with a mix of engineering, design, and social science backgrounds. Sometimes founders get too carried away with the technology; having a holistic mix in the core team will help contextualise the offerings, use and impact.
India’s social problems call for bold and ambitious innovators who can tackle challenges at scale. The social cost of failure is high for social enterprises (as compared to merely pivoting an app design); hence collaborative partnerships are important.
Social entrepreneurs should learn how to work with partners who are not social enterprises. They should be clear about their offerings, values, and philosophy. Partnerships are an art and a science. Partners should be picked carefully, and the relationship should evolve over time.
Founders will frequently need to pitch to funders, investors, partners, regulators, customers, and employees. The pitch should focus less on product features and more on problem resolution. Techniques like storytelling are effective here.
Founders should enumerate the range of risks involved, eg. regulatory and lack of ecosystem trust. Secondary impacts should also be assessed, since some risks are more indirect than others.

The road ahead

This is a great time to integrate different domains of knowledge and skills in agri-innovation. In addition to fresh farm produce, there are lucrative opportunities in processed products such as pickles, papads, chutneys, and murabbas. This calls for effective post-harvest management infrastructure such as storage, preservation, cold chain and refrigerated transportation.

New models such as the FaaS model can lead to more sustainable paths to profitability. The platform model can leverage data analytics to identify emerging business trends and opportunities and thus attract more venture capital, according to a report published by Bain and Company in partnership with Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Such models are also getting significant corporate backing, such as Trringo by Mahindra and Mahindra for tractor rentals and John Deere (with EM3 Agri Services) for harvester fleets.

Smartphones powered by affordable mobile broadband networks are helping improve workflow of farms and dairies. This opens the door to new pay-per-use business models and innovation stacks, connecting the farm to the fridge and fork. Banks and financial organisations also need to step up to the challenge and offer more creative models of financing for farmers, entrepreneurs, incubators, and accelerators.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a target for farmers’ incomes to be doubled by 2022, India’s 75th year of Independence. Schemes like the government’s Startup Agri India scheme, the Digi Gaon (Digital Village) initiative, and Bharat Net project can all work together towards making this a reality. Initiatives like agri-hackathons can also bring together aspiring entrepreneurs from diverse sectors.

However, there are certain challenges:
Pricing decisions should be made more transparent and less politically driven (particularly before elections), with sufficient market validity and testing. This includes setting the price of onions and sugar, and promising ‘free’ electricity for farmers.
Increased promotion and adoption of open data are other trends to watch for. An open data ecosystem can grow India’s GDP by $22 billion by 2020, according to report by YES Bank and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). India’s Open Government Data (OGD) platform can step up to this challenge.
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is pushing for these initiatives to reach ordinary people and marginalised communities. Other sources of data include rural internet kiosks, community e-centres, and online agricultural systems.
Agri-tech entrepreneurs can go beyond incremental change to truly effect exponential change, and transform the agricultural sector while also giving back to society. Successful agri-preneurs in India can also take their innovations global.

The agricultural sector is now shedding its rustic persona to emerge as a trendy space to be in. Inclusive, sustainable, and scalable solutions are the way ahead.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/your-story-june-29-2018-tech-transformation-agriculture-redefined-digital-innovation-startups

Tech for the blind: How app developers can help end the ‘disturbing touchscreen trend’

praskrishna — 2016-10-10T12:46:15Z

At their introduction, touchscreens was so refreshing and how we had rushed to get those touch devices. Meanwhile, there was a separate world that came crashing down with the advent of touch enabled phones. Just like me, I’m sure not many may have thought how touchscreens almost ended the messaging ability of visually impaired. Now, with services moving from phone calls to online (services and apps), it’s getting more difficult.

The article by Naina Khedekar was published in First Post on October 10, 2016.

We met Nirmita Narasimhan, a Policy Director at The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bengaluru, who has been instrumental in putting in place policies such as the copyright to benefit visually impaired. Nirmita is visually impaired herself, but that didn’t stop her from completing her law from Delhi University, and alongside she also completed her MA, M.Phil and PHD. While she is not writing policies or engaged in her passion for classical singing, she is busy playing a full time mom to two sons. But, it wasn’t easy, as back in 1995, when she was planning to pursue higher studies there weren’t many digital resources, and the ones like JAWS carried an outrageous price tag of $1000!

Lack of digital resources and struggle to study

Nirmita grew up in Delhi and it was at the age of nine that she started developing the vision problem. Her vision kept deteriorating and as a student in a mainstream school, she struggled with studies. Her parents had to read out everything to her; and there was also a stage when she used to enlarge everything and photocopy it. But, she finished her 10th and 12th grades with the help of a writer, and without any resources for electronics or digital books.

She then went on to learn German. However, soon realised that a translator cannot be dependent on someone else to read and look at the dictionary at all times. “You can’t have a career as a translator or interpreter if you need someone who knows German to constantly sit beside you and read to you all the time,” she explained. So, that put an end to her German sojourn.

She then decided to study law, and says, probably was one of the only students to have passed without reading a single book from the library. She relied on notes and had to choose 5-6 questions as each answer needed a lot of reading. She completed law from Delhi University and simultaneously pursued per passion for music.

It was after that reality dawned when no one was ready to offer her a job. After knocking all doors, from top firms to single advocates, she found it very difficult. She then started working for a blind advocate, but it wasn’t real work and she wasn’t getting paid for it. She later moved to Bengaluru, and after some research work with a law firm, she joined CIS.

“CIS was a turning point. So, all the problems that I faced are the ones I want to fix, she said.

Introduction to software that could read out to users

It was in her final year of studies around 2001, when a neighbour pointed out an article that spoke about a new software that reads out to users at the National association for the blind. Nirmita said the software was called Kurzweil 1000 wherein you could scan your books and it could read out to you. But books had to be of really good quality and the software cost Rs 50,000. After a long debate and financial crisis, she decided to go with it, as that was the only way to move ahead.

She was excited with the free CD that was bundled called Literature 3.O that had 2000 books and kept her awake nights reading these books. Later, she also started using JAWS.

‘Disturbing’ trend of touch phones

It was around 2013, when the rest of the world was planning which touch smartphone to buy, it was a disturbing trend with mobile phones at least when blind and low visually persons are concerned. “Keyboards were gone. We got touch phones and it was a nightmare. There was nothing to feel. I am not comfortable text messaging even today. There is a screen reader on Android called Talkback, which is very good, but it works above a certain version, and all devices above that are touch phones. Moreover, it isn’t quite enough when you are outdoors and the voice input just doesn’t work,” she said.

Blackberry had a QWERTY but screen reader was not that great and the iPhone wasn’t affordable, she adds. “Everyone was rushing to the market to buy second hand keyboard phones, but they didn’t support good reading technologies.

Affordable software for blind, and support from leading OS makers

Easy availability, price and customer support have been a hindrance when it comes to software to assist blind. And the next agenda for Nirmita is building just that.

In 2012, they got funding for a project to develop text to speech in Indian language and work at enhancing a screen reader dubbed non visual desktop access (NVDA). “It’s an open source project, a good solution that is scalable. People cannot afford JAWS and that will make it difficult for them to ever start using screen readers,” she added.

Moreover, support for languages is another problem. JAWS only supports English and Hindi, and is a closed system with lack of India support.

It was also a struggle earlier as the project is for a social cause and not a full-fledged company, and required special skill set as the open source works with Windows. “After a long time, we now have a team in IIT Delhi and there has been some work and improvement. Many of us have begun shifting to NVDA, and under hat project we have started undertaking training so that we can teach others. 10- 15 organisations run these training and we supports numerous regional languages including Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati and more. So, still need refinement, but at least there’s something, she adds.

“Now, we need to scale it, improve and train more people. The software can work on Android smartphones, irrespective of the display,” she said.

While there is an app for everything, and many standalone apps have been built for the visually impaired, Nirmita calls in for universal app design. A principle that every time a product is built, designed or developed, it can be done in a way considering the blind. Yes, why a separate app, when developers can add support for the blind. Nirmita talks about the hindrances when trying to book a taxi from Ola and the inability to place orders from BigBasket. A set of standard rules could help iron out the creases. In govt procurement bills, accessibility should be made mandatory.

Google and Apple OSes lead in the market, and if these OS makers add a mandate on how the same app should also assist the blind, a lot can change. “What is specially made is useful, but if what is made in an accessible manner then there won’t be two worlds,” she adds.

Copyright policy and other initiatives

The copyright policy may mean nothing to many of us, but for people with disability it was a big turning point. Some years ago the law said you cannot convert a book into any other format for people with disability, unless you get the permission of the publisher. So, if one lakh books were published in India, only minuscule 500-600 books were converted into braille or audio formats and these were usually text books.

“We started campaigning that we have a right to read. We should be able to pick and convert any book we want. Whatever people are reading and talking in news we should be able to access it and children should get access to all such books, “she said.

Nirmita explains how this isn’t a difficult task anymore, thanks to technology. It is simpler to convert and access these books. Yes, the problem of expensive technology still exists, but she along with a tech team has also begun working on that with new affordable software that could make it affordable for all. After struggling for almost 3-4 years, it was in 2012 that the new law was passed, allowing anyone with reading disabilities to convert any book into a format that helps them.

Meanwhile, she is also working on how all websites should be accessible by all including the blind. With the emergence of e-governance, it is important for everyone to follow a standard that will help this happen. Explaining further, she said that there are standards for digital accessibility called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and it came up with guidelines for Indian govt websites and a part of those dealt with accessibility. They have divided it into advisory and mandatory. And, accessibility comes under mandatory.

Another initiative involved was teaming up with Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) |”Whenever you pay a telephone bill, a part of it goes to USOF and they are supposed to use it for communities underserved and in rural areas. We teamed up to assist visually impaired, and a pilot scheme was launched, “she explained further. However, it was a chase for the project and the output wasn’t as they had expected.

Though copyright has solved the problem, we are still converting our own books, she added. There hasn’t been help. Opening an online digital library, wherein every time a publisher publishes a book, they can give a digital format that can help blind, which can then be shared with others.

People in villages still use Braille. There also need to be training to teach them. And, the primary way to reach in rural areas with resource centres associated with organisations. Technology has made many things simpler, and a few standards could definitely help bridge the gap.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/news/first-post-naina-khedekar-october-10-2016-tech-for-the-blind-how-app-developers-can-help-end-the-disturbing-touchscreen-trend

Tech Anthropology Today: Collaborate, Rather than Fetishize from Afar

Geert Lovink and Ramesh Srinivasan — 2017-05-16T14:51:09Z

"That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two." In this interview, Geert Lovink discusses with Ramesh Srinivasan: “how can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

Cross-posted from nettime.org.

“How can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

In Whose Global Village? (NYUPress, 2017) UCLA scholar Ramesh Srinivasan travels the globe in order to find out much techno-autonomy there’s still left. Now that more than half of the world has moved to urban centres, the rural population is literary a minority and is kindly asked to adjust accordingly. This makes Srinivasan’s work even more urgent when he asks “what the internet, mobile phone or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspectives of diverse cultures.”

The communities Ramesh Srinivasan visits are on the defensive, in a process of fragmentation. “There is a disconnection not just from one another,” he writes, “but also from the common threads of their history and culture. The tribes and villages experience “placelessness, fragmentation of identity, and dissolution of social bonds.” Throughout the study, which took place between 2004-2013, Srinivasan reports from the rising gap between the proposed technologies (such as videos, websites, databases) and the ‘techno-solutionism’ (as described by Morozov) that he wants to prevent. Ramesh is so honest to present this dilemma as an inner struggle of today’s anthropologist with a technology background. Computers and smart phones are an integral part of the everyday life—no matter where we go—and can no longer be presented as liberating tools. This put the ‘ICT for development’ researcher is an awkward position. Post-colonial theories have widely been read and their influence (from Fanon, Said to Spivak) is having an inevitable impact. This in turn leads to a new attitude that I would describe as ‘radical modesty’ (if not ‘vital pessimism’).

While studying the impact of the Tribal Peace system that he and others installed to connect the different Navajo tribes in San Diego County, Srinivasan realises that he has to work with rather than ignore the networks that exist. “It was neither the technology nor institutions that connected the people I had met. Instead, the very few threads of kinship I noted were related to revered individuals, regarded by most with collective respect and as a source of inspiration.” It is with and through the elders that he starts to draw up information architectures (or ‘ontologies’), listing topics, themes, and values across the native reservations. How can ‘lateral networks’ be supported in a a process of what James Carey calls ‘ritual communication’?

Needless to say this approach takes us light years away from Facebook and other social media. This is only in part a question of translating interfaces to local indigenous languages. The proposed systems require the design of its own visual metaphors, reminding us of 1990s multi-media navigation screens, meant to represent digital storytelling. This is dealt with in closed, or semi-open networks, paying respect to the different experiences of time and space. These ideas are put to the test in the last part of the book that describes the encounter with the Zuni tribe (Arizona/New Mexico), where Ramesh Srinivasan worked together with Robin Boast. It is amongst the Zuni peoples that the researchers encounter the distrust against anthropologists. “Our Zuni friends voiced feelings of misrepresentation and anger at their objectification. They explained that social scientists would visit their community, exoticize their traditions and customs, and extract what they could to benefit their own agendas rather than those of the community.”

The gained detachment aims to put the researcher “at the service of our friends and partners.” Important is no longer the one-way transfer of knowledge but the art of listening. Towards the end of his study Ramesh asks: “What would it mean to step away from top-down understandings of the internet and instead ‘splinter’ the way we think about technologies and the communities they may support?” As an activist in Egypt explained: “We do not need another NGO or a new dialogue.com to solve our problems—we just need you to listen, support our voices, an pay attention to what we we do.” Whose Global Village? adequately describes the moral and methodological crisis in the ‘ICT for Development’ field. The wide condemnation of Facebook’s neo-colonial internet.org balloon campaign to bring access (to Facebook) to hundreds of millions of rural poor in India clearly marks a paradigm shift. Access is no longer a benevolent project. It’s clear that ICT for Development as such does not contribute to a redistribution of wealth and makes global inequality only worse. So much for internet charity.

Ramesh admits: “Trained as a designer and engineer, I recognize my innate tendency to valorize my power to come up with a set of solutions for any challenge at hand. Yet every project I have described illustrates the valuable insights gained when I put aside my own agenda and bias as much as possible to open myself to experiences that could not have been predicted from afar.” This modesty sounds like a new starting point. But is it also resulting into new concepts and narratives? This might be too much to ask of a single publication (in fact, the first book publication of this author). The ‘tactical distance’, created out of respect for the communities-in-defence, results into rather sparse information about the places we visit. There are no interview fragments included in the book, and the few local leaders that we encounter do not speak to the reader in a direct manner. The chosen way to report creates a vague cloud of secrecy around the research itself. What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Were more detailed research results published elsewhere or only accessible for donors (a common practice in NGO land)? What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Is it too risky to give them a voice? Might their opinions and desires be too ordinary, too radical, or simply not what we want to hear? What if they do not fit our Western expectations? The Others are humans, after all, and, like us, tend not to live up to expectations. These, and more, are some of the questions we encounter once we give up on the development rhetoric.

Geert Lovink: You’ve been in a lucky, privileged position to travel so often and witness events and encounter communities in diverse places such as Cairo during the 2011 uprising, with the Zapatistas Chiapas, doing research in the land of your ancestors, South India and on reservations in the South-West of the United States. The offline encounter in-real-life seems to be constitutional for your theory. In the past scholars travelled through the library and many these days do not leave their screens while processing their ‘big data’. Digital ethnography, on the other hand, seems to require direct exchanges with the Other. This assumption pops in all chapters. Is travelling the new luxury? Or should we say that it is rather dedicated time? Once you arrive elsewhere there is suddenly another time regime.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Indeed, I think all of us as researchers and teachers are nothing if not 'lucky' or 'privileged'. And you're certainly on point to recognize that the root of my scholarship and activism locates technologies within an assemblage of other factors - peoples, places, infrastructures, and environments. Yet it is essential that I do not collaborate with (rather than ‘study of’) any community unless I am invited to do so and where our efforts are focused on initiatives that live and are owned by that group itself.

That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two. If we want to be of service and understand the complex relationships between technologies, politics, and cultures—as I attempt to do via the multiple case studies discussed in the book, we need to put our bodies and hearts in places rather than our distant gaze. It's critical for me to not step foot anywhere where I am not invited first, and to critically think about my role and power as I enter different environments. Indeed, the book is full of ethnographies of attempting to listen more than make, and how I eschew the 'study of' any community and instead write about what we create and work on together. My goal is to collaborate rather than study, rather than fetishize from afar.

GL: Whose Global Village? has an unusual time span of 10-14 years. First research goes back to 2003-2004. Some case study closed in 2005 while most literature dates from 2012-2013. In between, the 2008 global financial crisis occurred, the smart phone was launched and apps became mainstream. How did you deal with these constant changes? Are you proposing a ‘longue durée’ in media studies and internet criticism’? What are the benefits of this approach? How do you see ‘grassroots storytelling’ dealing with the relentless changes of platforms, interfaces and protocols? Do remote communities have a different approach to the latest fashion and the famous ‘fear of missing out’?

RS: There are some dynamics that don't change no matter what app, gadget or platform has captured the popular imagination. That is—the realities of power over how technologies are designed, owned, and politically or economically appropriated. The book starts with the simple but surprisingly ignored sociotechnical truism - People and societies shape and are shaped by technologies. Yet such a small percentage of Internet users have any power over the design process let alone any sovereignty over what occurs with their data and identities as they are refracted onto digital networks. Those issues are timeless and all the more urgent today. I focus on the political and cultural flashpoints where by users and communities can reign in their blind trust of new digital platforms and instead take power over these in relation to their local concerns and agendas.

GL: As a media activist you have a background in engineering. However, at UCLA you work inside library science (called ‘information studies’). However, you seem to relate most to the role of anthropologist, in that you deeply desire not make past mistakes in encounters with ‘the Other’. In this context you work with Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the contact zones and apply this to the design of ‘multiple ontologies’. I never hear IT engineers talking about contact zones. How do you want to carry your insights into the tech world? After all, you live in California. Who else is going to do this? What could be a good strategy? How do you look at the Bay Area and the global geek class they still dominate in terms of its global imaginary?

RS: I see myself as a scholar who can contribute to fields that tend to remain mostly distinct in the academy—design, engineering, cultural studies, media studies are but a few. If I was ever an IT ‘geek’ that was decades ago!

To engage in the charge of the book, of locating our understandings of digital networks and systems in relation to diverse cultures and users worldwide, all of these fields are useful to invoke and bring into dialogue with one another. I'm fortunate to be in a department that supports this interdisciplinarity and indeed as you stated, coming from California and trained in engineering here, I believe it is all the more important to question the black boxes not just of Silicon Valley hardware and software platform design but to push these incredibly powerful technologies to open up to an engaged, conversational social contract with diverse publics.

GL: Over the past 10-15 years we’ve seen the closing down of the possibility space of the Web and the rise of the ‘easy to use’ template culture of social media. The technologies that you’ve proposed and built seem to move away from the consumer culture. In South India you’re spread video cameras, elsewhere you’ve developed a dedicated Tribal Peace system interface (as part of a stand-alone website) while for the Zuni communities you’ve utilized the FileMaker Pro Advanced database software. Not Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube (and no wikis either). Can you elaborate on this?

RS: It's important to not assume that naively putting content online is somehow empowering. Indeed, that which we ‘share’ (eg; sharing economy) asymmetrically builds power and value for the platform holder and all those that can monetize it. As a result, we increasingly know that corporate proprietary platforms such as Facebook or Google are hardly designed to directly support a user's sovereignty or agency. The interest, across each of the book's chapters, is to instead think about how the communities with which I collaborate can have their interests served via technologies either that we design together or appropriate/subvert in various ways. Far too often we see examples where such 'participation' actually does little to shape any cultural or political cause from the grassroots. So we think agnostically and critically about the systems, networks and infrastructures we use in relation to our collaborations.

GL: Can you tell us what you’ve been doing over the past few years? Did you continue to work in the same direction? The book indicates that your collaboration with Robin Boast and the work with the Zuni Native American Reservation seems to continue.

RS: My interests lie in that important space between understanding how technologies may aid and support grassroots political movements and diverse user communities. The Zuni collaboration, described in chapter 4, is interested in that cause in relation to the political and cultural sovereignty of a tribe that was not just historically colonized but still faces the objectification and misrepresentation of new forms of coloniality online.

The cases in the book look at both political movements as well as diverse cultures and communities. Currently, I am collaborating with activists and indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec communities in the Oaxaca Mexico region, one of the most biodiverse and culturally/linguistically diverse parts of our world. In this work, I am writing about the Rhizomatica project (invoking Deleuze/Guarttari's rhizome) where these communities are designing their own collectively-owned cell phone networks in cloud forests all around the region. This has massive political and economic effects. What we see here is a rhizome in the making, a set of networks, systems, and infrastructures shaped and produced from the grassroots, by communities and for communities, and not for the major corporations of our world that tend to on the surface exploit and monitor the activities of these people. More on this amazing project, including some videos at www.rhizomatica.org . I believe that as we start to think about this new effort, that Lisa Parks and I describe as 'network sovereignty', we can start to embark on a path I describe in detail in chapter 5 of the book, of getting back the social contract and communitarian potential of technology to serve democratic agendas located in people's politics and cultures.

I am hopeful we can start that conversation now. I attempt to continue it via my soon to be released second book, After the Internet (with Adam Fish, Polity, end 2017) which looks at examples ranging from Iceland’s Pirate Party, hacktivism, the Silk Road, the Arab Spring, and other activist movements that re-imagine new technologies in relation to grassroots power and voice.

Reference

Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World, New York University Press, New York, 2017.

Profiles

Ramesh Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in Design|Media Arts. Srinivasan, who holds M.S and Doctoral degrees, from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard's Design School respectively, has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities. He is interested in how an information system can function as a cultural artifact, as a repository of knowledge that is commensurable with the ontologies of a community. As a complement, he is also interested in how an information system can engage and re-question the notion of diaspora and how ethnicity and culture function across distance. This research allows one to uncover mechanisms by which indigenously-articulated forms of development can begin to occur, as relating to his current work in pastoral and tribal communities in Southern India. His research therefore involves engaging communities to serve as the designers, authors, and librarians/archivists of their own information systems. His research has spanned such bounds as Native Americans, Somali refugees, Indian villages, Aboriginal Australia, and Maori New Zealand.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2013 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (new media), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar