Centre for Internet and Society

Removing Barriers to Connectivity: Connecting the Unconnected

praskrishna — 2013-11-09T03:14:43Z

The workshop was organised by Internet Society and ETNO on October 23, 2013. Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.

Click to read the details on IGF website here

In the spirit of Paragraph 50 of the Tunis Agenda, our panel aims to highlight best practices that will help in “turning the digital divide into digital opportunity”, and will look at what can be done to promote broadband penetration and access to infrastructure. By forging better Internet governance environments through dialogue and interaction, stakeholders can work together to build better local infrastructure and more efficient deployment of infrastructure. Internet technical community experts, policy-makers, and development experts know well the challenges that exist in promoting deployment of Internet infrastructure. From public-works challenges to human capacity development, each country may have their own unique challenges. Provisions and policies must be put in place to ensure that broadband connections are developed, maintained and improved to sustain the rise in Internet traffic and particularly to accommodate the fast growth of video traffic. Against this backdrop, this workshop proposes to assemble a group of experts and practitioners to discuss observations from the field (practical examples and information) about how to help encourage connectivity and to “lift” barriers to connectivity. We also will identify barriers for investment faced by the private sector and tries to define ways to improve the policy landscape and identify a sustainable economic model to foster private investment. We plan to do this by identifying connectivity challenges and by identifying best practices for working with all stakeholders to manage those challenges. The developing country perspective will be reflected, and the workshop will specifically address what is needed in practical terms to connect the unconnected – eg low-cost devices, open systems and public / private partnerships. Workshop participants will engage the audience to encourage a dialogue that seeks feed-back from participants. An output of the workshop would be a collaborative “living” list of best practices and observations identified during the workshop that can serve as a baseline to be added to given national and local dynamics.

Panelists

Raj Singh, Internet Society, Male, Technical Community, SINGAPORE, Asia-Pacific Group
Martin Levy, Hurricane Electric, Male, Private Sector, UNITED STATES, Western Europe and Others Group - WEOG
Christoph Steck, Telefonica, S.A., Male, Private Sector, SPAIN, Western Europe and Others Group - WEOG
Jennifer Haroon, Google, Female, Private Sector, UNITED STATES, Western Europe and Others Group - WEOG
Simon Milner, Facebook, Male, Private Sector, UNITED KINGDOM, Western Europe and Others Group - WEOG
Pranesh Prakash, Centre for Internet & Society India, Male, Civil Society, INDIA, Asia-Pacific Group

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/igf-2013-removing-barriers-to-connectivity

Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight

nishant — 2013-01-28T04:51:58Z

I encountered the Aaron Swartz memorial the other day that helps ‘liberate’ a randomly selected article from JSTOR, as an act of civil disobedience, to commemorate both the legacy that Swartz leaves behind, but also the high-profile witch-hunt case which was a crucial factor in him taking his own life.

Nishant Shah's blog post was published by DML Central on January 24, 2013.

Much has been said about Swartz and much more will have to be said about him, and about his work, to make sure that the good that men do does not get interred with their bones. And there are people more articulate, closer to him in personal and professional capacities who will do a better job at making sure we have an archive of memories to fill up the ‘Aaron sized-hole’ that his untimely death has introduced into our lives.

So instead of attempting to write a eulogy I am ill-equipped for, I want to mark the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz by talking about causes and everyday politics. And I might have to do it through a mode of collective self-flagellation because it is a point that needs to be driven home. I am sure that almost everybody would agree that the ideals that Swartz held were unimpeachable, even though they might not always agree with his tactics. There would be a general consensus that in our rapidly growing information societies free knowledge leads to better, stronger, and more equitable societies. In fact, there is a whole generation of younger users who are so used to having unlimited and unrestricted access to digital information that they often get frustrated and infuriated when they encounter media cartels and Intellectual Property Regimes that insist on locking up knowledge -- especially publicly funded academic resources -- behind paywalls.

We have all grumbled, at different points, about the essay we wanted to teach in class, the book we needed for a research paper, the movie we wanted to remix, or the song we wanted to sample, locked up behind (often) unaffordable access systems. We recognise that in the building of this gated knowledge landscape, we are creating uneven, corrupt and corrupting hierarchies of information control and access. And yet, when it comes to actually responding to these questions of closed intellectual property, restricted information access and media monopolies exerted by information cartels, we generally have a comfortable sense of distance. These are other peoples’ problems. These are battles somebody else will fight.

Even within academia, where we have been the most active in questioning and contesting the notions of power and knowledge, there is also the highest complicity in creating these monstrous behemoths that we feed regularly with research that is more often than not, publicly funded. In our quest for tenures, careers and popularity, we have voluntarily given up our rights to private and closed access journals that in return give us the symbolic capital to gain power in the system. In the 1980s, when the Subaltern school was writing against colonial legacies and cultural imperialism, Homi Bhabha had described this condition of granted agency and borrowed power as mimicry. In his own hyphenated way, he had suggested that the new subaltern, who is often seen as engaged in critically responding to the colonial masters and their legacies, only exists in a structure of mimicry -- where he emptily gestures towards the problems of colonial inheritance, without any power to actually overthrow or challenge it. Within South Asian feminisms, Kumkum Sangari has described this status of granted agency within patriarchy -- a condition that gives us a sense of power and a space of negotiation, as long as we uphold the very structure that oppresses us in the name of our empowerment.

It is time to realise that within academia, and the social sciences and arts based academia in particular, we have now perfected the art of mimicry. Where we pull our pens instead of our swords and talk (often indecipherably) about conditions of power and geographies of inequality and the need to do something about it. We attend conferences where proceedings go into closed access journals, and publish books with publishing houses that charge us and our students exorbitant sums of money to access the knowledge in those books. We publish not to be heard but to be cited, not to create open publics but closed communities of interlocked interests. And we feel smug about being politically committed, separating the conditions of our knowledge production from the content of our knowledge, as if the two have nothing to do with each other.

In other sectors that I dabble with but am not such a rank (and hence equally complicit) insider, I see similar distances. This alienation of our intellectual work from its political content is just one of the separations we make. The other separation is between our discursive communities and everyday practice. So embedded is our description, explanation and analysis of the world, in languages inaccessible to any but the privileged few who are trained to understand it. The advice we give our students -- follow the grandmother rule: write clearly so that your grandmother will be able to understand it -- is a standard we rarely practice in our academic writing.

These are symptoms I see in other sectors that are also committed to political questioning and change, working towards building better worlds and societies. Specialised lawyers fight their battles in closed court-rooms and write in obscure law journals which are not accessible or intelligible to the common public. Activists often get bogged down into appropriating the same language to be taken seriously. Advocates of causes fear over-simplification of the complex issues, keeping the everyday person outside of these battles around information and knowledge. We have built gated politics where the threshold of investment and engagement is so high, that the only response to that is detachment.

This brings me back to talking about Swartz and his dream of liberating information from the clutches of exploitative information houses. Swartz’s crime was not that he broke the law -- I wonder if the public prosecutor has never pirated material online; statistics would suggest otherwise -- but that he didn’t find allies in spaces which profess political commitment but then mimic it in their content rather than in practice. It is not surprising that even when JSTOR, the affected party, refused to push for criminal or civil charges, the University where the ‘crime’ occurred and the federal authorities decided to pursue him as a felon. Many people have wondered about why a well-loved and popular cult figure like Swartz would feel so lonely as to take this drastic step to end his life, and we now have to take responsibility that this separation of what he believed as the central tenet to life is something that his natural allies have separated out from their work.

Swartz is a folk-hero and he shall live as an icon for the groups working around internet freedom and information openness. But maybe it is time to stop waiting for another martyr to the cause. Maybe it is time to recognise that these battles around knowledge and information are not specialised fights to be played out in sombre tones by zealots on opposite sides. These are human wars, and they affect not only our everyday sense of who we are and the societies we live in, but also who we want to become and the worlds we want to create for future generations to inherit. Swartz embodies a whole generation of digital natives who fail to understand why the ethically wrong and morally reprehensible practice of protected intellectual property, that goes against the very grain of building information societies, continues to find silent supporters rather than vocal protestors. The grief and sense of loss we have with Swartz's passing is not easy to remedy. But Swartz will also be a moniker that every digital native will have to wear, as they traverse a treacherous terrain, persecuted by IP watchdogs and punished for what seems to be a natural order of things in their information worlds.

There is a lot of growing commentary with people expressing anger, shock, and sadness for the 26 year old man who died fighting a battle that we did not even become an audience to. And that commentary is necessary because we need to cope with the fact that we live in a world where somebody who believed in the most beautiful idea of a world that has free knowledge was persecuted to an early death. But at some point, we also need to stop talking and realise that we don’t have to come to arms for a moment only once-every-heroic-death. That the last disservice we will do to this everyday battle against intellectual property regime is to wait for the next icon to be trapped in this Greek tragedy structure of being punished for doing what he felt was right. It is time to start thinking of these questions of knowledge and information in our everyday life, negotiate with them beyond the narratives of convenience, and hope that there will be no more need to produce martyrs for a cause that is not just about books and music, but about being human.

Banner image credit: Maria Jesus V http://www.flickr.com/photos/favina/8377387022/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-jan-24-2013-nishant-shah-remembering-aaron-swartz-taking-up-the-fight

Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way

subodh — 2019-04-01T13:18:33Z

Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organisation working on rejuvenation of rivers in India, has began documentation of rivers on Wiki, especially to draw attention to and mitigate the crisis of toxic deposits facing more than 40 rivers in India. The work was started by Jal Biradari, TBS’s Maharashtra based group, in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team of CIS. Here is the report from the first pilot workshop conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, in Alwar, Rajasthan.

Events details on Wikimedia meta page

The Workshop

As per a Government of India report 42 rivers in India are polluted with toxic heavy metal deposits in them. To mitigate this crisis Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organization working on rejuvenation of rivers in India began documentation of rivers on Wiki. The work was started by TBS’s Maharashtra based group Jal Biradari in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge team of CIS (CIS-A2K).

Realizing the potential of the project TBS decided to integrate this as training module in their capacity building workshops conducted at Bhikampura in Rajasthan. The first pilot workshop was conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, Bhikampura, Alwar in Rajasthan for 34 participants from eight states of India. Dr. Rajendra Singh, Maulik Sisodiya and Subodh Kulkarni, CIS-A2K were the facilitators. The objectives behind organizing the workshop was to build an open knowledge resource on water related issues in all Indian languages, document the river basins of India, train volunteers working in the sector to work in Wikimedia projects, open street mapping exercises and photo walks along the river and post free content on Commons and Wikisource projects.

The documentation structure for river basin was decided through participatory process. The participants were divided into 6 groups for working on 6 river basins of Arvari district. The resource material available with TBS in the form of maps, reports, training booklets was used to prepare the schematic maps of each river basin. The water bodies such as ponds, manmade structures like dams were also listed.


Activists during the workshop conducted by TBS in Alwar, Rajasthan in December 2018

After this pre-work, the training on Wikipedia editing started. The participants worked in sandboxes first on their articles. The manual of style, giving offline and online references and categorisation were discussed and practiced on sandboxes. The Commons session started with elaborate discussion on copyrights, licenses and encyclopedic content. The images were uploaded on Commons and used in the articles. The articles in the sandboxes were presented by each working group. Taking into consideration various suggestions, appropriate modifications were done. The finished new articles and the additional content into existing articles were then moved in the main namespace of respective language Wikipedia. TBS has decided to re-license 30 books and training material on river in CC-BY-SA. Participants who attended the workshop have started contributing in various languages.

Participants' Feedback

“Rivers are essential for existence of life in land. Keeping its sanctity and health is very important. The Wikimedia workshop gave an insight on river pollution issues and the importance of reviving them. As Wikipedia is an open platform it can create a larger impact by reaching out to the society.” - Mrityunjay1010

“The wiki-workshop on "Rivers on Wiki" has been my maiden experience in the context of generalizing the knowledge for common good. The workshop gave me a lens to see the usage of Wikipedia in regional languages as a medium for environmental consciousness building as well as conservation. Wikipedia as a means for social audit was also another enriching experience in that workshop.” - Simantabharati

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-rejuvenating-indias-rivers-the-wiki-way

Regulatory Perspectives on Net Neutrality

pranesh — 2015-07-18T02:46:30Z

In this paper Pranesh Prakash gives an overview on why India needs to put in place net neutrality regulations, and the form that those regulations must take to avoid being over-regulation.

With assistance by Vidushi Marda (Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society) and Tarun Krishnakumar (Research Volunteer, Centre for Internet and Society). I would like to specially thank Vishal Misra, Steve Song, Rudolf van der Berg, Helani Galpaya, A.B. Beliappa, Amba Kak, and Sunil Abraham for extended discussions, helpful suggestions and criticisms. However, this paper is not representative of their views, which are varied.

Today, we no longer live in a world of "roti, kapda, makaan", but in the world of "roti, kapda, makaan aur broadband". ^{^[1]} This is recognized by the National Telecom Policy IV.1.2, which states the need to "recognise telecom, including broadband connectivity as a basic necessity like education and health and work towards 'Right to Broadband'."^{^[2]} According to the IAMAI, as of October 2014, India had 278 million internet users. ^{^[3]} Of these, the majority access Internet through their mobile phones, and the WEF estimates only 3 in 100 have broadband on their mobiles.^{^[4]} Thus, the bulk of our population is without broadband. Telecom regulation and net neutrality has a very important role in enabling this vision of Internet as a basic human need that we should aim to fulfil.

1. Why should we regulate the telecom sector?

All ICT regulation should be aimed at achieving five goals: achieving universal, affordable access; ^{^[5]} ensuring and sustaining effective competition in an efficient market and avoiding market failures; protecting against consumer harms; ensuring maximum utility of the network by ensuring interconnection; and addressing state needs (taxation, security, etc.). Generally, all these goals go hand in hand, however some tensions may arise. For instance, universal access may not be provided by the market because the costs of doing so in certain rural or remote areas may outweigh the immediate monetary benefits private corporations could receive in terms of profits from those customers. In such cases, to further the goal of universal access, schemes such as universal service obligation funds are put in place, while ensuring that such schemes either do not impact competition or very minimally impact it.

It is clear that to maximise societal benefit, effective regulation of the ICT sector is a requirement, which otherwise, due to the ability of dominant players to abuse network effect to their advantage, is inherently prone towards monopolies. For instance, in the absence of regulation, a dominant player would charge far less for intra-network calls than inter-network calls, making customers shift to the dominant network. This kind of harm to competition should be regulated by the ICT regulator. However, it is equally true that over-regulation is as undesirable as under-regulation, since over-regulation harms innovation - whether in the form of innovative technologies or innovative business models. The huge spurt of growth globally of the telecom sector since the 1980s has resulted not merely from advancements in technology, but in large part from the de-monopolisation and deregulation of the telecom sector.^{^[6]} Similarly, the Internet has largely flourished under very limited technology-specific regulation. For instance, while interconnection between different telecom networks is heavily regulated in the domestic telecom sector, interconnection between the different autonomous systems (ASes) that make up the Internet is completely unregulated, thereby allowing for non-transparent pricing and opaque transactions. Given this context, we must ensure we do not over-regulate, lest we kill innovation.

2. Why should we regulate Net Neutrality? And whom should we regulate?

We wouldn't need to regulate Net Neutrality if ISPs were not "gatekeepers" for last-mile access. "Gatekeeping" occurs when a single company establishes itself as an exclusive route to reach a large number of people and businesses or, in network terms, nodes. It is not possible for Internet services to reach the customers of the telecom network without passing through the telecom network. The situation is very different in the middle-mile and for backhaul. Even though anti-competitive terms may exist in the middle-mile, especially given the opacity of terms in "transit agreements", a packet is usually able to travel through multiple routes if one route is too expensive (even if that is not the shortest network path, and is thus inefficient in a way). However, this multiplicity of routes is not possible in the last mile.

This leaves last mile telecom operators (ISPs) in a position to unfairly discriminate between different Internet services or destinations or applications, while harming consumer choice. This is why we believe that promoting the five goals mentioned above would require regulation of last-mile telecom operators to prevent unjust discrimination against end-users and content providers.

Thus, net neutrality is the principle that we should regulate gatekeepers to ensure they do not use their power to unjustly discriminate between similarly situated persons, content or traffic.

3. How should we regulate Net Neutrality?

3.1. What concerns does Net Neutrality raise? What harms does it entail?

Discriminatory practices at the level of access to the Internet raises the following set of concerns:

1. Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and privacy.

2. Harm to effective competition

a. This includes competition amongst ISPs as well as competition amongst content providers.

b. Under-regulation here may cause harm to innovation at the content provider level, including through erecting barriers to entry.

c. Over-regulation here may cause harm to innovation in terms of ISP business models.

3. Harm to consumers

a. Under-regulation here may harm consumer choice and the right to freedom of speech, expression, and communication.

b. Over-regulation on this ground may cause harm to innovation at the level of networking technologies and be detrimental to consumers in the long run.

4. Harm to "openness" and interconnectedness of the Internet, including diversity (of access, of content, etc.)

a. Exceptions for specialized services should be limited to preserve the open and interconnectedness of the Internet and of the World Wide Web.

It might help to think about Net Neutrality as primarily being about two overlapping sets of regulatory issues: preferential treatment of particular Internet-based services (in essence: content- or source-/destination-based discrimination, i.e., discrimination on basis of 'whose traffic it is'), or discriminatory treatment of applications or protocols (which would include examples like throttling of BitTorrent traffic, high overage fees upon breaching Internet data caps on mobile phones, etc., i.e., discrimination on the basis of 'what kind of traffic it is').

Situations where the negative or positive discrimination happens on the basis of particular content or address should be regulated through the use of competition principles, while negative or positive discrimination at the level of specific class of content, protocols, associated ports, and other such sender-/receiver-agnostic features, should be regulated through regulation of network management techniques . The former deals with instances where the question of "in whose favour is there discrimination" may be asked, while the latter deals with the question "in favour of what is there discrimination".

In order to do this, a regulator like TRAI can use both hard regulation - price ceilings, data cap floors, transparency mandates, preventing specific anti-competitive practices, etc. - as well as soft regulation - incentives and disincentives.

3.1.1 Net Neutrality and human rights

Any discussion on the need for net neutrality impugns the human rights of a number of different stakeholders. Users, subscribers, telecom operators and ISPs all possess distinct and overlapping rights that are to be weighed against each other before the scope, nature and form of regulatory intervention are finalised. The freedom of speech, right to privacy and right to carry on trade raise some of the most pertinent questions in this regard.

For example, to properly consider issues surrounding the practice of paid content-specific zero-rating from a human rights point of view, one must seek to balance the rights of content providers to widely disseminate their 'speech' to the largest audiences against the rights of consumers to have access to a diverse variety of different, conflicting and contrasting ideas.

This commitment to a veritable marketplace or free-market of ideas has formed the touchstone of freedom of speech law in jurisdictions across the world as well as finding mention in pronouncements of the Indian Supreme Court. Particular reference is to be made to the dissent of Mathew, J. inBennett Coleman v. Union of India^{^[7]} and of the majority Sakal Papers v. Union of India^{^[8]} which rejected the approach.

Further, the practice of deep-packet inspection, which is sometimes used in the process of network management, raises privacy concerns as it seeks to go beyond what is "public" information in the header of an IP packet, necessary for routing, to analysing non-public information. ^{^[9]}

3.2 What conditions and factors may change these concerns and the regulatory model we should adopt?

While the principles relating to Net Neutrality remain the same in all countries (i.e., trying to prevent gatekeepers from unjustly exploiting their position), the severity of the problem varies depending on competition in the market, on the technologies, and on many other factors. One way to measure fair or stable allocation of the surplus created by a network - or a network-of-networks like the Internet - is by treating it as a convex cooperation game and thereupon calculating that game's Shapley value:^{^[10]} in the case of the Internet, this would be a game involving content ISPs, transit ISPs, and eyeball (i.e., last-mile) ISPs. The Shapley value changes depending on the number of competitors there are in the market: thus, the fair/stable allocation when there's vibrant competition in the market is different from the fair/stable allocation in a market without such competition. That goes to show that a desirable approach when an ISP tries to unjustly enrich itself by charging other network-participants may well be to increase competition, rather than directly regulating the last-mile ISP. Further, it shows that in a market with vibrant last-mile competition, the capacity of the last-mile ISP to unjustly are far diminished.

In countries which are remote and have little international bandwidth, the need to conserve that bandwidth is high. ISPs can regulate that by either increasing prices of Internet connections for all, or by imposing usage restrictions (such as throttling) on either heavy users or bandwidth-hogging protocols. If the amount of international bandwidth is higher, the need and desire on part of ISPs to indulge in such usage restrictions decreases. Thus, the need to regulate is far higher in the latter case, than in the former case.

The above paragraphs show that both the need for regulation and also the form that the regulation should take depend on a variety of conditions that aren't immediately apparent.

Thus, the framework that the regulator sets out to tackle issues relating to Net Neutrality are most important, whereas the specific rules may need to change depending on changes in conditions. These conditions include:

● last-mile market

○ switching costs between equivalent service providers

○ availability of an open-access last-mile

○ availability of a "public option" neutral ISP

○ increase or decrease in the competition, both in wired and mobile ISPs.

● interconnection market

○ availability of well-functioning peering exchanges

○ availability of low-cost transit

● technology and available bandwidth

○ spectrum efficiency

○ total amount of international bandwidth and local network bandwidth

● conflicting interests of ISPs

○ do the ISPs have other business interests other than providing Internet connectivity? (telephony, entertainment, etc.)

3.3 How should we deal with anti-competitive practices?

Anti-competitive practices in the telecom sector can take many forms: Abuse of dominance, exclusion of access to specific services, customer lock-in, predatory pricing, tying of services, cross-subsidization, etc., are a few of them. In some cases the anti-competitive practice targets other telecom providers, while in others it targets content providers. In the both cases, it is important to ensure that ensure that telecom subscribers have a competitive choice between effectively substitutable telecom providers and an ability to seamlessly switch between providers.

3.3.1 Lowering Switching Costs

TRAI has tackled many of these issues head on, especially in the mobile telephony space, while competitive market pressures have helped too:

● Contractual or transactional lock-in. The easiest way to prevent shifting from one network to another is by contractually mandating a lock-in period, or by requiring special equipment (interoperability) to connect to one's network. In India, this is not practised in the telecom sector, with the exception of competing technologies like CDMA and GSM. Non-contractual lock-ins, for instance by offering discounts for purchasing longer-term packages, are not inherently anti-competitive unless that results in predatory pricing or constitutes an abuse of market dominance. In India, switching from one mobile provider to another, though initiated 15 years into the telecom revolution, is in most cases now almost as easy as buying a new SIM card.^{^[11]} TRAI may consider proactive regulation against contractual lock-in.

● Number of competitors. Even if switching from one network to another is easy, it is not useful unless there are other equivalent options to switch to. In the telecom market, coverage is a very important factor in judging equivalence. Given that last mile connectivity is extremely expensive to provide, the coverage of different networks are very different, and this is even more true when one considers wired connectivity, which is difficult to lay in densely-populated urban and semi-urban areas and unprofitable in sparsely-populated areas. The best way to increase the number of competitors is to make it easier for competitors to exist. Some ways of doing this would be through enabling spectrum-sharing, lowering right-of-way rents, allowing post-auction spectrum trading, and promoting open-access last-mile fibre carriers and to thereby encourage competition on the basis of price and service and not exclusive access to infrastructure.

● Interconnection and mandatory carriage. The biggest advantage a dominant telecom player has is exclusive access to its customer base. Since in the telecom market, no telco wants to not connect to customers of another telco, they do not outright ban other networks. However, dominant players can charge high prices from other networks, thereby discriminating against smaller networks. In the early 2000s, Airtel-to-Airtel calls were much cheaper than Airtel-to-Spice calls. However, things have significantly changed since then. TRAI has, since the 2000s, heavily regulated interconnection and imposed price controls on interconnection ("termination") charges.^{^[12]} Thus, now, generally, inter-network calls are priced similarly to intra-network calls. And if you want cheaper Airtel-to-Airtel calls, you can buy a special (unbundled) pack that enables an Airtel customer to take advantage of the fact that her friends are also on the same network, and benefits Airtel since they do not in such cases have to pay termination charges. Recently, TRAI has even made the interconnection rates zero in three cases: landline-to-landline, landline-to-cellular, and cellular-to-landline, in a bid to decrease landline call rates, and incentivise them, allowing a very low per call interconnection charges of 14 paise for cellular-to-cellular connections. ^{^[13]}

○ With regard to Net Neutrality, we must have a rule that no termination charges or carriage charges may be levied by any ISP upon any Internet service. No Internet service may be discriminated against with regard to carriage conditions or speeds or any other quality of service metric. In essence all negative discrimination should be prohibited. This means that Airtel cannot forcibly charge WhatsApp or any other OTT (which essentially form a different "layer") money for the "privilege" of being able to reach Airtel customers, nor may Airtel slow down WhatsApp traffic and thus try to force WhatsApp to pay. There is a duty on telecom providers to carry any legitimate traffic ("common carriage"), not a privilege. It is important to note that consumer-facing TSPs get paid by other interconnecting Internet networks in the form of transit charges (or the TSP's costs are defrayed through peering). There shouldn't be any separate charge on the basis of content (different layer from the carriage) rather than network (same layer as the carriage). This principle is especially important for startups, and which are often at the receiving end of such discriminatory practices.

● Number Portability. One other factor that prevents users from shifting between one network and another is the fact that they have to change an important aspect of their identity: their phone number (this doesn't apply to Internet over DSL, cable, etc.). At least in the mobile space, TRAI has for several years tried to mandate seamless mobile number portability. The same is being tried by the European Commission in the EU. ^{^[14]} While intra-circle mobile number portability exists in India - and TRAI is pushing for inter-circle mobile number portability as well^{^[15]} - this is nowhere as seamless as it should be.

● Multi-SIM phones. The Indian market is filled with phones that can accommodate multiple SIM cards, enabling customers to shift seamlessly between multiple networks. This is true not just in India, but most developing countries with extremely price-sensitive customers. Theoretically, switching costs would approach zero if in a market with full coverage by n telecom players every subscriber had a phone with n SIM slots with low-cost SIM cards being available.

The situation in the telecom sector with respect to the above provides a stark contrast to the situation in the USA, and to the situation in the DTH market. In the USA, phones get sold at discounts with multi-month or multi-year contracts, and contractual lock-ins are a large problem. Keeping each of the above factors in mind, the Indian mobile telecom space is far more competitive than the US mobile telecom space.

Further, in the Indian DTH market, given that there is transactional lock-in (set-top boxes aren't interoperable in practice, though are mandated to be so by law^{^[16]}), there are fewer choices in the market; further, the equivalent of multi-SIM phones don't exist with respect to set-top boxes. Further, while there are must-carry rules with respect to carriage, they can be of three types: 1) must mandatorily provide access to particular channels^{^[17]} (positive obligation, usually for government channels); 2) prevented from not providing particular channels (negative obligation, to prevent anti-competitive behaviour and political censorship); and 3) must mandatorily offer access to at least a set number of channels (positive obligation for ensuring market diversity). ^{^[18]} Currently, only (1) is in force, since despite attempts by TRAI to ensure (3) as well.^{^[19]}

If the shifting costs are low and transparency in terms of network practice is reported in a standard manner and well-publicised, then that significantly weakens the "gatekeeper effect", which as we saw earlier, is the reason why we wish to introduce Net Neutrality regulation. This consequently means, as explained above in section 3.2, that despite the same Net Neutrality principles applying in all markets and countries, the precise form that the Net Neutrality regulations take in a telecom market with low switching costs would be different from the form that such regulations would take in a market with high switching costs.

3.3.2 Anti-competitive Practices

Some potential anti-competitive practices, which are closely linked, are cross-subsidization, tying (anti-competitive bundling) of multiple services, and vertical price squeeze. All three of these are especial concerns now, with the increased diversification of traditional telecom companies, and with the entry into telecom (like with DTH) of companies that create content. Hence, if Airtel cross-subsidizes the Hike chat application that it recently acquired, ^{^[20]} or if Reliance Infocomm requires customers to buy a subscription to an offering from Reliance Big Entertainment, or if Reliance Infocomm meters traffic from another Reliance Big Entertainment differently from that from Saavn, all those would be violative of the principle of non-discrimination by gatekeepers. This same analysis can be applied to all unpaid deals and non-commercial deals, including schemes such as Internet.org and Wikipedia Zero, which will be covered later in the section on zero-rating.

While we have general rules such as sections 3 and 4 of the Competition Act, we do not currently have specific rules prohibiting these or other anti-competitive practices, and we need Net Neutrality regulation that clearly prohibit such anti-competitive practices so that the telecom regulator can take action for non-compliance . We cannot leave these specific policy prescriptions unstated, even if they are provided for in section 3 of the Competition Act. These concerns are especial concerns in the telecom sector, and the telecom regulator or arbitrator should have the power to directly deal with these, instead of each case going to the Competition Commission of India. This should not affect the jurisdiction of the CCI to investigate and adjudicate such matters, but should ensure that TRAI both has suo motu powers, and that the mechanism to complain is made simple (unlike the current scenario, where some individual complainants may fall in the cracks between TRAI and TDSAT).

3.3.3 Zero-rating

Since a large part of the net neutrality debate in India involves zero-rating practices, we deal with that in some length. Zero-rating is the practice of not counting (aka "zero-rating") certain traffic towards a subscriber's regular Internet usage. The zero-rated traffic could be zero-priced or fixed-price; capped or uncapped; subscriber-paid, Internet service-paid, paid for by both, or unpaid; content- or source/destination-based, or agnostic to content or source/destination; automatically provided by the ISP or chosen by the customer . The motivations for zero-rating may also be varied, as we shall see below. Further, depending on the circumstances, zero-rating could be competitive or anti-competitive. All forms of zero-rating result in some form of discrimination, but not all zero-rating is harmful, nor does all zero-rating need to be prohibited.

While, as explained in the section on interconnection and carriage above, negative discrimination at the network level should be prohibited, that leaves open the question of positive discrimination. It follows from section 3.1 that the right frame of analysis of this question is harm to competition, since the main harm zero-rating is, as we shall see below, about discriminating between different content providers, and not discrimination at the level of protocols, etc.

Whether one should allow for any form of positive discrimination at the network level or not depends on whether positive discrimination of (X) has an automatic and unfair negative impact on all (~X). That, in turn, depends on whether (~X) is being subject to unfair competition. As Wikipedia notes, "unfair competition means that the gains of some participants are conditional on the losses of others, when the gains are made in ways which are illegitimate or unjust." Thus, positive discrimination that has a negative impact on effective competition shall not be permitted, since in such cases it is equivalent to negative discrimination ("zero-sum game") . Positive discrimination that does not have a negative impact on effective competition may be permitted, especially since it results in increased access and increases consumer benefit, as long as the harm to openness and diversity is minimized .

While considering this, one should keep in mind the fact that startups were, 10-15 years ago, at a huge disadvantage with regard to wholesale data purchase. The marketplaces for data centres and for content delivery networks (which speed up delivery of content by being located closer, in network terms, to multiple last-mile ISPs) were nowhere near as mature as they are today, and the prices were high. There was a much higher barrier to startup entry than there is today, due to the prices and due to larger companies being able to rely on economies of scale to get cheaper rates. Was that unfair? No. There is no evidence of anti-competitive practices, nor of startups complaining about such practices. Therefore, that was fair competition, despite specific input costs that were arguably needed (though not essential) for startups to compete being priced far beyond their capacity to pay.

Today the marketplace is very different, with a variety of offerings. CDNs such as Cloudflare, which were once the preserve of rich companies, even have free offerings, thus substantially lowering barriers for startups that want faster access to customers across the globe.

Is a CDN an essential cost for a startup? No. But in an environment where speed matters and customers use or don't use a service depending on speed; and where the startup's larger competitors are all using CDNs, a startup more or less has to. Thankfully, given the cheap access to CDNs these days, that cost is not too high for a startup to bear. If the CDN market was not competitive enough, would a hypothetical global regulator have been justified in outright banning the use of CDNs to 'level' the playing field? No, because the hypothetical global regulator instead had the option to (and would have been justified in) regulating the market to ensure greater competition.

A regulator should not prohibit an act that does not negatively impact access, competition, consumer benefit, nor openness (including diversity), since that would be over-regulation and would harm innovation.

3.3.3.1 Motivations for Zero-Rating

3.3.3.1.1 Corporate Social Responsibility / Incentivizing Customers to Move Up Value Chain

There exist multiple instances where there is no commercial transaction between the OTT involved and the telecom carrier, in which zero-priced zero-rating of specific Internet content happens. We know that there is no commercial transaction either through written policy (Wikipedia Zero) or through public statements (Internet.org, a bouquet of sites). In such cases, the telecom provider would either be providing such services out of a sense of public interest, given the social value of those services, or would be providing such services out of self-interest, to showcase the value of particular Internet set the same time.

The apprehended risk is that of such a scheme creating a "walled garden", where users would be exposed only to those services which are free since the search and discovery costs of non-free Internet (i.e., any site outside the "walled garden") would be rather high. This risk, while real, is rather slim given the fact that the economic incentives for those customers who have the ability to pay for "Internet packs" but currently do not find a compelling reason to do so, or out of both a sense of public interest and self-interest of the telecom providers works against this.

In such non-commercial zero-priced zero-rating, a telecom provider would only make money if and only if subscribers start paying for sites outside of the walled garden. If subscribers are happy in the walled garden, the telecom provider starts losing money, and hence has a strong motivation to stop that scheme. If on the other hand, enough subscribers start becoming paying customers to offset the cost of providing the zero-priced zero-rated service(s) and make it profitable, that shows that despite the availability of zero-priced options a number of customers will opt for paid access to the open Internet and the open Web, and the overall harms of such zero-priced zero-rating would be minimal. Hence, the telecom providers have an incentive to keep the costs of Internet data packs low, thus encouraging customers who otherwise wouldn't pay for the Internet to become paying customers.

There is the potential of consumer harm when users seek to access a site outside of the walled garden, and find to their dismay that they have been charged for the Internet at a hefty rate, and their prepaid balance has greatly decreased. This is an issue that TRAI is currently appraised of, and a suitable solution would need to be found to protect consumers against such harm.

All in all, given that the commercial interests of the telecom providers align with the healthy practice of non-discrimination, this form of limited positive discrimination is not harmful in the long run, particularly because it is not indefinitely sustainable for a large number of sites. Hence, it may not be useful to ban this form of zero-priced zero-rating of services as long as they aren't exclusive, or otherwise anti-competitive (a vertical price-squeeze, for instance), and the harm to consumers is prohibited and the harm to openness/diversity is minimized.

3.3.3.1.2 Passing on ISP Savings / Incentivizing Customers to Lower ISP's Cost

Suppose, for instance, an OTT uses a CDN located, in network distance terms, near an eyeball ISP. In this case, the ISP has to probably pay less than it would have to had the same data been located in a data centre located further away, given that it would have fewer interconnection-related charges.

Hence the monetary costs of providing access to different Web destinations are not equal for the ISP. This cost can be varied either by the OTT (by it locating the data closer to the ISP - through a CDN, by co-locating where the ISP is also present, or by connecting to an Internet Exchange Point which the ISP is also connected to - or by it directly "peering" with the ISP) or by the ISP (by engaging in "transparent proxying" in which case the ISP creates caches at the ISP level of specific content (usually by caching non-encrypted data the ISP's customers request) and serves the cached content when a user requests a site, rather than serving the actual site). None of the practices so far mentioned are discriminatory from the customer's perspective with regard either to price or to prioritization, though all of them enable faster speeds to specific content. Hence none of the above-mentioned practices are considered even by the most ardent Net Neutrality advocates to be violations of that principle. ^{^[21]} However, if an ISP zero-rates the content to either pass on its savings to the customer^{^[22]} or to incentivize the customer to access services that cost the ISP less in terms of interconnection costs, that creates a form of price discrimination for the customer, despite it benefiting the consumer.

The essential economic problem is that the cost to the ISP is variable, but the cost to the customer is fixed. Importantly, this problem is exacerbated in India where web hosting prices are high, transit prices are high, peering levels are low, and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are not functioning well. ^{^[23]} These conditions create network inefficiencies in terms of hosting of content further away from Indian networks in terms of network distance, and thus harms consumers as well as local ISPs. In order to set this right, zero-rating of this sort may be permitted as it acts as an incentive towards fixing the market fundamentals. However, once the market fundamentals are fixed, such zero-rating may be prohibited.

This example shows that the desirability or otherwise of discriminatory practices depends fully on the conditions present in the market, including in terms of interconnection costs.

3.3.3.1.3 Unbundling Internet into Services ("Special Packs")

Since at least early 2014, mobile operators have been marketing special zero-rating "packs". These packs, if purchased by the customer, allow capped or in some instances uncapped, zero-rating of a service such as WhatsApp or Facebook, meaning traffic to/from that service will not be counted against their regular Internet usage.

For a rational customer, purchasing such a pack only makes sense in one of two circumstances:

● The person has Internet connectivity on her Internet-capable phone, but has not purchased an "Internet data pack" since she doesn't find the Internet valuable. Instead, she has heard about "WhatsApp", has friends who are on it, and wishes to use that to reduce her SMS costs (and thereby eat into the carriage provider's ability to charge separately for SMSes). She chooses to buy a WhatsApp pack for around ₹25 a month instead of paying ₹95 for an all-inclusive Internet data pack.

● The person has Internet connectivity on her Internet-capable phone, and has purchased an "Internet data pack". However, that data pack is capped and she has to decide between using WhatsApp and surfing web sites. She is on multiple WhatsApp groups and her WhatsApp traffic eats up 65% of her data cap. She thus has to choose between the two, since she doesn't want to buy two Internet data packs (each costing around ₹95 for a month). She chooses to buy a WhatsApp pack for ₹25 a month, paying a cumulative total of ₹120 instead of ₹190 which she would have had to had she bought two Internet data packs. In this situation, "unbundling" is happening, and this benefits the consumer. Such unbundling harms the openness and integrity of the Internet.

If users did not find value in the "special" data packs, and there is no market demand for such products, they will cease to be offered. Thus, assuming a telco's decision to offer such packs is purely customer-demand driven - and not due to deals it has struck with service providers - if Orkut is popular, telcos would be interested in offering Orkut packs and if Facebook is popular, they would be interested in offering a Facebook pack. Thus, clearly, there is nothing anti-competitive about such customer-paid zero-rating packs, whereas they clearly enhance consumer benefit. Would this increase the popularity of Orkut or Facebook? Potentially yes. But to prohibit this would be like prohibiting a supermarket from selectively (and non-collusively) offering discounts on popular products. Would that make already popular products even more popular? Potentially, yes. But that would not be seen as a harm to competition but would be seen as fair competition. This contravenes the "openness" of the Internet (i.e., the integral interconnected diversity that an open network like the Internet embodies) as an independent regulatory goal. The Internet, being a single gateway to a mind-boggling variety of services, allows for a diverse "long tail", which would lose out if the Internet was seen solely as a gateway to popular apps, sites, and content. However, given that this is a choice exercised freely by the consumer, such packs should not be prohibited, as that would be a case of over-regulation.

The one exception to the above analysis of competition, needless to say, is if that these special packs aren't purely customer-demand driven and are the product of special deals between an OTT and the telco. In that case, we need to ensure it isn't anti-competitive by following the prescriptions of the next section.

3.3.3.1.4 Earning Additional Revenues from Content Providers

With offerings like Airtel Zero, we have a situation where OTT companies are offering to pay for wholesale data access used by their customers, and make accessing their specific site or app free for the customer. From the customer's perspective, this is similar to a toll-free number or a pre-paid envelope or free-to-air TV channel being offered on a particular network.

However, from the network perspective, these are very different. Even if a customer-company pays Airtel for the toll-free number, that number is accessible and toll-free across all networks since the call terminates on Airtel networks and Airtel pays the connecting network back the termination charge from the fee they are paid by the customer-company. This cannot happen in case of the Internet, since the "call" terminates outside of the reach of the ISP being paid for zero-rating by the OTT company; hence unless specific measures are taken, zero-rating has to be network-specific.

The comparison to free-to-air channels is also instructive, since in 2010 TRAI made recommendations that consumers should have the choice of accessing free-to-air channels à-la-carte, without being tied up to a bouquet.^{^[24]} This would, in essence, allow a subscriber to purchase a set-top box, and without paying a regular subscription fee watch free-to-air channels. ^{^[25]} However, similar to toll-free numbers, these free-to-air channels are free-to-air on all MSO's set-top boxes, unlike the proposed Airtel Zero scheme under which access to a site like Flipkart would be free for customers on Airtel's network alone.

Hence, these comparisons, while useful in helping think through the regulatory and competition issues, should not be used as instructive exact analogies, since they aren't fully comparable situations.

3.3.3.1.5 Market Options for OTT-Paid Zero-Rating

As noted above, a competitive marketplace already exists for wholesale data purchase at the level of "content ISPs" (including CDNs), which sell wholesale data to content providers (OTTs). This market is at present completely unregulated. The deals that exist are treated as commercial secrets. It is almost certain that large OTTs get better rates than small startups due to economies of scale.

However, at the eyeball ISP level, it is a single-sided market with ISPs competing to gain customers in the form of end-users. With a scheme like "Airtel Zero", this would get converted into a double-sided market, with a gatekeeper without whom neither side can reach the other being in the middle creating a two-sided toll. This situation is ripe for market abuse: this situation allows the gatekeeper to hinder access to those OTTs that don't pay the requisite toll or to provide preferential access to those who pay, apart from providing an ISP the opportunity to "double-dip".

One way to fix this is to prevent ISPs from establishing a double-sided market. The other way would be to create a highly-regulated market where the gatekeeping powers of the ISP are diminished, and the ISP's ability to leverage its exclusive access over its customers are curtailed. A comparison may be drawn here to the rules that are often set by standard-setting bodies where patents are involved: given that these patents are essential inputs, access to them must be allowed through fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licences. Access to the Internet and common carriers like telecom networks, being even more important (since alternatives exist to particular standards, but not to the Internet itself), must be placed at an even higher pedestal and thus even stricter regulation to ensure fair competition.

A marketplace of this sort would impose some regulatory burdens on TRAI and place burdens on innovations by the ISPs, but a regulated marketplace harms ISP innovation less than not allowing a market at all.

At a minimum, such a marketplace must ensure non-exclusivity, non-discrimination, and transparency. Thus, at a minimum, a telecom provider cannot discriminate between any OTTs who want similar access to zero-rating. Further, a telecom provider cannot prevent any OTT from zero-rating with any other telecom provider. To ensure that telecom providers are actually following this stipulation, transparency is needed, as a minimum.

Transparency can take one of two forms: transparency to the regulator alone and transparency to the public. Transparency to the regulator alone would enable OTTs and ISPs to keep the terms of their commercial transactions secret from their competitors, but enable the regulator, upon request, to ensure that this doesn't lead to anti-competitive practices. This model would increase the burden on the regulator, but would be more palatable to OTTs and ISPs, and more comparable to the wholesale data market where the terms of such agreements are strictly-guarded commercial secrets. On the other hand, requiring transparency to the public would reduce the burden on the regulator, despite coming at a cost of secrecy of commercial terms, and is far more preferable.

Beyond transparency, a regulation could take the form of insisting on standard rates and terms for all OTT players, with differential usage tiers if need be, to ensure that access is truly non-discriminatory. This is how the market is structured on the retail side.

Since there are transaction costs in individually approaching each telecom provider for such zero-rating, the market would greatly benefit from a single marketplace where OTTs can come and enter into agreements with multiple telecom providers.

Even in this model, telecom networks will be charging based not only on the fact of the number of customers they have, but on the basis of them having exclusive routing to those customers. Further, even under the standard-rates based single-market model, a particular zero-rated site may be accessible for free from one network, but not across all networks: unlike the situation with a toll-free number in which no such distinction exists.

To resolve this, the regulator may propose that if an OTT wishes to engage in paid zero-rating, it will need to do so across all networks, since if it doesn't there is risk of providing an unfair advantage to one network over another and increasing the gatekeeper effect rather than decreasing it.

However, all forms of competitive Internet service-paid zero-priced zero-rating, even when they don't harm competition, innovation amongst content providers, or consumers, will necessarily harm openness and diversity of the Internet. For instance, while richer companies with a strong presence in India may pay to zero-rate traffic for their Indian customers, decentralized technologies such as XMPP and WebRTC, having no central company behind them, would not, leading to customers preferring proprietary networks and solutions to such open technologies, which in turn, thanks to the network effect, leads to a vicious cycle. These harms to openness and diversity have to be weighed against the benefit in terms of increase in access when deciding whether to allow for competitive OTT-paid zero-priced zero-rating, as such competition doesn't exist in a truly level playing field . Further, it must be kept in mind that there are forms of zero-priced zero-rating that decrease the harm to openness / diversity, or completely remove that harm altogether: that there are other options available must be acknowledged by the regulator when considering the benefit to access from competitive OTT-paid zero-priced zero-rating.

3.3.3.1.6 Other options for zero-rating

There are other models of zero-priced zero-rating that either minimize the harm is that of ensuring free Internet access for every person. This can take the form of:^{^[26]}

● A mandatorily "leaky" 'walled garden':

○ The first-degree of all hyperlinks from the zero-rated OTT service are also free.

○ The zero-rated OTT service provider has to mandatorily provide free access to the whole of the World Wide Web to all its customers during specified hours.

○ The zero-rated OTT service provider has to mandatorily provide free access to the whole of the World Wide Web to all its customers based on amount on usage of the OTT service.^{^[27]}

● Zero-rating of all Web traffic

○ In exchange for viewing of advertisements

○ In exchange for using a particular Web browser

○ At low speeds on 3G, or on 2G.

3.3.3.2. What kinds of zero-rating are good

The majority of the forms of zero-rating covered in this section are content or source/destination-based zero-rating. Only some of the options covered in the "other options for zero-rating" section cover content-agnostic zero-rating models. Content-agnostic zero-rating models are not harmful, while content-based zero-rating models always harm, though to varying degrees, the openness of the Internet / diversity of OTTs, and to varying degrees increase access to Internet-based services. Accordingly, here is an hierarchy of desirability of zero-priced zero-rating, from most desirable to most harmful:

1. Content- & source/destination-agnostic zero-priced zero-rating.^{^[28]}

2. Content- & source/destination-based non-zero-priced zero-rating, without any commercial deals, chosen freely & paid for by users. ^{^[29]}

3. Content- & source/destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, without any commercial deals, with full transparency. ^{^[30]}

4. Content- & source/destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, on the basis of commercial deal with partial zero-priced access to all content, with non-discriminatory access to the same deal by all with full transparency.^{^[31]}

5. Content- & source/destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, on the basis of a non-commercial deal, without any benefits monetary or otherwise, flowing directly or indirectly from the provider of the zero-rated content to the ISP, with full transparency. ^{^[32]}

6. Content- & source-destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, across all telecom networks, with standard pricing, non-discriminatory access, and full transparency.

7. Content- & source-destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, with standard pricing, non-discriminatory access, and full transparency.

8. Content- & source-destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, with non-discriminatory access, and full transparency.

9. Content- & source-destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, with non-discriminatory access, and transparency to the regulator.

10. Content- & source-destination-based zero-priced zero-rating, without any regulatory framework in place.

3.3.4 Cartels and Oligopoly

While cartels and oligopolies may have an impact on Net Neutrality, they are not problems that any set of anti-discrimination rules imposed on gatekeepers can fix. Further, cartels and oligopolies don't directly enhance the ability of gatekeepers to unjustly discriminate if there are firm rules against negative discrimination and price ceilings and floors on data caps are present for data plans. Given this, TRAI should recommend that this issue be investigated and the Competition Commission of India should take this issue up.

3.4 Reasonable Network Management Principles

Reasonable network management has to be allowed to enable the ISPs to manage performance and costs on their network. However, ISPs may not indulge in acts that are harmful to consumers in the name of reasonable network management. Below are a set of guidelines for when discrimination against classes of traffic in the name of network management are justified.

● Discrimination between classes of traffic for the sake of network management should only be permissible if:

○ there is an intelligible differentia between the classes which are to be treated differently, and

○ there is a rational nexus between the differential treatment and the aim of such differentiation, and

○ the aim sought to be furthered is legitimate, and is related to the security, stability, or efficient functioning of the network, or is a technical limitation outside the control of the ISP^{^[33]}, and

○ the network management practice is the least harmful manner in which to achieve the aim.

● Provision of specialized services (i.e., "fast lanes") is permitted if and only if it is shown that

○ The service is available to the user only upon request, and not without their active choice, and

○ The service cannot be reasonably provided with "best efforts" delivery guarantee that is available over the Internet, and hence requires discriminatory treatment, or

○ The discriminatory treatment does not unduly harm the provision of the rest of the Internet to other customers.

These principles are only applicable at the level of ISPs, and not on access gateways for institutions that may in some cases be run by ISPs (such as a university network, free municipal WiFi, at a work place, etc.), which are not to be regulated as common carriers.

These principles may be applied on a case-by-case basis by a regulator, either suo motu or upon complaint by customers.

^{^[1]} Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, (19 May 2011), http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf.

^{^[2]} Available at http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/NTP%202012.pdf.

^{^[3]} IAMAI, India to Cross 300 million internet users by Dec 14, (19 November, 2014), http://www.iamai.in/PRelease_detail.aspx?nid=3498&NMonth=11&NYear=2014.

^{^[4]} World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2015, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_IT_Report_2015.pdf.

^{^[5]} http://www.ictregulationtoolkit.org/4.1#s4.1.1

^{^[6]} See R.U.S. Prasad, The Impact of Policy and Regulatory Decisions on Telecom Growth in India (July 2008), http://web.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi-bin/siepr/?q=system/files/shared/pubs/papers/pdf/SCID361.pdf.

^{^[7]} 1973 AIR 106

^{^[8]} 1962 AIR 305

^{^[9]} "When ISPs go beyond their traditional use of IP headers to route packets, privacy risks begin to emerge." Alissa Cooper, How deep must DPI be to incur privacy risk? http://www.alissacooper.com/2010/01/25/how-deep-must-dpi-be-to-incur-privacy-risk/

^{^[10]} Richard T.B. Ma & Vishal Misra, The Public Option: A Non-Regulatory Alternative to Network Neutrality, http://dna-pubs.cs.columbia.edu/citation/paperfile/200/netneutrality.pdf

^{^[11]} Mobile number portability was launched in India on January 20, 2011 in the Haryana circle. See http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/pm-launches-nationwide-mobile-number-portability/1/127176.html . Accessed on April 24, 2015.

^{^[12]} For a comprehensive list of all TRAI interconnection regulations & subsequent amendments, see http://www.trai.gov.in/Content/Regulation/0_1_REGULATIONS.aspx.

^{^[13]} See Telecommunication Interconnection Usage Charges (Eleventh Amendment) Regulations, 2015 (1 of 2015), available at http://www.trai.gov.in/Content/Regulation/0_1_REGULATIONS.aspx.

^{^[14]} Article 30 of the Universal Service Directive, Directive 2002/22/EC.

^{^[15]} See Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Sixth Amendment) Regulations, 2015 (3 of 2015), available at http://www.trai.gov.in/Content/Regulation/0_1_REGULATIONS.aspx.

^{^[16]} The Telecommunication (Broadcasting and Cable) Services (Seventh) (The Direct to Home Services) Tariff Order, 2015 (2 of 2015).

^{^[17]} Section 8, Cable Television Networks Act, 1995.

^{^[18]} TRAI writes new rules for Cable TV, Channels, Consumers, REAL TIME NEWS, (August 11, 2014), http://rtn.asia/rtn/233/1220_trai-writes-new-rules-cable-tv-channels-consumers.

^{^[19]} An initial requirement for all multi system operators to have a minimum capacity of 500 channels was revoked by the TDSAT in 2012. For more details, see http://www.televisionpost.com/cable/msos-not-required-to-have-500-channel-headends-tdsat/.

^{^[20]} Aparna Ghosh, Bharti SoftBank Invests $14 million in Hike, LIVE MINT, (April 2, 2014), http://www.livemint.com/Companies/nI38YwQL2eBgE6j93lRChM/Bharti-SoftBank-invests-14-million-in-mobile-messaging-app.html.

^{^[21]} Mike Masnick, Can We Kill This Ridiculous Shill-Spread Myth That CDNs Violate Net Neutrality? They Don't, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140812/04314528184/can-we-kill-this-ridiculous-shill-spread-myth-that-cdns-violate-net-neutrality-they-dont.shtml.

^{^[22]} Mathew Carley, What is Hayai's stance on "Net Neutrality"?, https://www.hayai.in/faq/hayais-stance-net-neutrality?c=mgc20150419

^{^[23]} Helani Galpaya & Shazna Zuhyle, South Asian Broadband Service Quality: Diagnosing the Bottlenecks, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1979928

^{^[24]} DTH players told to offer pay channels on la carte basis, HINDU BUSINESS LINE (July 22, 2010), http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/dth-players-told-to-offer-pay-channels-on-la-carte-basis/article999298.ece.

^{^[25]} The Telecommunication (Broadcasting and Cable) Services (Fourth) (Addressable Systems) Tariff Order, 2010.

^{^[26]} These suggestions were provided by Helani Galpaya and Sunil Abraham, based in some cases on existing practices.

^{^[27]} This is what is being followed by the Jana Loyalty Program: http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/05/06/with-a-new-loyalty-program-mobile-app-marketplace-jana-pushes-deeper-into-the-developing-world/

^{^[28]} Example: free Internet access at low speeds, with data caps.

^{^[29]} Example: special "packs" for specific services like WhatsApp.

^{^[30]} Example: zero-rating of all locally-peered settlement-free traffic.

^{^[31]} Example: "leaky" walled gardens, such as the Jana Loyalty Program that provide limited access to all of the Web alongside access to the zero-rated content.

^{^[32]} Example: Wikipedia Zero.

^{^[33]} A CGNAT would be an instance of such a technology that poses network limitations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/regulatory-perspectives-on-net-neutrality

Regulating the Internet

gurshabad — 2018-12-20T00:29:06Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/regulating-the-internet

Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India, say internet groups

Sai Sachin Ravikumar — 2019-04-15T10:32:54Z

Discussion board Reddit, messaging service Telegram and comedy site College Humor have been blocked for intermittent periods, say internet groups.

The article by Sai Sachin Ravikumar was published in Business Standard on April 3, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

Websites like Reddit and Telegram are being blocked in India by internet service providers, throwing into question the enforcement of net neutrality rules, advocacy groups said on Wednesday.

Restrictions on "torrent sites" that offer free movie and music downloads are routine in India to prevent copyright infringement. Pornography websites are also blocked by court orders seeking to protect children.

But in recent months, websites such as the discussion board Reddit, messaging service Telegram and comedy site College Humor have been blocked for intermittent periods, often for days and only in some regions, baffling internet users.

"It's not making any sense, what's happening," said Apar Gupta, executive director at the non-profit Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). "A lot of these blocks are also happening in such a way that no notices are displayed." Since January, there have been at least 250 reports of websites blocked on networks operated by Jio, a unit of Reliance Industries, Bharti Airtel and Hathway, the IFF said in a letter to the telecoms department.

Jio and Airtel are among India's top telecom providers.

Some internet users have posted on social media screenshots of pages displaying messages saying a website was blocked to comply with government orders.

When Reuters tried to access CollegeHumor.com on Wednesday a message read: "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India."

An official at the telecoms department, which last year approved rules on net neutrality--the concept that all websites and data on the Internet be treated equally--declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

Complaints by Indian internet users have covered "most forms of net neutrality violations," IFF's Gupta said.

Nearly 60 per cent of the user reports compiled by the foundation since January involved Jio networks, the IFF's data showed.

A Jio representative did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Hathway did not reply to phone and email requests for comment.

Bharti Airtel said in a statement it "supports an open internet" and does not block content unless directed by authorities. It did not say if it was currently blocking any websites.

Reddit did not respond to an emailed request for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

Telegram, which has been blocked previously in Russia and Iran, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.

If websites are blocked based on government or court orders, or internet firms have legal grounds to restrict web pages, they might not violate net neutrality rules, said Gurshabad Grover, a researcher at the non-profit Centre for Internet and Society.

"But in this case we're not entirely sure," he said.

Other sites blocked this year include tax portal Taxscan and legal database Indian Kanoon.

After complaints from Jio's internet users, Indian Kanoon founder Sushant Sharma said he had been told by Jio the portal was blocked for one day last week due to a government order.

"By evening, apparently, that order was taken back," said Sharma, whose website has some 150,000 daily visitors.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-sai-sachin-ravikumar-april-3-2019-reddit-telegram-among-websites-blocked-in-india

Reconceptualizing Privacy on Social Network(s) Sites

rebecca — 2011-08-18T05:07:09Z

While “privacy” on social network sites remains a highly ambiguous notion, much debate surrounding the issue to date has focused on privacy as the nonpublic-ness of personal information. However, as these social platforms become sites for diverse forms of “networking”, privacy must also be popularly conceptualized as control over personal data flows.

The perils of information exposure and the loss of privacy on social network sites (SNS) has become a talked about issue. Information once considered has private has in many instances become viewable by unintended audiences of parents, colleagues, college admission officers, employers, even the courts. The recent Facebook privacy scandal, which left sensitive personal information for millions of users open and searchable via Google, heightened privacy consciousness amongst users, public interest groups, and Facebook itself. As the free flowing nature of information on the internet has redefined practices surrounding the disclosure of information, new and multidimensional privacy challenges have arose as a result.

The much-celebrated ethos of “openness” continues to attract numerous and diverse users to SNS, and without a doubt, these platforms have enabled users to stay connected and share information with the people around them -- for better or worse. However, it is within this inherently open context that notions of privacy are continuously being challenged and redefined. While a particular user may prefer to keep certain information widely available to attract “potential friends” within a certain network or social circle, it may go without saying that the same user may not be comfortable with a family member viewing that same information, or having personal information open access to third parties. It is this iterative tension between “openness” and privacy which beckons the need to balance the openness of SNS with the privacy of its members.

Privacy as a Semi-Public Personal Space

Most commonly, privacy has been interpreted by users as a “lack of access”, or the degree to which they are able to protect their information from the public gaze. Various research examining the privacy (mal)practices of users have also, by in large, conceptualized privacy within this public/private binary. The most popular SNS today do allow users to careful define their privacy level. However, whether or not the information of a user remains open, restricted, or private will depend on the privacy preferences unique to the user, and to some degree, the architecture of a particular SNS. Inferring from privacy in practice, researchers have generally labeled users as privacy fundamentalists, pragmatics, or the marginally concerned . While making this distinction has been useful, is important to note that the diversity and complexity of relationships within a single networked space obscures the inherent simplicity of such typology. With many online social networks becoming representative of offline affiliation, the challenges inherent to maintaining a diverse number of social relations online may lead researchers to interpret uncertain privacy practices as paradoxical. Such a notion also calls into question the utility of categorizing users according to their privacy practices.

To illustrate such complexity, many users today are compelled to join sub-networks or groups within these sites, which then cluster users and relax the privacy settings between them. While a college student may wish to keep weekend outings hidden from the professors they have connected with, they may also be tempted to reveal such information with his network of peers-- to which the professors may belong. The open nature of these sub-networks are inherently valuable for maintaining offline affiliations, friendships and collegial relationship. However, this also increases the likelihood invisible audiences of unintended users may gain access to potentially unflattering information to an . By joining a network on Facebook, for example, the personal information of a users profile page becomes open to all “friends and networks”, even if the users may previously had their information set behind a more granular privacy settings.

Within these open spaces, the ability of users to make appropriate or selective disclosures of information is becoming obscured. While Facebook does allow for users to alter the settings after joining a network, such “openness by default” may catch many users off guard or only be brought to their attention once they face its negative repercussions. Because the maintenance of a wide variety of such social relationships depends on the disclosure/non-disclosure of certain types of information, privacy in praxis has become an act of balancing the utility of social network with the privacy concerns they present. Users are now faced with the challenge of classifying certain pieces of information public or non public, or determining suitable practices of disclosures amongst a diverse social graph. It is not to be expected that such decisions will become easier within a context whose architecture is built on openness to make it “easier for friends to find, identify, and learn about you”.

Privacy as Control over the Flow of Information

While the classification and coding of information vis-à-vis a diverse set of relationships forms the base of practice for most of the privacy conscious, this paradigm of privacy remains rather limited within a defined network of individuals, whether they be “friends”, within an intended audience, or not. Within this framework, information is understood as being either socially or institutionally sensitive, as its exposure may affect certain social or institutional relationships. Given the spatial and temporal context the “social profile” gives to personal information, it is reasonable to see how popular understandings of privacy have been within the public/private paradigm.

While this may be the case, it is important that users observe how the inherently “networked” nature of these spaces complicates the common privacy paradigm. When a user joins a SNS, they enter into a complex and opaque set of networked relationships beyond those with their “friends” and “friends of friends”. There exists sub-networks of third-party actors which constitute corporate entities, their partners and affiliates --may they be advertisers, third party developers, or a broad range of other service providers. Many of which are granted access to your information in varying forms and for differing reasons. With the introduction of the Open Social network, fronted by Google and various social advertising and developers networks, the ability for one to maintain the control and integrity of their information or “data” has become an increasingly complex endeavor.

While the importance of maintaining non-public social spaces online should not be diminished, in a time when collecting, storing, aggregating and disseminating information has become increasingly easy and cost-effective, users of SNS must begin to conceptualize online privacy in a way which extends past the social context popularly understood to give “information” meaning. Once information loses its contextual place of meaning, which may be the profile itself, users seem less apt to consciously consider the collection and dissemination of such data as a breach of privacy, or even a concern at all. It may be true that the socially sensitive nature of such data is reduced once it is disassociated with a particular user, or that the click stream patterns and other information collected by advertisers through cookies may not always pose a direct and potential threat to our privacy as we’ve thus far conceived it. However, a brief glance at the privacy policies, terms of use, and on-site practices of a few SNS illuminates that privacy must be seen as the control over the flows of personal information.that

Privacy vis-à-vis Third Parties

As many have illuminated, SNS are commercial enterprises with a business model based on the harvesting of personal information for marketing and other purposes. Therefore, it may be naive for a users to believe what happens on these sites stays on these sites, or that privacy settings, however granular they may be, grants them adequate control over their information. While SNS such as Bebo state that they “take your privacy very seriously”, the onus is on the user to determine whether or not the privacy standards of third party applications are up to par. The transfer of responsibility for monitoring the privacy practices of third parties is characteristic of many popular SNS. MySpace states in their privacy policy that they do not “control third parties” and cannot “dictate their actions”, while Facebook similarly states that they cannot guarantee that such third parties will “follow their rules”.

As third parties are often governed by their own privacy policies, the unmonitored and unenforced nature of these networked relationships places further responsibility on the individual users to ensure that privacy practices are adequate. This becomes quite difficult on SNS like Facebook, where third party developers are granted access to the personal information of all you and all your network members, including photos, videos, and other biographical information.

The relatively anonymous nature of these parallel sub-networks also obscures the ability of the user to take control over the accessibility of their information. Further, the privacy policies of the various SNS give no indication as to “who” their affiliates, partners, and service providers are. Most SNS also reserve the right to transfer personally identifiable information to its partners and affiliates if they have a “business reason to do so” and in all cases, advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies with regards to the information they collect -- some of it personally identifiable. To complicate matters, all of the leading SNS, including Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and Bebo, reserve the right to collect information about you from other companies and publicly available sources. It is unclear as to what information is being collected or for what purposes, and unfortunately, such information is effectively kept “private”.

Redefining Privacy on Social Network Sites

Social network sites can be seen as open spaces which allow users to maintain diverse personal relationships. However, the somewhat anonymous parallel networks of third parties which exist on these sites threatens the “open nature” of these sites vis-à-vis our privacy. While users may maintain that the information they have provided is kept secure and private, these parallel third party networks negates the control an individual may assert over the flow of their information. It is within this context that privacy needs to be conceptually redefined in relation to both user “information” as it appears on a social profile, and “data” once it is processed by third parties. There is a need for an alternative paradigm to privacy on SNS which takes into consideration the flow, retention and use of personal information.

While it may be too early to determine whether or not the expected digital dossiers complete with complex user-specific biographical data will be developed or come to threaten our privacy in a fundamentally new way, it is also premature and erroneous to assume that traditional notions of privacy are fundamentally antithetical to the net. As communication become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, so to should our perceptions of privacy and ways of preserving it. SNS must also become responsible for ensuring greater transparency in the flows and uses of personal information, working to standardize the privacy policies in such a way that makes the user experience one which is seamless with respect to privacy practices. Initiatives such as the W3C’s P3P are a promising step towards nurturing a more nuanced understanding of privacy among internet users. Only through understanding privacy as the control over the flows of personal information can be balance the interests of SNS users with the business models of these “open” networked spaces.

Top of Form

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reconceptualizing-privacy-on-social-network-s-sites

Recommendations for the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (Co-Win) platform

Pallavi Bedi — 2021-03-25T13:14:46Z

The first confirmed case of Covid-19 was recorded in India on January 30, 2020, and India’s vaccination drive started 12 months later on January 16, 2021; with the anxiety and hope that this signals the end of the pandemic. The first phase of the vaccination drive identified healthcare professionals and other frontline workers as beneficiaries. The second phase, which has been rolled out from March 1, covers specified sections of the general population; those above 60 years and those between 45 years and 60 with specific comorbid conditions. The first phase also saw the deployment of the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (Co-Win) platform to roll out and streamline the Covid 19 vaccination process. For the purpose of this blog post, the term CoWIn platform has been used to refer to the CoWin App and the CoWin webportal.

During the first phase, it was mandatory for the identified beneficiaries to be registered on the Co-Win App prior to receiving the vaccine. The Central Government had earlier indicated that it would be mandatory for all the future beneficiaries to register on the Co-Win app; however, the Health Ministry hours before the roll out of the second phase tweeted that beneficiaries should use the Co-Win web portal (not the Co-Win app) to register themselves for the vaccine. The App which is currently available on the play store is only for administrators; it will not be available for the general public. Beneficiaries can now access the vaccination by; (i) registering on the CoWin website; or (ii) Certain vaccination (sites) have a walk-in-facility: On-site registration, appointment, verification, and vaccination will all be on-site the same day; or (iii) register and get an appointment for the vaccination through the Aarogya Setu app.

The scale and extent of the global pandemic and the Covid-19 vaccination programme differs significantly from the vaccination/immunisation programmes conducted by India previously, and therefore, the means adopted for conducting the vaccination programme will have to be modified accordingly. However, as several newspaper reports have indicated the roll out of the CoWin platform has not been smooth. There are several glitches; from the user data being incorrectly registered, to beneficiaries not receiving the one time password required to schedule the appointment.

An entirely offline or online method (internet penetration is at 40% ) to register for the vaccine is not feasible and a hybrid model (offline registration and online registration) should be considered. However, the specified platform should take into account the concerns which are currently emanating from the use of Co-Win and make the required modifications.

Privacy Concerns

When the beneficiary uses the Co-Win website to register, she is required to provide certain demographic details such as name, gender, date of birth, photo identity and mobile number. Though Aadhar has been identified as one of the documents that can be uploaded as a photo identity, the Health Ministry in a response to a RTI filed by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) clarified that Aadhaar is nor mandatory for registration either through the Co-Win website or through Aarogya Setu. While, the Government has clarified that the App cannot be used by the general public to register for the vaccination, it still leaves open the question of the status of the personal data of the beneficiaries identified in the first phase of the process, who were registered on the App, and whose personal details were pre-populated on the App. In fact in certain instances, Aadhar details were uploaded on the app as the identity proof, without the knowledge of the beneficiary.

These concerns are exacerbated in the absence of a robust data protection law and with the knowledge that the Co-Win platform (App and the website) does not have a dedicated independent privacy policy. While the Co-Win web portal does not provide any privacy policy, the privacy policy hyperlinked on the App directs the user to the Health Data Policy of the National Health Data Management Policy, 2020. The Central Government approved the Health Data Management Policy on December 14, 2020. It is an umbrella document for all entities operating under the digital health ecosystem.

An analysis of the Health Policy against the key internationally recognised privacy principles which are represented in most data protection frameworks in the world, including the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, highlights that the Health Policy does not provide any information on data retention, data sharing and the grievance redressal mechanism. It is important to note that the Health policy has also been framed in the absence of a robust data protection law; the Personal Data Protection Bill is still pending before Parliament.

The Co-WIn website does not provide any separate information on how long the data will be retained, whether the data will be shared and how many ministries/departments have access to the data.

A National Health Policy cannot and should not be used as a substitute for specific independent privacy policies of different apps that may be designed by the Government to collect and process the health data of users. Health Data is recognised as sensitive personal data under the proposed personal data protection bill and should be accorded the highest level of protection. This was also reiterated by the Karnataka High Court in its recent interim order on Aarogya Setu. It held that medical information or data is a category of data to which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and “the sharing of health data of a citizen without his/her consent will necessarily infringe his/her fundamental right of privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution of India.”

Link with Aarogya Setu

A beneficiary registered on the Co-Win platform can use the Aarogya Setu App to download their vaccination certificate. Beneficiaries have now also been provided an option to register for vaccination through Aarogya Setu. However, the rationale for linking the two separate platforms is not clear, especially as Aaroya Setu has primarily been deployed as a contact tracing application.

There is no information on whether the data (and to what extent) that is stored in the Co-Win platform will be shared with Aarogya Setu. It is also not clear whether the consent of the beneficiary registered on the Co-Win platform will be obtained again prior to sharing the data or whether registration on the Co-Win platform will be regarded as general consent for sharing the data with Aarogya Setu. This is contrary to the principle of informed consent (i.e the consent has to be unambiguous, specific, informed and voluntary), which a data fiduciary has to comply with prior to obtaining personal data from the data principal. The privacy policy of Aarogya Setu has also not been amended to reflect this change in the purpose of the App.

Co-Win registration as an entry to develop health IDs?

One of the objectives of the Health Data Management Policy is to develop a digital unique health ID for all the citizens. The National Health Data Management Policy states that participation in the National Health Data Ecosystem is voluntary; and the participants will, at any time, have the right to exit from the ecosystem. Currently, the policy has been rolled out on a pilot basis in 6 union territories, namely; Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, Puducherry, Ladakh and Lakshadweep. As Health is a state subject under the Indian Constitution, Chhattisgarh has raised concerns about the viability and necessity of the policy, especially in the absence of a robust data protection legislation.

Mr. R.S. Sharma, the Chairperson of the ‘Empowered Group on Technology and Data Management to combat Covid-19’ had in an interview to India Today stated “ “Not just for vaccinations, but the platform will be instrumental in becoming a digital health database for India”. This indicates that this is an initial step towards generating health ID for all the beneficiaries. It would also violate the principle of purpose limitation, that data collected for one purpose (for the vaccine) cannot be reused for another (for the creation of the Digital Health ID system) without an individual’s explicit consent and the option to opt-out.

Conclusion

Given India’s experience and reasonable success with childhood immunisation, there is reasonable confidence that the country has the ability to scale up vaccination. However, the vaccination drive should not be used as a means to set aside the legitimate concerns of the citizens with regard to the mechanism deployed to get pet people to register for the vaccination drive. As a first step it is essential that Co-Win has a separate dedicated privacy policy which conforms to the internationally accepted privacy principles and enumerated in the Personal Data Protection Bill. It is also essential that Co-Win or any other app/digital platform should not be used as a backdoor entry for the government to create unique digital health IDs for the citizens, especially without their consent and in the absence of a robust data protection law.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/an-analysis-of-the-covid-vaccine-intelligence-network-co-win-platform

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium

praskrishna — 2013-09-30T10:44:39Z

This international convening is the culmination of the Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Challenge, committed to surfacing individuals and organizations that are transforming higher education toward connected and creative learning, open in content and access, participatory, and building on a growing range of experiments and innovations in networked learning. Nishant Shah is giving a talk at this event.

Note: The event is free and open to the public. Click to read the original published by DML Research Hub. This event is sponsored and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute, located at UC Irvine and is co-sponsored by the MIT Media Lab and CALit2.

A Live recording of the panel discussion here.

Please feel free to follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #ReclaimOpen. Certain portions of the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium will be streaming live via the DML Research Hub's YouTube Channel. Please click on the "streaming live" links below for more info. All times listed below are Pacific Time.

September 26, 2013

5:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Welcome to Calit2 by G.P.Li and to the symposium by David Theo Goldberg

Opening Keynote Event - Conversation with John Seely Brown and Amin Saberi, moderated by Anya Kamenetz

Scientist, artist and strategist, for two decades the head of Xerox PARC, one of the country’s most innovative places, JSB is hailed as one of the premier minds bent to the work of understanding how learning evolves in a connected age. He’ll be talking with Amin Saberi, a professor of management science, computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford, and now the CEO of NovoEd, a MOOC startup offering courses from some of the world’s top business schools with the novel inclusion of small group, real-world collaborative project-based learning. Some questions we’ll take on: where are we in the MOOC hype cycle, and does it matter? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of online and offline interaction for learning?

7:30 PM (CALit2 Atrium)

Gathering - Reclaim Open Learning Reception

We invite you to join us in celebrating the opening of the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium following the Conversation with John Seely Brown and Amin Saberi

September 27, 2013

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CALit2 Atrium)

Reclaim Open Learning Demos + Continental Breakfast

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Reclaiming Open Learning--A Stake in the Ground

John Seely Brown, Nishant Shah, and Philipp Schmidt (Moderator)

What values are we articulating? Why does open learning matter? What is it “good for”? What are the stakes?

11:00 AM - 3:00 PM (CALit2, Room 3008)

Working Group - Reclaim Open Learning: The COURSE

Howard Rheingold

We will work all day to create a distributed multimedia open course on Reclaiming Open Learning, hacking together a syllabus, activities, assignments, competencies, and more across platforms.

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Connected Learning, Digital Arts and Humanities

Susie Ferrell, Jade Ulrich, Martha Burtis, Alan Levine, Jonathan Worth, and Liz Losh (Moderator)

Why is art important in an online learning world sometimes dominated by STEM? how does the media production of learners get facilitated and managed in distributed networks and large-scale?

12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Break for Lunch

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

The Warm Body Effect

Josie Fraser, Freeman Murray and Anya Kamenetz (Moderator)

Space, place, and collocation -- what do physical presence, local communities and live social interaction mean for learners connected by the web? What power relationships and hierarchies are implied/facilitated by openness?

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Contexts & Outcomes

Howard Rheingold, Anya Kamenetz, and Mimi Ito (Moderator)

What are the broader social and economic contexts in which open learning is happening? How do questions of value and quality get negotiated? How do we define success?

4:00 PM - 4:30 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Presentation from 'Reclaim Open Learning: The COURSE'

Howard Rheingold

The working group will present their course.

4:30 PM - 5:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Closing Remarks

David Theo Goldberg

Winners

DigiLit Leicester www.digilitleic.com | Josie Fraser (Leicester City Council), Lucy Atkins (Leicester City Council), Richard Hall (De Montfort University)

This distributed course has a local aim: increasing the ability of local teachers in Leicester to use connected learning methods to support teaching and transform learning.

Digital Storytelling 106 (DS106) ds106.us | Jim Groom, Martha Buris, Alan Levine, University of Mary Washington, United States

Based on the principle “a domain of one’s own,” Groom’s course connects registered students and open participants in an ever-evolving online community where they submit, complete and collaborate on assignments in writing, mash-ups, design, video, audio, and other media. DS106 lives online as a livestreaming radio station, a sub-reddit, a G+ group, a Twitter feed, and more.

FemTechNet femtechnet.blogspot.com | Susanna Ferrell, Jade Ulrich Scripps College, United States

FemTechNet bills itself as the first “distributed online collaborative course.” In their beta outing, students applied feminist texts to labor, digital art, and archives, drawing connections between the dichotomies of software/hardware and feminism/masculinity. They edited Wikipedia, created sculptures and images and held dialogues with others of diverse backgrounds. The course is expanding globally.

Jaaga Study jaaga.in/study | Archana Prasad, Freeman Murray, India

Jaaga is a multidisciplinary creative hub in Bangalore, India. They are piloting informal learning programs leveraging MOOC resources with volunteer facilitators in a face to face community setting, with the goal of creating market-ready computer programmers.

Photography BA Hons and Phonar-Ed www.phonar.covmedia.co.uk | Jonathan Worth, Matt Johnston, Shaun Hides, Jonathan Shaw, Coventry University, UK; David Kernohan, JISC, UK

These free and open photography classes are available in app form and deal directly with the nature of the photographer as publisher. Classroom-based but leveraging various online communities, they are expanding to a full master’s and bachelor’s program.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dml-hub-reclaim-open-learning-symposium

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop

subha — 2013-09-12T10:22:44Z

Konkani as a language has seen geographical, political and religious conflicts. Being the official language of Goa and spoken widely in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra it is still trying to strengthen its base. Recently CIS-A2K in collaboration with Goa University organized a four-day workshop for MA, Konkani language students.

Subhashish Panigrahi's blog post was published in Startup Goa Blog on September 9, 2013.

This workshop involved 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia which is in incubation. We’re hoping that these efforts will contribute towards bringing this 7 year old project out of incubation to a live Wikipedia project.

Before any language, Wikipedia shapes up as a live project where an incubation process is involved. A community of volunteers (known as Wikipedians) gradually grow to sustain this Wikipedia in incubation with active contribution.The Konkani Wikipedia incubator started way back in 2006. But because of many reasons it could not take off and is still in incubation. One of the major reasons has been the issue with multiple script usage. Because of the political and religious reasons Konkani has multiple writing and verbal standards and also written in multiple scripts; Devanagari and Roman (known as Romi as well) in Goa where Devanagari is the official script, Kannada in the Konkani speaking regions of Karnataka (Mangalore region primarily), Malayalam in Kerala (Kochin region) and in Perso-Arabic script by part of the Konkani speaking population. The largest script usage for Konkani is in Devanagari. Goa University is world’s first University to have a masters program in Konkani language where the writing standard is in Goan Konkani (Language code: Gom) which is written in Devanagari. During the interaction with the faculty members; Prof. Madhavi Sardesai and Head of the department Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodar, it was found that the students were very enthusiastic to contribute to their language. The students were introduced to Konkani Wikipedia and they showed interest in taking part in a workshop to learn Wikipedia editing. This was the beginning of something new after a long time. Four out of thirty eight students volunteered to coordinate the workshop on the ground. They discussed about the workshop and the prerequisites; going through the list of articles on Konkani Wikipedia, writing a unique article by collecting resources and creating their usernames on Wikipedia before attending the workshop. All of the students including four coordinators came with at least 2 pages of written content before the workshop.

Day 1: Building the Blocks

It was 10 in the morning, a big LED panel in the audio visual room of the Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, Goa was displaying the word cloud containing words like Wikipedia, Openness, Education, Open Knowledge, Global Collaboration. Soon the room was filled with 20 MA students from the Konkani department of Goa University. Prior to the workshop there was an interaction with the students in the presence of the Head of the department Dr. Priyadarshini and Prof. Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and from the Konkani department. Four of the students Supriya Kankumbikar, Fr. Luis Gomes, Vaishali Parab and John Noronha volunteered to coordinate the workshop. With their help, a majority of students signed up and created their user accounts before the first workshop. Some roughwork went on to plan for a whole day workshop.

Introduce Yourself

To start with the first day, there was an “Adjective Name” activity. It was fun to know how people judge themselves with adjective. Then there was a discussion about articles students planned to write. Few of them were not sure if the articles like social issues and biography of a writer could fit into the Wikipedia framework.

Editing time

Article titles were decided and everyone was ready with their homework write ups and books for adding sources. The next big thing was typing in Devanagari. Only four to five of them knew typing. Students came forward to try out typing. There was a glow of triumph after they typed correctly using “Transliteration” layout. The editing session began. It worked well. Students managed to type with only a little typos.


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

There was an activity break with a game called “Tumi Kashi Asat” (means How are you doing in Konkani). According to the game rules, the host has to make some body movements and ask “Tumi Kashi Asat” and bending forward. The participants have to move their body in the reverse way and answer “Ami bari ashat” (I’m doing good). This replaced the caffeine intake for the four days and kept all of us alive.

Rat and frog game

“Rat race” is a game where participants sit on chairs and one of them is made to stand in the center. The rat makes others run and replace each others seats and one among the participants becomes a rat. This rat race brought back the old childhood memories and for a moment everyone forgot their age. At the end of it students sat down to take a deep breath and were taught some of the basic wiki-codes (bold, Italics and adding references). Editing session went on until the rest of the day.

Day 2: Climbing Up the Ladder

The agenda for the day was to tell the students about the advanced options and ensure addition of more citations. Citations on Wikipedia are very essential for readers to validate the facts. But bringing this to the students who just had started typing in their language a day before was not that easy. The second day was spent giving small breaks during the editing session for small activities. Running, jumping and shouting fueled the students to be happy editors and not burdened. By the end of the first two days 22 students created 24 articles (About 42 pages of written content). Everyone clapped for their friends, they were welcomed into the Konkani Wikipedia community and were shown the facebook group they could join and be more connected before thanking and saying bye for the day with the promise of more fun for the next workshop.

Day 3: Fresh Batch, New Start


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

16 new students from the MA course were welcomed. Four student-coordinators and one from the first batch of students joined the funday. The entire day was spent with lots of fun, creating articles and basic know how about Wiki-codes. Half the students in this batch knew typing in Devanagari Inscript. The students were then paired with those who knew Inscript and thanks to the Fedora Devanagari keyboard layout. All of the students created their first articles.

Day 4: No Need to Say Good Bye!

Seeing the newspaper coverage about the workshop featuring some of their friends was a delight for the new wikipedians after two long days. Few of them came forward to share their experience about the workshop and their vision for the Konkani language.

At the end of four days all of them bid farewell. These were the foundation days and the biggest editing rally Konkani Wikipedia Incubator has seen in the last seven years with this milestone that the students had created.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/start-up-goa-blog-september-10-2013-subhashish-panigrahi-recap-on-konkani-wikipedia-workshop

Reaping the Benefits of Gamification

dipali — 2015-10-24T14:24:55Z

As a part of the Making Change blog-post series, in this post we will identify a new technique: gamification. This technique is being used for sustainable environment conservation by modern day change-makers. We interview two out of three co-founders of Reap benefit- Kamal Raj and Gautam Prakash who believe in the adoption of more sustained environmental practices that induce social change towards conserving the environment.

CHANGE-MAKER: Kamal Raj,Gautam Prakash and Kuldeep Dantewadia
 
ORGANISATION: Reap Benefit 

METHOD OF CHANGE: Gamification and Human centric systems for consistent behavior change towards better waste-water-energy management. 

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Building a new era of environmentally conscious youth in India through technology and an interdisciplinary approach to change.

We depend on the environment and the resources that it provides us, but surprisingly we are unaware of the effects of its depletion and the need to save these resources. A few of the problems that people now face are with resources like- water,waste and energy because we do not acknowledge the fact that we are wasting them unconsciously. This only triggers the need for more and more solutions which would change the way people perceive the resources and realize the need to conserve. While trying to start an initiative to come up with some solutions to manage these resources, we are approached by the question of the accessibility, affordability and sustainability of those solutions. The solutions and the practice of that solution is a two-way process for any sustainable making-change initiative.

In this post I will be introducing to you Reap Benefit and the technique of Gamification. I will bring out a comparative analysis of the various definitions by renowned gaming authorities across the world who are involved in the process of using games in non-game contexts to bring out change in the offline space. Only after this, will I be acknowledging the importance of the strategies used by Reap Benefit for making these solutions sustainable. The strategies will be- human centric solutions and gamification. Then, I will bring out the connection between these two strategies to provide you an inter-disciplinary understanding of the making change process. Next, these strategies will be coupled with the discussion on the use of technology to speed-up the process. Also, throughout this post we will be referring to the blog- Methods of Social Change written by Denisse Albornoz and we will also make an attempt to answer the questions- 'Who,Where,How' of this making change project in relation to Reap Benefit. The blog post can be accessed here.

Before the journey of the post, I would like you to read this little success story narrated by Kamal Raj in the interview that led Reap benefit a step higher in its aim for making change:

Reap benefit went to a school which received only 400 litres of water supply a day resulting in poor health and care conditions. This water would be used for washing their plates after the mid-day meal and also for sanitation systems. This would only make the place a platform for water, food and breeding mosquitoes all together. Since the students usually consumed food with their right hand, while taking the plate to wash it, they would leave the plates at one side; they would open the tap with their left hand, would take their plates again and start washing them. During this time interval, they would waste a lot of water.

As, a solution to this, Reap Benefit changed the taps which would discharge 60% less of water. They also created a clean water purification system. Now, with the same 400 litres of water, students washed their plates and adopted better sanitation practices. The challenges that they faced actually made them innovate better systems for remarkable change.

Think about these questions for a minute..

Does this story relate to physical needs?
Does this story relate to creative problem solving?
Is it a story that brings out better affordable solutions?
With this solution were the students benefited?
Was this a successful idea?

Reap Benefit

First of all, take a look at a brief introduction of Reap Benefit given by Kamal Raj:

Kamal: "Reap Benefit works to implement affordable solutions, enabling quantifiable waste-water-energy management systems, as a way to facilitate behavioural change by engaging the head, hand and heart of the user. Having worked with many people, we have realized that behaviour modification allows for more sustained adoption of environment sustainability practices. We take them through a 4-stage behavioural change process – ‘Unconsciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Right’ and ‘Unconsciously Right’ (we will understand this process later in the post). A link to the website is here- Reap Benefit."

Reap Benefit is bound together by the deep concern for the environment they have and the dead-lock issues that it faces. They aim for affordable solutions with maximum impact in the least time. Kamal marks that they work only with the students within the age group 10-16, because the use gamification is most effective in this age group. Also, he makes an addition to that by saying the rewards the older age groups demand are not as easy-to-meet as those of the age group they work with. It also aims to co-create experiences by working hands on with the youth: their target audience for creating change.

It is said that the more you practice the better you get. By this, I would like to introduce you to the concept of quotidian activism. Reap Benefit deeply believes in this concept. But, what does quotidian activism mean? A working definition is: the form of activism occurring everyday. This form of activism may lead to people making actions sustainable and achieve consistent behavioural change, supported by products and innovations provided by Reap Benefit (later in this post, I will introduce you to some of these innovations).

Finally, Reap Benefit highly focuses on the need to answer the ‘why’ behind the problem. This answer would provide a more personal understanding of the problem for creating change. By engaging the participant with the 'why', he will also be able to evaluate the impact and the benefits of his actions, take ownership of the problem and comprehend the need for innovation.

What is 'change' for Reap Benefit?

Presuming every organization has its own design to making change, Reap Benefit's understands it in the following way:

Gautam: “Change for us is a very sub-conscious part of your life. (It is also a) two stage process- knowledge: which will tell us we need solution and the solution. The knowledge will tell you that you are unconsciously doing the wrong thing. Then when you realize it, you go to a stage of consciously wrong. When you keep doing this you reach a stage when you know that you are consciously doing right, and soon, you are doing it every single day and then you unconsciously do it.”

I will attempt to understand their process of change by adding that this 'to be good' drive in the individual or the need for public approval is what makes them do unconsciously right everyday, and then it is only the last stage what makes it a habit. Gautam also mentions that each of these stages has an impact of its own and altogether, they become more powerful. This change process will lead to sustainable change according to him.

We have seen the change agents that are vital to create change, but how is this change executed? In the next section we will look at two strategies used for making change: gamification and human-centred design and later, we will only try to produce a connection between them.

Discovering Gamification

In this section, we will unpack the first part of the 'how' question. First of all, we will compare the various definitions of the technique given by people involved in understanding the use of game elements in the non-game contexts, to create change in the emotional and social behaviour of people. The definitions of these three people in the big list of so-called gamification authorities will be used provides us with keywords for a comparative understanding of what the technique means. These three people are:

JANE McGONIGAL: She is an American game designer and author who advocates the use of mobile and digital technology to channel positive attitudes and collaboration in a real world context.

GABE ZICHERMANN: He is an author, public speaker, and self-described "serial entrepreneur." He has worked as a proponent of leveraging game mechanics in business, education, and other non-entertainment platforms to increase user engagement through gamification.

JESSE SCHELL: He is an American video game designer an acclaimed author, CEO of Schell Games and a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology.

Definitions

JANE McCONIGAL	GABE ZICHERMANN	JESSE SCHELL
“It is a blissful productivity acquired by the flourishing feeling, that is, accomplishments in a game but only with a volunteering attribute of the participant.”	“Games are the only force in the universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest in a predictable way without using force.”	“It is a problem solving situation that you enter into because you want to.”

I would be like to bring points of intersections between these three definitions.

VOLUNTEERING ATTRIBUTE VS. USE OF FORCE: The volunteering attribute is an efficient way to foster sustainable participation, as opposed to the use of force which makes a campaign less appealing.
PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS: Games are a very responsive way of trying to accomplish problem solving as the person is engaged with the problem and willing to solve it.
PRODUCTIVITY: There problem solving skills leads the participant to a desired outcome.

These points also give you a clear understanding of Reap Benefit who works along the same lines with the volunteer or participant to solve the problem of conservation.
But, does the usage of games actually produce behavioral change? If so, how do games provide this function? These are some of the questions we will try and attempt to answer in the next section.

Games as a Tool to Influence Behaviour

Playing games results in obtaining rewards in some form of the other. These rewards psychologically induce a positive emotional feeling in the participant. When the participant learns something through games and when that emotional feeling arises, he tries and incorporates the same solutions in the games to solving the real life problems. This brings out an improved result and problem solving ability. But what about the affordability of that solution? We need to understand ways to make it affordable because any task once done will not induce consistency in the behavior change. But the task repeated many times will improve or change the behavior over a long period of time. So, when the question of affordability (financial fear) is answered then the emotional feeling primarily can bring out change in the behavior of the individual. (Yongwen Xu, 2011).

There are also some game mechanics that are to be kept in mind to change behavior while designing games apart from just the element of fun and affordability. So, we will now look at another authority involved in gamification in the upcoming section to explore these mechanics. We will also try and understand these mechanics in relation to Reap Benefit.

Game Mechanics

Seth Priebatsch is the creator of SCVNGR and LevelUp social gaming sites. He has provided a list of game mechanics which could be necessary to understand games and why they produce particular changes for a better environment. These are:

Appointment Dynamics: to bring players to do something at a pre-defined time and place.

Influence and status: any participant or group that is involved in the change-making process, is influenced by the presence of others because of the competition and the envy that leads them to carry forward the task

Progression Dynamics: the success of the student is measured through the tasks by giving rewards.

Communal Discovery: the entire group or community works towards making change.

Seth's model could be applied to the process of creating change that Reap Benefit uses, and this is illustrated through their experience of a student-run energy audit in the field. A set of students were assigned the task of doing an audit for the energy conservation and the energy usage of a Puma store. They were just given the base for the audit but the criteria for the audit was planned by them. The students were encouraged by the thought of getting rewards for the task. Kamal recalls that they had used games to make the children understand it.

Relating this to Seth's Model, the children were given a pre-defined time and place for doing the task and were influenced both, by the element of competition between the students and also the idea of receiving a reward once the task is completed. The task only ends by obtaining a sense of communal discovery that, all together they can make change on a personal and team level. We understood Seth's model but we will try and comprehend deeper, the use of rewards for inducing behavioral change in the next section.

Rewards Mechanism

Kamal commented on Reap Benefit's 2-3 months periodic reward mechanism. He believes that this makes students equal in position before starting every task.

Kamal: "We use a lot of things like rewards to motivate them to play a game (with us) and we personalize all these rewards based on the questionnaire that we do at the beginning where we subtly understand what they like."

This information which gives ideas of how to encourage each student to get the best performance out of them.

a) Extrinsic rewards: The extrinsic reward here, for example would be allotting points to various participants/ teams. Michael Wu, a chief scientist in subjects like digital technologies, says extrinsic rewards are like a jump start to intrinsic rewards.Once the student acknowledges them, they acquire a sense of ownership and innovation and are empowered to create new solutions. Hence, awareness is not created before the task but an output from the task.

Refer to Gabe Zichermann's video for more on the importance of gamification and the rewards mechanism.

b) Intrinsic rewards: Apart from producing behavior change, gamification's can also indicate learning. One of the elements that facilitates learning would be:

Player Control: A participant will have certain amount of control while gaming which would lead to a sense of responsibility and accomplishment. Learning could be intrinsic only if there is responsibility of gaining a reward through a task.

There are many other elements that produce learning and they could be accessed here.

Human-Centric Model

Human-centred systems aim to preserve or enhance human skills, in both manual and office work, in environments in which technology tends to undermine the skills that people use in their work.

We will now answer the second part of the 'how' question and show another strategy for making change. Human centric systems do not use machines to create solutions to the problems but rather design the game with the importance of the 'user-friendly' element. This has been explored in a past post by Denisse. Access it here.

Reap Benefit's ‘transparent dustbin’ is a great model to illustrate this. The dustbin is transparent for people to see and then throw the waste in according to different types of waste. It is kept at an eye-level so that the waste already thrown inside can help the person perceive and throw his waste in the exact dustbin and to make it easily accessible for the public.

These human-centric approaches provide a consistent change in the behaviour of the individual because the method is user-friendly and make segregation easy. The objectives is to engage in unconscious behavioural change. The transparent dustbin is better explained by this audio byte of Kamal Raj:

Another innovation of Reap Benefit, is the compose mixture

Kamal says: "The idea was to throw something with it, like the degrade compost product we innovated and the waste would compost, without smell, without taking 3 months."

This mix, by giving visual feedback could be accessible by anyone due to its low cost and easy-to-use method. So, these innovations justify and explain the benefits of human centric models and also produce many new ideas in the minds of the students( James,2010). I would like to explain this by a chain of ideas that arise while segregating plastic and non-plastic waste.

The participation in the structure (waste segregation model)

The negatives of the model (harmful effects of mixing plastic in the model)

Realizing the need for another mechanism (dustbins for different types of waste)

Another idea to support the new mechanism (dustbins should be transparent and named)

The need to spread this (start campaigning for the system)

Explaining this model in brief: the waste segregation model is the segregation of plastic and other waste. During this process the three ideas that arise are: a) the harmful effects of plastic, b) the need for a plastic waste dustbin and a non-plastic waste dustbin, and the last one, b) the transparency of the dustbin. Then the major question of spreading the model by using technology arises. This would be the model thought by the participant during the discussion of the usage of technology for sustainability.

But what is sustainability and how is it important? Complementing the technique of gamification and the human- centric approaches with technology to make it a sustainable solution is a challenge. This system may be adopted by all. But the aftermath of implementing this apparatus is a challenging question. In the next section we will comprehend the role of technology adding a more positive result to Reap benefit.

The Role of Technology and Media

This section will look at how Reap Benefit uses technology and media and then try and understand how the use of technology can make these solutions sustainable.

Kamal: "There are two aspects that are already existing- knowledge and the products. So, when someone starts the journey, technology enables us to be with them in this journey without us being there. Without the sharing of photos through digital media like facebook, keeping track of the journey would not be possible. We need technology to bridge the gap."

Information access is facilitated by the use of technology and digital media or social networking, as they share the systems with their online community. But, when this access is denied the only solution is to be a part of the in-tutor system and realize the positives of the same through experience. Technology takes Reap Benefit a step higher in its aim to make sustainable change by targeting youth, the main users of social network platforms.

Making Change

We started this post with an introduction to a very strong initiative- Reap Benefit. Techniques such as gamification and human-centric systems are used effectively by this organization to create maximum benefits. It focuses highly on the use of these strategies to induce behaviour modification in youth. We attempted to build a relationship between these techniques to answer whether they are sustainable, intelligible and accessible solutions to making change.

Summing up the 'WHO,WHERE AND HOW' question- We have only understood that, to use the opportunity and take charge before others do so, we need a 3-stage plan. We understood that the WHO means the target, the change agents who will lead the initiative and comprehend the need for change by themselves. The question of WHERE focuses on the idea of making change in the public space rather than in the private sphere which limits the extent of the change. We have summarized this only by bringing out the importance of technology to make change the largest priority of youth. The question of HOW is understood in this post by the use to affordable solutions.

The problems faced by the environment call for solutions that are affordable and accessible. These two qualities of the solution would only make it sustainable.These solutions are met by various game elements in a game and the human centric approaches that engage the individual in problem solving by disseminating knowledge to them and informing them about the problems. This makes those solutions to problem-solving evaluatable through quantity and the quality of the result of the problem. Behavior change will be only possible by solutions that break the existing schemas in the society and create new innovations. (James,2010). Now, through sustainable, innovative solutions through these techniques we can make the dream of a clear and clean environment a reality.

While this blog may help you gain a positive understanding about gamification it would certainly lead you to many more questions. In this digital age, we would surely have to ‘re-game-think’ the methodologies for change again and agai,n not only in terms of using unique techniques such as gamification but also in terms of accessibility of such techniques for change in the structural divisions in society.

Footnotes

Reward is one of the elements that drives the individual to adopt the gamification technique- the reward/feedback mechanism. You can acquire a profound reading on more of these elements that leads to further making-change here- http://www.yukaichou.com/.
A few more elements like the player control and communal discovery that indicates learning through Gamification could be found here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
More information on persuasive messages, strategies for changing behavior, rules for effective delivery, and how to manage the participants/audience in the making change initiative can be found-http://sustainability.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Promoting_Sustain_Behavior_Primer.pdf
To hear a talk show of Yukaichou on TEDx about Gamification- check it here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Qjuegtiyc
To hear another talk show of Gabe Zichermann on TEDx about Gamification- check here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2N-5maKZ9Q
The process of creating sustainability through gamification and technology, according to Rachel James, goes as follows:

Attracting attention by breaking the existing schemas (mental structures of preconceived idea, Jean Piaget,1926) This can be done by creating a mystery for them and then involving the individual in complex thought processing to change the schema. Story-telling could also induce emotional reactions to inspire or simulate them.
Persuade them through gamification
Make the strategies for change very rigid which cannot be changed often and acknowledge what you deliver to your audience.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
James, Rachel. “Promoting Sustainable Behavior- a guide to successful communication”. Web. August 2010.
Xu, Yongwen. ” literature review on web application Gamification and analytics”. Web. August 2011.
http://www.yukaichou.com
Albornoz, Denisse. 'Methods for Social Change'. Web. February 2014. The link for the same is here- http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change.

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About Dipali Sheth:

Studying in my 3rd year at Christ University gave me the opportunity to intern at Centre for Internet and Society. This post has been a result of my internship for a month under the Making Change program at CIS. My interest in Research and New Media started the journey here and has only added to making Research my zeal in the near future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/reaping-the-benefits-of-gamification

Reading from a Distance — Data as Text

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:29:12Z

The advent of new digital technologies and the internet has redefined practices of reading and writing, and the notion of textuality which is a fundamental aspect of humanities research and scholarship. This blog post looks at some of the debates around the notion of text as object, method and practice, to understand how it has changed in the digital context.

The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on Digital Humanities, given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding (see TEI) to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of apps such as Storify or Scoop it have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm[1]. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation. But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts. The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts ‘ massively addressable at different levels of scale’ as suggested by Micheal Witmore. According to him “Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction”. This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, “textuality is addressability” and further...this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event”. What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book.[2]

The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content, process etc seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the ‘text’ through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces. One example of such a digital text perhaps is the hypertext[3]. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited in some sense as the ideal text. Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the post-structural notion of what comprises an open text as it were, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture.

But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the ‘text’ is manifested through practices of reading and writing [4]. So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, his book Graphs, Maps and Trees talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an ‘abstract model of literary history’. He describes this approach as ‘within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study’...He further says, “Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific kind of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.” The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can ‘facilitate’ this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods. An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of ‘ Bichitra’, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore varioum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation.

As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as understood in the field of computing is data that is so vast or complex that it cannot be processed by existing database management tools or processing applications[5]. But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text - and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later American New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a form of cultural and literary production. [6] Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by including corpora, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper. Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content. [7]

Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question one may ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions. This is an interesting use of the term, given that the suggestion to use quantitative methods such as clustering and pattern recognition in fields that are premised on close reading and interpretation is itself a provocative one and has implications for content. The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if the Digital Humanities can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located.

References:

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, “Texts”, Planned Obsolescence – Publishing, Technology and Future of the Academy, New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. pp.89 – 119.
Kirschenbaum, M.G, “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities”, Conference proceedings; National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Balitmore, October 10-12, 2007, http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf.
Landow, George. P, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Balitmore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992 pp 2-12
Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso: London and New York, 2005. p.1
Whitmore, Michael , “Text: A Massively Addressable Object”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24
Wilkens, Mathew, “Canons,Close Reading and the Evolution of Method” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24

[1] For more on cluster analysis and algorithms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis

[2] See Witmore, 2012. pp 324 - 327

[3] A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” ( As quoted in Landow, 1991. pp 2-12)

[4] Barthes, 1977. pp 155 - 164

[5] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

[6] See Wilkens (2012). pp 249-252

[7] See Fitzpatrick (2011), pp 89 -119

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance

Reading Devanagari script based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada Script

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:14:43Z

This is a small hack to read websites with Devanagari script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili and a few more languages) based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada script.

Konkani Wikipedia finally went live in this June after being in Incubator for nine years. Konkani language is written using five different scripts; Devanagari (official script for Konkani in Goa), Kannada, Latin, Malayalam and Persian. The current Konkani Wikipedia is available at https://gom.wikipedia.org where “gom” is for the Goan variation of Konkani.

There is a significant Konkani population in coastal Karnataka and to a small extent in northern Kerala that use Kannada script for writing Konkani. Many of these people might be facing issues with reading the Konkani articles in Devanagari script in the Goan Konkani Wikipedia which brings the need for making the Wikipedia available in Kannada and other scripts that Konkani uses.

There are various ways to go about it. Some of the Wikimedia projects like the Serbian and Chinese Wikipedia already had this issue and had multi-script transliteration as a solution. Transliteration between Devanagari and Kannada scripts could be transliterated in multiple ways and below is one of them.

Noted typographer K. P. Rao who is known for creating fonts for almost all the Indian scripts has recently come up with a solution for Devanagari⟷Kannada transliteration by creating a new font “Devama” that has Devanagari Unicode encodings with Kannada glyphs. The font has the rendering logic as per Kannada rules which means if we set this fonts for any text typed using Devanagari script, it will display it in Kannada script. This will help anyone who can read Kannada script to read something written in Devanagari. Mr. Rao has generously released “Devama” under Open Font License (OFL) ver. 1.1. The source file for the font is currently available at https://github.com/pavanaja/DevamaNew for anyone to use and modify with attribution.

How to use the font:

Download and install the font as a .zip file.
Unzip the file and find the “Devama.otf” file. Install it. (the installation will vary based on your operating system, check a how-to guide to learn).
Now inorder to make the font working you need to change the browser settings. (check here for Firefox and Chrome browser settings). You need to set “Devama” as the display font for Devanagari script.
In Mozilla Firefox:

Select “Options” from Tools menu. It will open a new tab. Select the “Content” tab. Click on the button “Advanced...”. Select Devanagari from the drop-down list from “Fonts for” and set “Devama” as the font for all options. Click on “Ok” and close the dialog box. Now reload the Konkani Wikipedia to check if it is working or not.

Not just Konkani Wikipedia, any other site in Devanagari script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili, Bihari and a few other Indian languages) could also be read in Kannada. This might be useful for those who could read in Kannada and have problems reading in Devanagari.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reading-devanagri-konkani-wikipedia-in-kannada-script

Read Our Annual Reports and Audit Reports

Admin — 2025-12-29T14:02:33Z

Click on the links below to access our annual and audit reports.

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2024-2025 Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2024) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q2 (July - September 2024) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3 (October - December 2024) Consolidated Audited Financials (FY 2024 - 2025) Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2023-2024 Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2023) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q2 (July - September 2023) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3 (October - December 2023) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q4 (January - March 2024) Consolidated Audited Financials (FY 2023 - 2024) Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2022-2023 Consolidated Financials (FY 2022 - 2023 + Audit Report) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2022) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q2 (July - September 2022) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3 (October - December 2022) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q4 (January - March 2023) Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2021-2022 Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2021) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q2 (July - September 2021) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3 (October - December 2021) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q4 (January - March 2022) CIS Signed Consolidated Audited Financials (FY 2021-22 + Audit Report) Centre for Internet & Society Audit Report 2020-2021 Download Audit Report (2020-21), (PDF, 926 KB) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2020) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q2 (July - September 2020) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3 (October - December 2020) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q4 (January - March 2021) Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2020-21 Download Programmatic Annual Report (April 2020 - March 2021) Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2019-2020 Download Audit Report (2019-20), (PDF, 1060 KB) Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q1 (April - June 2019) Quarterly receipt of Foreign Contributions - Q3 (October - December 2019) Quarterly receipt of Foreign Contributions - Q4 (January - March 2020)
Centre for Internet & Society Audit Report 2018-19 Download Annual Report Download Audit Report Quarterly receipt of Foreign contribution - Q3(Oct - Dec) 2018
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2019-20 Download Annual Report (2019-20)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2017-18 Download Annual Report (2017-18), (PDF, 4809 Kb) Download Consolidated Financial Statements (2017-18)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2016-17 Download Annual Report (2016-17), (PDF, 1327 Kb) Download Consolidated Financial Statements (2016-17)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2015-16 Download Annual Report (2015-16) (PDF, 3559 Kb) Download Audit Report (2015-16), (PDF, 1907 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2014-15 CIS in partnership with the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities and the Centre for Law and Policy Research compiled the National Compendium of Laws, Policies, Programmes for Persons with Disabilities. During the year CIS signed memorandum of understandings with Mysore University (for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License); Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College (to introduce Indian Language Wikipedias in the Indian Under-Graduate and Post Graduate Classroom); Andhra Loyola College (for 5 years to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license); and Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa (to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa). CIS also conducted an empirical study of five separate and diverse banks (State Bank of India, Central Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank) to gain a practical perspective on the existing banking practices and policies in India, and published a Banking Policy Guide. Further CIS took part in the WIPO-SCCR meetings. India became the first country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty and the Accessible Books Consortium was launched. Download Annual Report (2014-15) (PDF, 1 Mb) Download Audit Report (2014-15) (PDF, 527 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2013-14 CIS celebrated five years of existence with an exhibition showcasing its works and accomplishments since it was founded in 2008. Along with CLPR, CIS published a report on making the General Elections of 2014 participatory and accessible for voters with disablities. CIS signed a memorandum of understanding with Christ University, Bangalore, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences for furthering the growth of Indian languages on Wikipedia. CIS is working with Privacy International on the Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project and as part of the work drafted the Privacy Protection Bill. CIS hosted the second Institute on Internet and Society at Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014. The Knowledge Repository was compiled and presented to the participants. Download Annual Report (2013-14) (PDF, 1.3 Mb) Download Audit Report (2013-14) (PDF, 7174 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2012-13 CIS is working on two projects: Creating a National Kit of Laws, Policies and Programmes for Persons with Disabilities and Developing an open source screen reading software solution “NVDA” to handle Indian languages and text-to-speech software in 15 Indian languages with the Hans Foundation. CIS published a report on Accessibility of Government Websites in India with the Hans Foundation and the Consumers International IP Watchlist 2012 — India Report with Consumers International. Wikimedia Foundation awarded a two-year grant to support and develop free knowledge in India and consequently, CIS got a new office in Delhi. Pranesh Prakash's preliminary analysis on blocked websites was featured in leading publications like Wall Street Journal, Hindu, Outlook, etc., and as part of the Google Policy Fellowship, brought out a report on Intermediary Liability in India, and initiated a project on The Internet Institute with the Ford Foundation. Download Annual Report (2012-13) (PDF, 2211 Kb) Download Audit Report (2012-13) (PDF, 2813 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2011-12 CIS published a new improved edition of the Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective with G3ict and Hans Foundation, prepared a report on Making Mobile Phones and Services Accessible for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, negotiated meetings at WIPO and with the Third World Network conducted an Analysis of WIPO Treaty for the Print Disabled, published a report on the state of Open Government Data in India with the Transparency & Accountability Initiative, published outputs on IT Act, Limitations, Copyright, Internet Protocol, Media, Sexual Minorities, and UID with Privacy International, UK and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, produced a report titled Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet 2011 with Google and released five monographs: Archives and Access, Porn: Law, Video & Technology, The Last Cultural Mile, Re:Wiring Bodies and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities. Download Annual Report (2011-12) (PDF, 1956 Kb) Download Audit Report (2011-12) (PDF, 21,313 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2010-11 CIS distributed for peer five monographs titled Re: Wiring Bodies, Pornography and the Law, Archive and Access, The Last Cultural Mile and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities for peer review, published a Position Paper in collaboration with Hivos and organised workshops on Digital Natives with a Cause in Taipei, Johannesburg, and Santiago, the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with G3ict and ITU, a report on Open Government Data with Transparency & Accountability Initiative, a report on Online Video Environment in India with iCommons and Open Video Alliance and two workshops on Privacy Matters in Kolkata and Bangalore in partnership with Privacy India and Society in Action Group. Download Annual Report (2010-11) (PDF, 1872 Kb) Download Audit Report (2010-11) (PDF, 14823 Kb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2009-10 CIS and the Institute of Network Cultures entered into a collaboration to produce a Reader on the Wikipedia, in partnership with Hivos published a report, Digital Natives with a Cause?, entered into research collaborations with the Centre for Study of Culture and Society for the Networked Higher Education Initiative, taught courses at Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Women’s Studies Centre, Pune University, Christ University, Bangalore, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, Shanghai University and the New Media Lab, Jadavpur University, co-organised a nationwide Right to Read Campaign in Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, prepared the India Country Report for Consumers International and organised the Maps for Making Change workshops in Delhi and Ahmedabad. Download Annual Report for 2009-10 (PDF, 1952 Kb) Download Audit Report for 2009-10 (PDF, 9.5 Mb)
Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2008-09 CIS drafted a policy on web accessibility for the National Informatics Centre, worked on a comparative study of major international web and ATM accessibility policies for the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, worked with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to formulate recommendations to make research publications open access.entered into partnership with LexUM for the Free Access to Law project and signed contracts with researchers for producing monographs on Re: Wiring Bodies, Archive and Access, Pornography and the Law, and The Last Cultural Mile. Download Annual Report (2008-09) (PDF, 561 Kb) Download Audit Report (2008-09) (PDF, 7.05 Mb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/reports/annual-reports

Read Bengali, Malayalam classics online as free Wiki libraries grow

praskrishna — 2016-01-29T15:51:09Z

Content Includes Classics In Malayalam, Bengali.

The article by Sandhya Soman was published in the Times of India on January 10, 2016.

It was a hunt that took Shiju Alex to many places. Finally, his quest ended at Dharmaram College library in Bengaluru as Alex got hold of a copy of the firstever printed book in Malayalam. He scanned it promptly and volunteers uploaded the text on to Malayalam Wikisource, one of the free online libraries run by Wikipedia. Nasim Ali returned to Wikipedia editing only because fellow Odias were reaching out on social media to help upload the 13-volume Bhagavata Mahapuranam.Now, the entire work is available for free at Odia Wikisource.

Actions speak louder than words when it comes to preserving books in regional languages. Indian versions of Wikisource have more than 1 lakh pages of classic epics, philosophical tracts, and novels and poems in 10 languages. And the num bers are growing. “These are the books that we grow up with and connect emo tionally. Most of us would like to see them online,“ said Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikipedian and programme officer at the Centre for Internet and Society .

As Wikipedians come together in Bengaluru on Sunday to celebrate 15 years of editing and curating the encyclopedia in India, more such stories will be told. The growth has been tremendous in Indian language content creation, especially when it comes to setting up Wikisources, said A Ravishankar, programme director at the Wikimedia India chapter. Malayalam has 26,332 pages, including around 200 of the seminal books in the language. While Telugu has 29,039 pages, Bengali has around 11,000. Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, Oriya, Marathi, Gujarati and Assamese libraries are also getting bigger. The content ranges from religious texts such as Ramayan and Bible to first-ever printed literary works.

“Most of these are books in the public domain or the ones relicensed with Creative Commons licences. This allows anyone to edit or make a copy of the work, making it reusable,“ said Panigrahi. Some of the relicensed works include the Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by University of Mysore.

It isn't easy to get works online. Alex finds it difficult to procure the original texts to create their PDF versions. “Every time I go to Kerala, I look for old books,“ said Alex, who uploads the PDFs on a public domain for others to upload them. Editors are also not easy to come by . Panigrahi took to social media to find a new set of editors when he was trying to upload the Bhagavatha volumes. “Wiki's volunteer-editors have their hands full. So we appealed on social media and many people signed up,“ he said.

But the effort is worth it, said Alex. Every time he unearths an old book and posts the link on his Facebook page, the reactions are full of surprise. “Many from the younger generation don't know that Samkshepa Vedartham (the first printed work in Malayalam) was printed in Rome. Also, researchers write to me saying they are happy to see the old books online,“ he said.

Students Pitch In

The Wikimedia Foundation has tied up with various colleges to help with typing and proof-reading. Around 120 students of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in Bhubaneswar typed stanzas from the Bhagavata while Christ University students from Bengaluru uploaded chunks of the Kannada Vishwakosha as part of their curriculum.

Tech Hurdle

Though the project started in 2006 with Malayalam Wikisource, it spread to other Indian languages around five years ago. The biggest hurdle remains technology as the open source optical character recognition (OCR) software isn't compatible with many Indian languages. “Google's OCR that was launched last year is much better as it works with most Indian languages,“ said Ravishankar. The new software “extracts text from images of any printed text -and sometimes even handwriting, which opens the door to old texts, manuscripts, and more,“ reads Panigrahi's blog post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-times-of-india-january-10-2016-sandhya-soman-read-bengali-malayalam-classics-online-as-free-wiki-libraries-grow

Centre for Internet and Society

Removing Barriers to Connectivity: Connecting the Unconnected

Panelists

Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight

Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way

Events details on Wikimedia meta page

The Workshop

Participants' Feedback

Regulatory Perspectives on Net Neutrality

1. Why should we regulate the telecom sector?

2. Why should we regulate Net Neutrality? And whom should we regulate?

3. How should we regulate Net Neutrality?

3.1. What concerns does Net Neutrality raise? What harms does it entail?

3.1.1 Net Neutrality and human rights

3.2 What conditions and factors may change these concerns and the regulatory model we should adopt?

3.3 How should we deal with anti-competitive practices?

3.3.1 Lowering Switching Costs

3.3.2 Anti-competitive Practices

3.3.3 Zero-rating

3.3.3.1 Motivations for Zero-Rating

3.3.3.1.1 Corporate Social Responsibility / Incentivizing Customers to Move Up Value Chain

3.3.3.1.2 Passing on ISP Savings / Incentivizing Customers to Lower ISP's Cost

3.3.3.1.3 Unbundling Internet into Services ("Special Packs")

3.3.3.1.4 Earning Additional Revenues from Content Providers

3.3.3.1.5 Market Options for OTT-Paid Zero-Rating

3.3.3.1.6 Other options for zero-rating

3.3.3.2. What kinds of zero-rating are good

3.3.4 Cartels and Oligopoly

3.4 Reasonable Network Management Principles

Regulating the Internet

Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India, say internet groups

Reconceptualizing Privacy on Social Network(s) Sites

Recommendations for the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (Co-Win) platform

Privacy Concerns

Link with Aarogya Setu

Co-Win registration as an entry to develop health IDs?

Conclusion

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium

September 26, 2013

September 27, 2013

Winners

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop

Day 1: Building the Blocks

Introduce Yourself

Editing time

More Editing Post Lunch

Rat and frog game

Day 2: Climbing Up the Ladder

Day 3: Fresh Batch, New Start

Day 4: No Need to Say Good Bye!

Reaping the Benefits of Gamification

Reap Benefit

What is 'change' for Reap Benefit?

Discovering Gamification

Definitions

Games as a Tool to Influence Behaviour

Game Mechanics

Rewards Mechanism

Human-Centric Model

The Role of Technology and Media

Making Change

Footnotes

Sources

Reading from a Distance — Data as Text

Reading Devanagari script based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada Script

Read Our Annual Reports and Audit Reports

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2024-2025

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2023-2024

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2022-2023

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2021-2022

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Report 2020-2021

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2020-21

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Reports 2019-2020

Centre for Internet & Society Audit Report 2018-19

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2019-20

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2017-18

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2016-17

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2015-16

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2014-15

Centre for Internet & Society Annual Report 2013-14