Centre for Internet and Society

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014

subha — 2014-10-06T05:09:19Z

GLAM activities in the last two months have been quite happening!

Subhashish Panigrahi's blog post was published on OpenGLAM website on August 27, 2014.

After Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin, OpenGLAM members and other GLAM contributors met again during Wikimania London, the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement focused on what people are making with wikis and open content. There were GLAM talks, workshops, discussions and brown bag talks: in this blog I’ll go into some of the highlights, but you can find an overview of all GLAM & Free culture submissions here.

Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperation

A GLAM-Wiki evaluation workshop was organized by Beat Estermann, Maarten Brinkerink and Wikimedia Foundation’s Program Evaluation specialist Jaime Anstee to assess the impact of the past GLAM projects and to create a road map by placing evaluation parameters in place for institutional collaboration. From the GLAM wiki residency project at Wikimedia UK, Jonathan Cardy presented the evaluation process needed in place for Wikipedia-in-Residence programs. Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE)’s Lilli Iliev shared information about the evaluation practices WMDE has put in place in order to implement small to large scale GLAM projects in Germany. While working with various cultural institutions in Germany, they focused on qualitative aspects of the content acquired, on goal oriented programs like “GLAM on Tour”, and on mass outreach by popular media and post campaign impact measuring. Four groups were then formed to work on particular GLAM projects, how they plan to evaluate tangible output and measure return on investments.

Have you heard?

In the scope of the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project that he founded, Andy Marbett (http://pigsonthewing.org.uk) spoke about the beauty of having recordings of notable people where they not just pronounce their names in their native languages, but introduce themselves with their dates and places of birth. With BBC’s collaboration, this project has grew to an avenue on Wikipedia to enrich biography-articles. This is indeed a project that has run absolutely in zero cost and aims at making Wikimedians meet their stars and document their voices for ever on the Internet. The full video of the talk is available below.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-august-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-open-glam-at-wikimania-2014

open_standards-event_report_2019.pdf

karan — 2019-08-02T06:49:59Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/open_standards-event_report_2019.pdf

Open Standards Workshop at IGF '09

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:54:03Z

The Centre for Internet and Society co-organized a workshop on 'Open Standards: A Rights-Based Framework' at the fourth Internet Governance Forum, at Sharm el-Sheikh. The panel was chaired by Aslam Raffee of Sun Microsystems and the panellists were Sir Tim Berners-Lee of W3C, Renu Budhiraja of India's DIT, Sunil Abraham of CIS, Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft, and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the session with an address on various rights. Rights, he noted can range from being things like the rights to air and water to the right not to have the data carrier you use determine which movie you watch. Then, there are tensions between rights: the right to anonymity can clash with the right to know who posted information on making a bomb. Berners-Lee stated that for 2009, he has chosen to pursue one particular right: the right to government-held data. This data can include everything from where schools are to emergency services such as locations of hospitals. Today, we are talking about standards.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a fifteen-year old body in which all kinds of people come together for purposes of setting standards around the World Wide Web. Thus, everything from HTML, which is used to write Web pages to WCAG, which are guidelines to enable people with disabilities access websites through assistive technologies. W3C conducts its discussions openly: anybody who has a good idea has a right to participate in its discussions -- it does not matter who one works for, who one represents -- what does matter are the ideas one brings to the table. The kinds of standards that W3C deals with are of interest to an immensely wide-ranging group of people. Even ten-year olds have actually expressed their opinions about standards like HTML. All this openness of participation must be guaranteed while ensuring that the processes move forward.

Next spoke Renu Budhiraja of the Department of Information and Technology, which is a part of the Indian government. She started off by hoping that this workshop would be not only a platform to share knowledge, but also to reach consensus on a few matters. Next, she laid out why open standards are extremely important for the Indian government. What citizens want in their interactions with the government are ease of interaction and efficiency. For them it is immaterial whether a certain service is provided by Department A or Department B. Thus we need to move towards a single-window government service for citizens, enabling them to interact easily with the government's various departments. While such an initiative must be centralized for it to be effective, it is crucial that its implementation be decentralized and suited to each district or localities' needs.

There is, understandably, a huge institutional mechanism behind ensuring that these systems are based on open standards. We have expert committees, consisting of academics and knowledgeable bureaucrats, and working groups, which include industry groups. Through these, we have evolved a National Policy on Open Standards, which is currently in a draft stage, but shall be notified soon. This policy outlines the principles based on which particular standards required for governmental functioning are to be chosen or evolved. This document will ensure long-term accessibility to public documents and information, and seamless interoperability of various governmental services and departments. It will also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and reduce costs, and thus ensure long-term, sustainable, scalable and cost-effective solutions.

Ms. Budhiraja noted that there are a few aspects of the policy that bear discussion in a forum such as the IGF. First is the issue of whether royalty-free is the only choice for innovation. All other things equal, between royalty-free and reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) standards, of course royalty-free is to be preferred. But what if a superior technology (JPEG200 vs. JPEG) is RAND? What should the government's position be in such a case? Further, what should the government's position be when in a particular domain a RAND standard is the only option?

Next is the issue of single vs. multiple open standards. When interoperability is what we are aiming at, can multiple standards be recommended as some in the industry are asking us to do? And then is the issue of market maturity. The government sometimes finds itself in a situation where a standard is available, but well-developed products around that standard aren't and there aren't sufficient vendors using that standard. All these issues are of great practical importance when a government works on a policy document on standards.

Next up was Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society. His presentation was on open standards as citizens' and consumers' rights. He started off by citing the example of the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application (SCOSTA) standard, and the implications that the SCOSTA story has on large-scale projects such as the National Unique ID project currently under way in India. SCOSTA, an open standard, was being written off as unimplementable by all the MNC smart card vendors who wished to push RAND standards. IIT Kanpur helped the government develop a working implementation. Within twenty days, the card manufacturers submitted modified cards for compliance testing by NIC. Because of SCOSTA being an open standard, local companies also joined the tender. The cost went down from Rs. 600 per card to Rs. 30 per card. This shows the benefits of open standards as a means of curbing oligopolistic pricing, and working for the benefit of consumers.

From a rights-based perspective, access to the state machinery is a primary right. Citizens should not be required to pirate or purchase software to interact with the state. If e-governance solutions are based on proprietary standards, not all citizens would be equal. The South African example or requiring a particular browser to access the election commission's website shows that in a rather drastic fashion. When intellectual property interferes with governmental needs, governments have not been shy of issuing compulsory licences. This was seen when during the Great War the United States government pooled various flight-related patents and compulsorily licensed them, as well as what we are currently seeing with many Aids-related drugs being compulsorily licensed in developing countries. Thus, there are precedents for such licensing, and governments should explore them in the realm of e-governance. Many countries now have statutes that guarantee the right to government-held information. Government Interoperability Frameworks should take these into account, and mandate all government-to-citizen (G2C) information be transacted via open standards. This must be backed up by a strong accessibility policy to ensure that the governments don't discriminate between their citizens.

Proprietary standards act like pseudo-intellectual property rights, just as DRMs do. They add a layer on top of rights such as copyright, and can prevent the exercise of fair use and fair dealing rights because of an inability to legally negotiate the standards in which the content is encoded in a cost-free manner. In guaranteeing this balance between copyrights and fair dealing rights, free software and alternative IP models play a crucial role. Because of software patents being recognized in a few countries, development of free software which allows citizens to exercise their fair use rights is harmed in all countries.

Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft spoke next and placed the standards debate in a large context. He noted that standards are a technicality that are only a small part of the large issue which is interoperability in e-governance and delivery to citizens. The real challenges are organizational and semantic interoperability. Frequently interoperability is not harmed by technical issues, but by legal and organizational issues. Governments used to work on paper; during the shift to electronic data, they didn't engage in any organizational changes. Thus they continue to function with electronic data the same way that they did with paper-based data. Governments often lack strong privacy policies regarding the data that each of their departments holds. This harms governmental functioning. Additionally, legacy hardware and software have to be catered to by the standards we are talking about: sometimes an open standard just will not work.

Standards don't guarantee interoperability, and there is significant work done on this by noted academics ("Why Standards Are Not Enough To Guarantee End-to-End Interoperability" Lewis et al.; "Difficulties Implementing Standards" Egyedi & Dahanayake; "Standards Compliant, But Incompatible?" Egyedi et al.). Mandated standards lists will not help address interoperability issues between different implementations of the same standard. What would help? Transparency of implementations; collaboration with community; active participation in maintenance of standards, etc., would help. There is a need for continued public sector reform, with a focus on citizen-centric e-governance, and a need to engage with the question of whether government-mandated standards lists lead the market or follow the market.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at UN University, Maastricht, spoke next. He started by noting that technical standards are left to technical experts. That needs to change, which is why discussing open standards at the IGF is important. He next set off a hypothetical: imagine you go to the city council office in Sharm el Sheik, and at the parking lot there it says that your car has to be a Ford if you are to park there; or if the Dutch government insists that you have a Philips TV if you are to receive the national broadcaster's signal. While these might seem absurd, situations like this arise all the time when it comes to the realm of software. Thus, the social effects of open standards are of utmost importance, and not just their technical qualities. Analysing the social effects of open standards takes us back to the economics of technology and technological standards. Technological standards exhibit network externalities: their inherent value is less than the value of others using them. Being the only person in the world with a telephone won't be very useful. Technological standards also exhibit path dependence: once you go with one technological format, it is difficult to change over to another even if that other format is superior to the first. Thus, clearly, standards benefit when there is a 'natural monopoly'. The challenge really arises when faced with the question of how to ensure a monopoly in a technology without the supplier of that technology exhibiting monopolistic tendencies. This can only be done when the technology is open and developed openly, of which the web standards and the W3C are excellent examples. If the technology or the process are semi-open, then because of the few intellectual property rights attached to the technology, some would be better off than others. Just as governments cannot insist on driving a particular make of cars as a prerequisite for access to them, they cannot insist on using a particular proprietary standard as a means of accessing them.

Many interesting questions arose when the floor was thrown open to the audience. "Should governments only mandate a particular standard when it is certain that market maturity exists?" Not really, since governmental decisions also give signals to the market and help direct attention to those standards. It would be best if roadmaps were provided, with particular under-mature standards being designated as "preferred standards", thus helping push industry in a particular direction. Examples where this strategy has borne fruit abound. This is also the strategy found in the Australian GIF. On the issue of multiplicity of standards, Sir Tim was very clear that they have to be avoided at all costs. He gave the example of XSLT and CSS, which are both stylesheet formats. He noted that their domain of operation was very different (with one being for servers and the other for clients), so having two standards with similar functions but different domains of operation does not make them multiple standards. Multiple standards defeat the purpose of the standardization process.

It was noted that governmental choices are of practical importance to citizens. During the Hurricane Katrina emergency, the federal emergency website only worked properly if Internet Explorer was used. How do we move forward? We must move forward by having policies that strike a balance between allowing for the natural evolution of standards and stability. The Government Interoperability Frameworks must be dynamic documents, allowing for categorization between standards and having clear roadmaps to enable industry to provide solutions to the government in a timely fashion. Governments must be strong in order to push industry towards openness, for the sake of its citizens, and not let industry dictate proprietary standards as the solution. Some opined that since there are dozens of domains that governments function in, maintaining lists of standards is a time-consuming process that is not justified, but others rebutted that by noting that for enterprise architectures to work, governments have to maintain such lists internally. Opening up that list to citizens and service providers would not entail greater overheads.

Sunil Abraham talking Open Standards at IGF09

(Video added on December 30, 2009)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dcos-workshop-09

Open Standards Poster

praskrishna — 2013-09-24T08:30:35Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-standards-poster.pdf

Open standards policy in India: A long, but successful journey

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:40:53Z

Last week, India became another major country to join the growing, global open standards movement. After three years of intense debate and discussion, India's Department of IT in India finalized its Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, joining the ranks of emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa and others. This is a historic moment and India's Department of Information Technology (DIT) deserves congratulations for approving a policy that will ensure the long-term preservation of India's e-government data.

A major victory for the Open Source community is that the policy now says, "4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard."

This victory is really important to the open source community because open source and open standards have a symbiotic relationship. While open source is the freedom to modify, share and redistribute software source code, open standards refer to the freedom to encode and decode data and network protocols. One freedom without the other is a limited freedom.

In the Indian policy, proprietary software vendors wanted to define open standards in such a way that even royalty-based standards would be included. Due to stiff opposition from the free and open source software community, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), academia and others, this proposal was rolled back.

Under the National e-Government Action Plan, the Indian government is spending more than 10 billion dollars on e-governance. Some of the largest greenfield e-governance projects are in India. For example, one project aims to give a unique ID to more than 700 million Indians. Given the scale and scope of e-governance in India, the storage, archival and retrieval of e-governance data is a critical state responsibility. The standards selected by India also have global implications because the sheer volumes of usage in India, could make those standards the most popular standards in the world.

It must be remembered that while software changes every few years, the underlying data (birth and death records, census data, tax data etc.) is fairly static and might have to be preserved for centuries. If the government stores its data in a closed format, it could permanently lose access to that data if the owner of that format goes out of business or refuses to provide access to that format. If the government stores its data in proprietary formats that require royalty payments, the negotiation power of the vendor goes up as more and more data is stored in that proprietary format; a situation that no sovereign power should tolerate.

The Indian policy also states that a single open standard will be used for e-governance. This clause is also extremely important. For example, if a Central Government Ministry requests a certain set of information from state governments in India, and each state government submits the data in a different format, enormous amounts of time will be wasted in converting the data into a common format. There is also risk that data could be lost in the process of converting data from one format to another. Therefore, the usage of a single, open standard for an application area is the backbone that will unify these applications and enable the sharing of data across different applications. This will drive more efficiency in e-governance enabling policy makers and e-government practitioners to quickly pull together data from different government departments and take more informed decisions.

It was a very tough fight and the proprietary vendors used their market clout and strong field presence in their attempts to subvert open standards. For example, in the previous draft policy dated 25/11/2009, the wordings of the key section read,

"4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard. However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered."

Commenting on the final policy, veteran journalist, Glyn Moody said, “As you can see, there is no room for doubt here, no quibbling with 'RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND)' or 'Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND)' as the earlier version suggested: just a clear and simple 'Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard'.”

So how did the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community succeed against tremendous odds? Some key actions that helped us succeed are:

   1. We worked long and hard to educate the public and the media. At first, some journalists shied away from writing on this subject because they found it too arcane and complex. It took over six months of talking to mediapersons before one of the mainstream publications carried an article on open standards. Once that happened, the dam broke and other publications also started to write about this “arcane” subject.
   2. The academic community, especially in the prestigious Indian academic institutions, were very supportive of open standards. Many academicians have influential positions on government committees and their support helped.
   3. India has a very vibrant set of Civil Society Organizations. The FOSS community worked with leading CSOs like IT For Change, Center for Internet and Society, Knowledge Commons and others that are founded by people who have tremendous experience in working on technology policy issues. A loose-knit coalition was formed under the title of FOSSCOMM and some excellent representations were made to the Indian government.
   4. Many sections within government itself were firmly in favor of open standards and the community worked closely with them.
   5. The community made common cause with sections of industry that supported open standards. This helped counter the pressure from industry associations that were supporting proprietary standards.

It was a long but extremely rewarding issue to be involved in and I am documenting this in the hope that other countries can benefit from the experiences we gained in fighting for open standards in India. Jai Ho! (May you be victorious!)

Read the original here

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

Open standards can disrupt Facebook’s messaging monopoly

Admin — 2019-02-02T01:59:37Z

Facebook made the news last week when The New York Times’ Mike Isaac reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg intended to integrate the company’s three messaging platforms: WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

The blog post by Abhimanyu Ghoshal was published in The Next Web on January 30, 2019. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

We don’t have all the details of exactly how this will work. The plan is still in its early stages, and there are plenty of moving parts – legal and technical – to take care of. What’s clear is this: with more than 2.6 billion users between the platforms, this is set to impact a lot of people if it goes through – and potentially many hundreds of millions more in the following years.

While the specifics of the move are yet to be revealed, a move like this could help Facebook create more detailed profiles of its users. Even if the company encrypts communications end-to-end as it seemed to imply in its responses to NYT, it could still leverage communications metadata to target ads more accurately than you might think.

Here’s an example: without looking at your messages (because they’re encrypted), Facebook could gather data on who you chat with most often and for how long, later correlating that with the recipients’ interests from Instagram. It could then show you ads for gifts that contact may like, right around the time their birthday comes up.

Integrating these platforms could also bolster Facebook’s efforts to keep users tied into its ecosystem. That’s problematic, when you consider the larger your network of contacts is on the company’s services, the harder it is for you to leave them and use an alternative you’re more comfortable with.

Is there a way out? Pranesh Prakash – a Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, as well as a Fellow at the New America think tank – believes that the answer lies not in breaking up Facebook over privacy laws, but in competition, and regulators at the government level should demand Facebook use open standards for its messaging platforms.

Prakash explained that standards like SMTP and IMAP, which are used for facilitating email exchanges, allow for interoperability between services run by different organizations. They also let users choose the client apps they prefer for accessing their inboxes.

Facebook’s messaging services, meanwhile, run on closed standards and don’t play nice with platforms created by third parties.

This results in people becoming trapped in Facebook’s ecosystem: even if you’re opposed to using the company’s products, you can’t realistically ditch them all because your friends and family are all using its platforms.

In case you’re worried about open-source protocols not being up to the task of serving massive networks like the ones Facebook operates, consider the fact that WhatsApp runs on FunXMPP, a customized version of the open XMPP set of standards that anyone can use for their own projects.

If Facebook is doing the difficult legwork of unifying the underlying technical infrastructure of its three apps, Prakash argues, it’d do well to make its new protocol public and open-source. That way, anyone should be able to use the company’s services to reach people just the same as when they choose to use a service created by a separate entity.

Prakash said that the only way diminishing Facebook’s power in this regard is to open up access to its network of users. In doing so, it will see people stick with the company’s services because they like using them, not because they can’t stay in touch with their contacts.

Questions surrounding Facebook’s monopolistic domination of the messaging space will inevitably crop up when the company implements Zuckerberg’s plan, and this sounds like a healthy way to tackle those issues.

Naturally, that seems like it’d hurt Facebook’s bottom line – but it’s important to start thinking about realistic measures to comply with antitrust law – or risk being booted from countries that don’t appreciate the way the company does business.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-next-web-abhimanyu-ghoshal-january-30-2019-open-standards-can-disrupt-facebooks-messaging-monopoly

Open Standards

royson — 2009-02-06T08:57:18Z

Research Agenda

Documenting and analysing the development impact and total cost of ownership of open/closed/semi-closed standards being used, considered or mandated by different markets (public/private, state/national, rural/urban). Examining the degree of compliance to these standards, for example, review of e-governance websites and review of cybercafé infrastructure.
Documenting and analysing standard setting in national and at international fora (process, participants, submissions and conclusions). Correlating market and government adoption of various standards and its impact on competition, price control and technology penetration.
Collecting, archiving and standards for Indic language computing (keyboard layouts, encoding, fonts) and development (glossaries, message catalogues, dictionaries and thesauruses) perspective. Proposing solutions for various technical roadblocks that prevent large scale adoption of standards in Indic language computing. Designing algorithm and prototypes for converters between legacy standards and contemporary open standards.
Auditing e-governance infrastructure and services for adherence to accessibility related open standards. Design migration plans for infrastructure and services that do not adhere to globally accepted open standards.

Intervention Agenda

Provide feedback to the open standards policy document to be published by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology.
Advocate that all Government-to-citizen interfaces are based on open standards to ensure that citizens don’t have purchase or pirate software in order to interact with the government.
Advocate for the adoption of European Union-IDABC style Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIF) including national definitions of “open standards” that are FOSS friendly.
Advocate that all Government-to-Citizen interfaces adhere to accessibility related open standards to ensure use by disabled, illiterate, neo-literate and aged citizens.
Advocate for technology- and vendor-neutral tenders which mandate the use of open standards where appropriate for government ICT purchases.
Advocate the use of open standards for the purposes of archiving, media-monitoring, dissemination of research inputs/outputs and Right to Information/Freedom of Information activities by publicly-funded organisations.

Resources

Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems – Berkman Centre for Internet and Society
Research outputs of the Government Interoperability Framework (GIF) Project managed by Asia Pacific Development Information Programme – United Nations Development Programme (UNDP-APDIP)
Noooxml.org – Campaign against OOXML
Consortium.info – Website managed by Andrew Updegrove
Open Video Bill of Rights
Dynamic Coalition for Open Standards – Internet Governance Forum

Open Access

Context

Most research and knowledge generation in India (and elsewhere) happens owing to public funding. As new knowledge is built on what is already known, open and free access to what is already known will speed up generation of new knowledge. That is why funding agencies such as the research councils and the Wellcome Trust in the UK, and NIH and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA have mandated open access for research they support. The Faculty of Arts and Science and the Faculty of Law at Harvard University and the professors at the School of Education at Stanford University have adopted a mandate for making all their research publications open access.

In India open access is picking up rather slowly. About a hundred Indian journals are open access journals—actually hybrid journals with the print version earning subscription revenue and the online version given away free—and there are about 35 open access archives. Only one institution—NIT, Rourkela—has mandated open access for faculty research publications.

India has an excellent open educational resource programme, NPTEL, jointly managed by the IITs and IISc, in which lectures by first rate teachers (delivered at the IITs and IISc) are filmed and made available in three formats: web, video and YouTube. This programme is supported by the Ministry of HRD.

Intervention Agenda

We need to design and implement a focused open access advocacy programme. It should have two components: top down and bottom up. While generally bottom up programmes reaching out to the grassroots are a better approach, in India we may have to use the top down approach as well (as we are still hierarchical and feudal).
The top down part should address the science advisers (there are two of them, PSA and SAC), the secretaries and senior technocrats in the Ministries and Departments relevant to S&T (DST, DSIR, DBT, Earth Sciences, DAE, DRDO, ISRO, CSIR, ICAR, ICMR, etc.), Chairmen of UGC, AICTE, the Indian Medical Council, the Minister of S&T, and parliamentarians.
The bottom-up part should focus on publishing researchers (professors, readers, post-docs, PhD students, chairpersons of department, deans, librarians, vice chancellors, etc., in universities; research scientists and directors in research laboratories; editors of research journals; and academies and professional societies).
We need to promote the setting up of interoperable institutional open access archives.
We need to promote open access journals. Many Indian journals are published by professional societies and research institutions.
We need to facilitate training programmes for setting up and running institutional archives and for converting journals into open access journals. Expertise for conducting such training is available at IISc-NCSI, NIC, ISI-DRTC, etc. If need be, we could even help organize training programmes with experts from elsewhere (e.g. University of Southampton for the institutional archives part and the Open Journal System or Bioline International for the OA journal part).
There is widespread misunderstanding about authors' rights. By and large Indian researchers give away copyright to journal publishers. They just sign blindly on the dotted line in the copyright agreement form sent by the publisher. We should launch a campaign to persuade authors to use an addendum (readily available from ARL and Science Commons). We should also talk to funding agencies and heads of institutions about the need to retain copyright to work performed in India with public funding.
We should identify organizations that are likely to support our programmes and plan joint programmes/ projects. For example, we can work with the Society for Scientific Values, New Delhi, in creating awareness on copyright related issues. We can work closely with IISc-NCSI on training programmes.
We can institute some awards to recognize meritorious contributions to the promotion of open access.
In the West many studies have been carried out to demonstrate that open access helps improve visibility and citability. We can carry out similar studies in India.
We can promote science evaluation methods using open access data (Google Scholar, for example).

Resources

Bibliography of open access

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Bibliography_of_open_access

Open Access News [a blog maintained by Prof. Peter Suber]

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges, a Handbook, EUR 23459, European Commission Directorate General for Research, 2008.
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, a blog maintained by Heather Morrison. http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/
John Willinsky: The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA), 2005.
Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario, by Anup K Das (Unesco Regional Office, New Delhi), 2008.
Richard Poynder's series of interviews with open access experts, Open and Shut.
American Scientist Open Access Form (Listserv) moderated by Stevan Harnad.
Association of Research Libraries SPARC OA Forum
Writings of Stevan Harnad, Alma Swan, Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/public-accountability/open-standard

Open Spectrum for Development India Case Study

praskrishna — 2012-07-26T08:17:15Z

This report is authored by Shyam Ponappa and jointly produced by APC and CIS.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/publications/india-untapped-potential

Open Spectrum for Development in the Context of the Digital Migration

praskrishna — 2011-10-13T01:14:26Z

Concise Description:

While the communication technologies that use the radio spectrum continue to develop at a brisk pace, our general approach to regulating the spectrum has not changed much since the 1930s when the spectrum was regulated to a very high degree in order to assure that interference between signals would not occur. For this reason, frequencies are assigned for specific uses and overseen quite closely by national regulators as well as an international system of governance. However, as technology rapidly changes, approaches to managing the spectrum should change as well.

Around the world, countries are migrating their broadcast systems –in particular, television- from analogue transmitters and receivers to digital ones. Digital broadcasting utilises the spectrum more efficiently, generally allowing for more channels in the space where one analogue channel could exist. This provides opportunity for other uses of the freed spectrum.

This digital migration creates the opportunity for improving how spectrum can be used and regulated. In particular, for expanding internet access. For this opportunity to realise, new means should be built into all spectrum allocation regimes. Open spectrum is one approach to spectrum management that would allow various users to utilise parts of the spectrum that are available. Sharing the spectrum in such a way would create a “spectrum commons” and would require a simple set of rules for communicating with one another and making decisions. But even if some frequencies are set aside as commons, more transparent and clear ways to regulate the spectrum being used by all stakeholders -including broadcasters, mobile companies and the military- need to be set.

This workshop will be aimed at identifying current practices that are contributing to build the spectrum commons, as well as debating different perspectives on policy and regulatory issues involved in spectrum management and its impacts on development.

In this workshop we will explore alternative regulatory frameworks in different contexts and regions, considering how technological developments can shape the future of spectrum-based communication. Considering, in particular, the opportunities brought by the transition to digital broadcasting systems.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?

Emerging Issues

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes

If so, please provide the link to the report:

http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposalsReports2010View&wspid=110

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

Moderator:

- Claire Sibthorpe, Maple Consulting Services, UK

Panelists:

Steve Song, Village Telco, South Africa
Muriuki Mureithi, Researcher, Summit Strategies ltd, Kenya
Carlos Afonso, Instituto NUPEF, Brazil
Willie Currie, Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, South Africa
Giacomo Mazzone, European Broadcasting Union, Switzerland
Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, USA
Paul Mitchell, Microsoft Corporation, USA

Remote moderator:

Henrik Almström, APC, South Africa

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:

Association for Progressive Communications (APC) (civil society)

KictaNet (multistakeholder network)

Balancing Act (private sector)

Centre for Internet and Society (civil society)

Organization:Association for Progressive Communications

Contact Person: Pablo Accuosto

Workshop Number 121

See the background paper here

See the details on IGF website here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/open-spectrum-for-development-in-the-context-of-the-digital-migration

Open Source Project Brings 11th Century Kannada Verses Online

subha — 2014-04-06T06:00:47Z

The post was co-authored by Pavithra Hanchagaiah, Omshivaprakash H L and Subhashish Panigrahi and published in the March issue of Foss Force.

Click to read the original published on the website of Foss Force here.

Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing in Kannada poetry that evolved in the 11th century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century as a part of the Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume set, “Samagra Vachana Samputa,” by the Government of Karnataka, a state in South West India, have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing the preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya and ready to enrich Kannada WikiSource.


Palm leaf of 11th and 12th Century with Vachana poems in Kannada language

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O. L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra to easily access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had challenges in using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII and searching text was a huge problem. Pavithra Hanchagaiah started helping to collect information about about vachanas and document them into Unicode by writing scripts to customize open source software to convert the Kannada fonts from ASCII into Unicode.

After further discussions, it was decided to get thousands of vachanas into a database, making them easily searchable with an index. This required us to build a platform on which this could be done. The fruits of our labors will help linguistic researchers and students as well as the public at large, anybody who’s interested in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime, Pavithra was running various scripts to fix errors in the conversion of the ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to be consumed by the modules developed for the concordance. We spent weekends and holidays executing this project from home and would sync up once in a while online.	Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash H L

After further discussions, it was decided to get thousands of vachanas into a database, making them easily searchable with an index. This required us to build a platform on which this could be done. The fruits of our labors will help linguistic researchers and students as well as the public at large, anybody who’s interested in reading and studying Vachana literature.

With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime, Pavithra was running various scripts to fix errors in the conversion of the ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to be consumed by the modules developed for the concordance. We spent weekends and holidays executing this project from home and would sync up once in a while online.

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash H L

With constant feedback and guidance from Mr. Swamy and Vasudendra, we learned how a concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to do their research. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements and managed the entire project. Free and open source software technologies were used for keeping the platform active. Pavithra was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and offered valuable input through suggestions, feedback and Q&A.

Working system

At present, the system has around 200,000 unique words in the repository. It was an extensive learning process, as we used our free time to solve real time issues. Moreover, it was a work of the Kannada language that needed quick attention. Vachana Sanchaya is meant to be more than just a repository of the text online; it’s meant to be a tool for researchers.

For example, as a user searches the words on our system, he or she can see who has used the word in which Vachanas. To improve readability, the searched text string is highlighted in each Vachana that is displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakaara, the user needs only to click on his or her name on the graph provided on the result page. We have used the MediaWiki jquery-ime input tool architecture that helps us provide the user with the ability to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for a search.

Public response

We are glad to see people accessing vachanas from our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. Thousands read them every day and it has become a part of many people’s daily routine. There have been more than 50,000 page views on social networks and 500,000 page views on our site in the first few months after our platform’s public launch. Some of the most commonly searched Kannada words are “ಕರ್ಮ”(Karma en: Work/Deed), “ಸತ್ಯ” (Sathya en: Truthfulness) and “ನದಿ” (River).

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,
ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ, ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು. ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

– An example of a vachana from the Vachana Sanchaya project.

Plans for the future

Our system is extensible with respect to adding new features. We have a review desk for researchers to help with the review of content. Later we will be adding required references to Vachanas from various research works on this literature. The content is available for the public through OpenData API and will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource once the review work is complete. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers and anyone interested in working to build linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages.

This system will evolve so it can be used for other literature projects. Vachana Sahitya will further help us to initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches get together to tag the words, glossary, etc. We can also add various language tools such as a spell checker and grammar checker through crowd-sourcing development. The forthcoming project under the “Kannada Sanchaya” are Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya which are already in the pipeline. Our idea is to extend this platform to include works from antiquity (Vyasa, for example) to the early 20th century (e.g., Muddanna) and possibly even include contemporary literature that’s available in the public domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/foss-force-open-source-project-brings-11th-century-kannada-verses-online

Open Source India 2015

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:46:46Z

The twelfth Open Source India event organized by EFY Group was held at NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bangalore on November 19 and 20, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi attended the event for the first day.

Open Source India (OSI) is the premierconference in Asia targeted at nurturing and promoting the Open Source ecosystem in the subcontinent. Started as LinuxAsia in 2004, OSI has been at the helm of bringing together the Open Source industry and the community in the last 11 years. The 12th edition of OSI this year aimed to take this event a notch higher by focusing on the Open Source ecosystem in Asia, and more specifically, in India.

For more information see the brochure of the event. Schedule of the event on Day 1 here and Schedule of the event on Day 2 here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-india-2015

Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface

subha — 2016-08-03T02:00:36Z

Santali, an aboriginal South Asian language, has a brand new freely licensed font and set of cross-platform open source input tools on the way.

The article was published by Opensource.com on July 8, 2016.

More than 6.2 million people in four South Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan) speak Santali. In India, it is one of the 22 major languages as mentioned in the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution. However, Santali is not the official language in regions where it is largely spoken, nor is it widely taught in schools. A large segment of the native speakers are socially and economically disadvantaged, which doesn't help either.

When it comes to mainstream media and the Internet, use of the native Santali alphabet, Ol Chiki, is limited. Right now there exists no single, fully Unicode-compliant website with Santali content. The Indian government's Ministry of Tribal Affairs, which is set up for the development of many aboriginal groups in the country, does not have its web portal in Santali or any other indigenous language. However, the government announced last year that it would make native Indian language input mandatory in mobile phones.

The need for a typeface, especially in a universal encoding standard like Unicode, became apparent during a three-month digitization project on Odia Wikisource, an Odia-language online library and sister project of Wikipedia. Many of the students who were part of the digitization project were native speakers. The students shared how they couldn't opt for education in their own language, thus affecting their knowledge and understanding of the written language.

The question whether digital activism can help revive indigenous languages was discussed at the 2015 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Cebu City, Philippines. After the event, a pilot project was started within the Center for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program to create a freely licensed font and input methods so that anyone can easily type in their native language.

The typeface family was designed by type designer Pooja Saxena and went through several rounds of review by language experts. However, the typeface is still one step away from reality. Because of this, two input methods will be made available along with the typeface; Sarjom Baha, a phonetic input method so that every common user can easily type the they pronounce the words, and InScript, a keyboard layout standard for Indian scripts. Even though the original plan was to create a editor community to contribute to the Santali Wikipedia and bring it live from Incubator, outputs will just be distributed for the users to use them.

The input method will also be available on Mediawiki so that the input methods will be available on Wikipedia and all its sister projects. Hopefully in the future, a group of contributors will use the tools, contribute, and bring the Santali Wikipedia live!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-july-8-2016-open-source-effort-gives-indigenous-language-an-official-typeface

Open sesame

praskrishna — 2015-09-25T01:31:49Z

The government’s email is shockingly vulnerable.

The article was published in the Hindu on September 22, 2015. CIS research on private email accounts is mentioned.

As the Centre moves towards smart cities and a Digital India, some critics have cited the country’s increased vulnerability to cyber attacks. To be sure, cyber threat groups could disrupt our infrastructure by taking control of many systems. Such attacks could be quite damaging. Yes, they are rare today, but are much more likely to arise in conjunction with traditional armed conflicts. Cyber criminal groups target Indian organisations on a daily basis.

Almost two years ago, the IT minister’s office triggered national outrage when it used a public email service for official communication. There was much hand-wringing about security practices in a ministry responsible for setting the technology direction (secure email policy) for the country. Then in December 2013, the Centre for Internet and Society revealed that up to 90 per cent of Indian government officials used private email accounts for professional purposes.

A big deal

Between then and now, we’ve read about a new email policy and revelations of several cyber attacks on government officials. And FireEye revealed a decade-long cyber espionage operation by a group we call ‘APT30’, which is likely to be sponsored by China. How did they break in? By sending targeted ‘spear-phish’ emails with malware attached.

Email doesn’t sound like a big deal. Most of us have been using it for over a decade, and think we know how to use it right. But when you’re in a position of authority with access to sensitive information, you shouldn’t leave it to chance.

Today, state-sponsored attackers craft these spear-phishing emails after considerable research. APT30 carefully researched their targets and crafted mails which would appear extremely relevant, with interesting content. The moment a victim would open an attachment, an exploit would secretly install a backdoor. Through that backdoor, groups can compromise the employee’s entire network and extricate sensitive data. Groups bent on destruction can deploy malware to destroy the data. They could also take control of systems managing infrastructure or industrial processes and create havoc.

Spear-phishing has an open rate of 70 per cent, while regular mass emails had an open rate of just 3 per cent. Email is the front- door for today’s threat groups. That’s why governments around the world are improving the security of their email systems to fend off these spear-phishing threats.

Public concerns

When government employees use webmail for official business, they trade away their security for convenience. The emails they receive are no longer screened by cyber security solutions, which detect advanced targeted email attacks before they reach the inbox. In addition, because people typically retrieve their webmail in a browser, attackers have a larger attack surface to exploit when carrying out their attacks. For example, attackers can coax victims to click on a link to a website, which delivers an exploit via Adobe Flash.

Webmail opens the door to threats that would otherwise have been intercepted. When our government employees use webmail for official business, they leave the front door wide open to threats. One of the best steps we can take towards improving our government’s cyber security defences is abandoning public email services.

The writer is a software architect at the cyber security firm FireEye

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-september-22-2015-atul-kabra-open-sesame

Open Secrets

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:21:21Z

We need to think of privacy in different ways — not only as something that happens between people, but between you and corporations.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was originally published in the Indian Express on October 27.

If you are a part of any social networking site, then you know that privacy is something to be concerned about. We put out an incredible amount of personal data on our social networks. Pictures with family and friends, intimate details about our ongoing drama with the people around us, medical histories, and our spur-of-the-moment thoughts of what inspires, peeves or aggravates us. In all this, the more savvy use filters and group settings which give them some semblance of control about who has access to this information and what can be done with it.

But it is now a given that in the world of the worldwide web, privacy is more or less a thing of the past. Data transmits. Information flows. What you share with one person immediately gets shared with thousands. Even though you might make your stuff accessible to a handful of people, the social networks work through a "friend-of-a-friend effect", where others in your networks use, like, share and spread your information around so that there is an almost unimaginable audience to the private drama of our lives. Which is why there is a need for a growing conversation about what being private in the world of big data means.

Privacy is about having control over the data and some ownership about who can use it and for what purpose. Interface designs and filters that allow limited access help this process. The legal structures are catching up with regulations that control what individuals, entities, governments and corporations can do with the data we provide. However, most people think of privacy as a private matter. Just look at last month's conversations around Facebook's new privacy policies, which no longer allow you to hide. If you are on Facebook, people can find you using all kinds of parameters — meta data — other than just your name. They might find you through hobbies, pages you like, schools you have studied in, etc. This can be scary because it means that based on particular activities, people can profile and follow you. Especially for people in precarious communities — the young adults, queer people who might not be ready to be out of the closet, women who already face increased misogyny and hostility online. This means they are officially entering a stalkers' paradise.

While those concerns need to be addressed, there is something that seems to be missing from the debate. Almost all of these privacy alarms are about what people can do to people. That we need to protect ourselves from people, when we are in public — digital or otherwise. We are reminded that the world is filled with predators, crackers and scamsters, who can prey on our personal data and create physical, emotional, social and financial havoc. But this is the world we already know. We live in a universe filled with perils and we have learned and coped with the fact that we navigate through dangerous spaces, times and people all the time. The digital is no different than the physical when it comes to the possible perils that we live in, though digital might facilitate some kinds of behaviour and make data-stalking easier.

What is different with the individualised, just-for-you crafted world of the social web is that there are things which are not human, which are interacting with you in unprecedented ways. Make a list of the top five people you interact with on Facebook. And you will be wrong. Because the thing that you interact with the most on Facebook, is Facebook. Look at the amount of chatter it creates — How are you feeling today?; Your friend has updated their status; Somebody liked your comment… the list goes on. In fact, much as we would like to imagine a world that revolves around us, we know that there are a very few people who have the energy and resources to keep track of everything we do. However, no matter how boring your status message or how pedestrian your activity, deep down in a server somewhere, an artificial algorithm is keeping track of everything that you do. Facebook is always listening, and watching, and creating a profile of you. People might forget, skip, miss or move on, but Facebook will listen, and remember long after you have forgotten.

If this is indeed the case, we need to think of privacy in different ways — not only as something that happens between people, but between people and other entities like corporations. The next time there is a change in the policy that makes us more accessible to others, we should pay attention. But what we need to be more concerned about are the private corporations, data miners and information gatherers, who make themselves invisible and collect our personal data as we get into the habit of talking to platforms, gadgets and technologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-october-27-2013-nishant-shah-open-secrets

Open Movement in India (2013-23): The Idea and Its Expressions

soni — 2024-02-13T02:57:29Z

This report identifies some broad patterns that have materialized in the Open Movement in the country in the last decade. The report is based on a reading of the available literature on selected projects and conversations with academicians and advocates of the Open. The rough outline of the Open initiatives is accompanied by reflections on the nature of the Open here and the need to envision it differently from what it currently is.

The report was prepared by Soni Wadhwa, and the visual elements of this study have been sourced by Joseph Francis. CIS’s Access to Knowledge team is grateful to Soni for embarking on the study and making the recommendations. The full report can be read here.

Open, as an idea, has not received systematic attention in India. Openness as a philosophy is rooted in the belief that sharing ideas and resources is healthy for the knowledge economy, especially in contemporary times. This sharing does not take anything away from any entity; rather, it enables collaboration and innovation for the larger social good. With the Internet and digital technology, one can see the faster spread of such innovation across the globe while also allowing for plenty of room for its adaptation to regional contexts. Anchored in the thought and efforts of individuals such as Richard Stallman (1992; 2002; 2006; 2009) and Tim Berners-Lee (Berners Lee, 2004; Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila, 2001; Berners-Lee et al 1992; Berners-Lee and Tim, 2010; Berners-Lee, Tim and Hendler, 2001; Berners-Lee, Tim and Shadbollt, 2011; Bizer, Heath and Berners-Lee 2011) who take a view contrary to that of keeping public funded research and innovation locked away under copyright and patent laws, the Open Movement originated in the Global North.

In the West, specifically in the USA, with the support from the institutions such as the Hewlett Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the manifestation of the Open Movement through the push for OER (Open Educational Resources) translated into a greater uptake from educational institutions such as Rice University and the MIT (through MIT OCW – Open CourseWare)(Bliss and Smith, 2017). With prestigious universities offering MOOCs (massive open online courses) through platforms such as edX and Coursera, educational resources have come to be seen as a social good: keeping them available for mass access has been an intentional move towards equal access to quality educational materials. In addition to OER, Open Access (the idea that research funded by public funds need to be made available publicly rather than behind a paywall erected by commercial publishers), as an expression of the Open Movement, has also been present in institutional funding mechanisms in the West, again, especially in the USA. A lot of research emerging out of grants extended to individuals and institutions have space for allocation of funds towards the cost of Open Access publishing for dissemination of results. Several other initiatives such as the Creative Commons, and the Wikimedia Foundation have been working towards making Openness a reality by charting out various projects, pathways, and initiatives to keep knowledge accessible to all for learning as well as collaboration.

In India, the state of the Open Movement is thrown into stark relief by the much longer and much more engaged Western imagination and practice of Openness. Indeed, studying its contours here is equivalent to studying its absences and is therefore very challenging. Here, Open, as an idea, has come via the West and still seems to be struggling to be defined and accepted as an ideal to strive towards. It is an alien concept, deeply misunderstood by the stakeholders who control sharing of knowledge resources: policy makers, legislators, leaders of research and institutions, and researchers and academicians in general.

To suggest another example, a pilot survey of Indian faculty members’ attitudes towards use of Open Knowledge sources such as Wikipedia in Indian classrooms reveals that faculty members are very suspicious and skeptical of such sources. They see it as a source of misinformation and therefore, as unreliable.What gets missed is the idea that the content on these sources is not merely for consumption of information and knowledge but are also platforms for knowledge creation and collaboration. In contrast to the two scenarios of OER and Open Access mentioned above, India does not show a long history of organized effort towards making information and knowledge accessible to all, not just through earmarking funds or mechanisms for making publicly funded research available in the public domain via Open Access, but through nurturing a culture of the Open as the default mode of dissemination.

What, then, are we to make of the direction in which the Open Movement is headed in India? Is it possible to shape its trajectory in India? Is it possible to ascertain the ways in which the ideas or benefits of the Open can be made to resonate with the Indian educational and research scenario? Can Indian educators and researchers afford to stay out of the Open ecosystem? What alternative modes of innovation do they champion? These are the questions that this study of the Open Movement in India in the last decade (2013-2023) seeks to explore.

The study is not an exhaustive one: it looks at only some examples that engage with the idea of the Open. The selective nature of the study is informed by two rationales. One, an all-encompassing review would be impossible given the constraints on time and resources: indeed, such a review would be the task of a full-fledged tracking project (which is one of the futures that this report suggests at the end). Two, given that Open does not have a clear pathway or a central, strategic vision to drive it as a movement, the selection of projects themselves is a symptom of the disjointed ways in which the idea of Open struggles to take shape or survive in India.

The year 2013 has been chosen as a starting point for this exploration because it was the year the Wikimedia Foundation extended a grant to the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to work with various Wikipedia communities in India towards the growth of the Open ecosystem in India. This last decade then is of grave importance to the CIS because it helps the organization reflect on their own work vis-a-vis that of other Open advocates CIS’s work, since then, is available on its website through details of its initiatives via its Access to Knowledge and Openness Programmes (see, for instance, their work on bridging gender gap on Indian Wikimedia communities, apart from a host of other training and advocacy initiatives here). This study is an aid to survey the idea and expressions of the Open as a broader movement and thus help CIS reflect on new directions and strategies to be pursued in the near future, to begin with.

However, there is more to the year 2013 than the happenstance of the grant to CIS per se: indeed, one can spot other organized efforts emerging in the Indian ecosystem since then. NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), which was established in 2003, began to offer MOOCs on its platform in 2014. Coincidentally, 2013 was also the year the Bichitra Project (an online variorum of the work of the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore), funded by the Ministry of Culture, went live. Together, the international foray into the Indian Open Movement and the governmental gravitas to strive towards making education and the literature of a great Indian author) accessible provide the rationale for this study’s focus on the examination of the nature of championing for the cause of the Open, its successes, failures, and potential for its growth in the next decade.

The approach or methodology to explore answers to these questions involved: analysis of primary as well as secondary research available on the different initiatives in India; interactions with experts working in the Open domain in India including some Indian academicians, especially on the discussion of Open Access which impacts their publishing record, and in turn, impacts their career advancement. The reading and the conversations supplemented each other in the process of investigation: the existing literature provided facts through texts (blogs, papers, documentation on websites and so on) while the interactions opened up more nuances of intersections through perspectives that do not always make it to the static texts.

Any study on the Open Movement in India owes a huge debt to Arul George Scaria’s gargantuan Open Science India Report (2019). At over 350 pages, it is a detailed study of Open Access projects and also includes a survey conducted among academic fraternity. It also offers concrete suggestions to strengthen access in research. It is remarkable for the larger view it takes of access to include access for persons with disabilities and access in terms of language, suggesting that research should also be accessible in Indian languages, and also in jargon-free English for wider audiences. Apart from Scaria’s study, there are journalistic pieces about Open Data in India, given the relevance it has for governance.

This current study does not aspire to be monumental like Scaria’s. However, it is hoped that its relevance to the ongoing conversations about openness would be noted at at least two levels. One, between 2019 (when Scaria’s report was published) and 2023 (the end point of this study), socioeconomic changes such as COVID-19 and the resulting remote work, one expects, have highlighted the significance of openness. For instance, given the serious constraints it posed for travel, a lot of commercial publishers kept their resources open so that further research, within medicine and outside, could keep happening. Thus, it becomes imperative to understand if the Indian ecosystem displayed any stronger endeavor towards openness. To anticipate a couple of suggestions discussed in the report below, certain things such as Indian researchers’ apathy or disdain for Open Access has not quite changed in the span of these four years. However, Government of India’s open initiatives such as Anuvadini and Bhashini around tools for navigating and producing content in Indian languages have started to appear.

Two, Scaria’s study subsumed all knowledge under “science”: in other words, science, in his report, is a metonym for knowledge. This current study, in being inclusive of humanities and the arts, especially as relevant to Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), engages with knowledge or movement in general irrespective of its disciplinary boundaries.

With that statement on where this report is situated, some notes about its structure are in order. This study begins with an overview of the legal and policy environment in India. It then moves on to explore the nature of Open projects in India. There are many ways to organize the narrative around Openness, with the domain wise bifurcation of the different aspects of the Open (The OPEN Movements, 2023). In contrast, this goes on to organize the projects around positionalities, rather than the domains. That is, the different projects and initiatives are narrativised as:

Public funded projects: These are endeavors emerging from funds provided by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture and distributed via grants to Higher Education Institutes in India, especially the IITs. They stand out as one category in that they are characterized by:

The vision to provide basic infrastructure of education and archival material in the public domain
The capacity to think and execute in terms of massive impact and scale
A wide scope for aiming higher in terms of innovation, approach, and access

Volunteer undertakings: These are projects undertaken by non governmental organizations such as the Sanchaya Foundation, SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre) and FOSSUnited characterized by:

A niche focus on a language or a domain or an audience
A preoccupation with developing a community rather than delivering an output
A qualitative aspect to engagement and documentation, as opposed to impact in terms of numbers

Within volunteer undertakings, the role of philanthropic foundations is very briefly touched upon. There are entities such as the SRTT (Sir Ratan Tata Trust) and SDTT (Sir Dorabji Tata Trust) that supported the cause of the Open in the initial stages via their investment in the larger educational and cultural cause. These foundations also seem to have discontinued their efforts in the long term perhaps given the scope of work involved. In addition to philanthropic foundations, mention is also made of international projects. The international Open Knowledge projects in India involve the Wikimedia Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that have funded various initiatives in India and have continued to stay invested in the larger vision as well as execution of Openness through their grants.

The discussion of the above mentioned types of projects is followed by an examination of the attitudes of academicians teaching at Higher Education Institutes towards Open Access as a specific niche within the Open Movement. Conversation with faculty members in different institutions reveals that Open as an idea is not quite clear to the academia, or at least occupies a space of dissonance: while it is desired as an ideal, it is very strongly constrained by the judgments of fellow peers and employing institutions. In contrast, conversations with experts in Open Access reveals that Open Access deserves a much stronger effort: not just to push for policy changes but also to decolonize Indian academia.

The study concludes with some threads that can be pursued from the projects the Open Movement in India has witnessed in the last decade. These points of engagement could become points of reflection for further initiatives in the next decade or two.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-movement-in-india-idea-and-its-expressions