Centre for Internet and Society

Odia Wikipedia to Digitise 14 Books

praskrishna — 2014-03-31T14:29:43Z

On the occasion of the 79th Odisha Day (Utkal Divas) on April 1, the Odia Wikipedia has decided to take up a new project for digitisation of 11 books of eminent Odia author Dr Jagannath Mohanty.

This article was published in the Pioneer on March 30, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

According to Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge) of Centre for Internet and Society Bengaluru Subhasis Panigrahi, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) would take up the digitisation project where KISS students would type them on WikiSource, a sister project of Wikipedia.

These books include children’s literature, travelogues and biographical essays penned by Dr Mohanty.Digitisation of three more books, two in Odia Jati, Jagruti O Pragati (on people and culture of Odisha) and Bhasa O Jatiyata in Odia (based on research on Odia language), and an English book Classical Odia (on the literary heritage of Odia) will be also be inaugurated on this day.

All these digitised books will be made available on the Internet with open access through free licences. More than 5,000 pages will be digitised in these two projects.Several public and private organisations have started making serious efforts after Odia got the classical language status recently.

To discuss the need for many new tools and technological advancement, a seminar will be held at Jayadev Bhawan here on March 29. Prof Udayanath Sahu and writers Asit Mohanty and Dr Lenin Mohanty will discuss about spell check for Odia, use of Odia language in the media and tools for typing in Odia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/daily-pioneer-state-editions-bhubaneswar-odia-wikipedia-to-digitise-14-books

Odia Wikipedia meets Google Developer Group

Sailesh Patnaik — 2015-07-16T13:17:07Z

This is a guest post by Wikimedian Sailesh Patnaik who has been a ardent contributor in Odia-language Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and has led outreach and partnership building initiatives to grow the Wikimedia projects in Odia and other Indian languages. In this post Sailesh shares his personal experience from his interaction at the Google Extended I/O organised by Google Developer Group in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. All the views are author’s personal views.

On this June 14 Google Developer Group Bhubaneswar organised an extended I/O at Bhubaneswar. To my surprise I found that there were more than 60 participants attending the conference. Basanta Kumar Maharana. TELL WHO HE IS, was the speaker in the event. Basanta shared his memories from Google I/O 2015, San Francisco and demonstrated about the new launch and updates of Google. It was quite interesting for me to learn about various Google apps (?) kike Google cardboard, Android M, etc.

In an informal interaction with the host Sanjib Parida, he proposed me to speak about Odia Wikipedia there who came to know about the project while attending Odia Wikipedia's 13th anniversary.

I started my talk by asking four questions to the audience:

How many of the audience know about Wikipedia? (Everyone raised hands.)
Who have copied content from Wikipedia for assignments? (People giggled about it, 50-60% of the participants nodded saying yes!)
Who knows that anyone can “edit” Wikipedia? (the count reduced to about 10-20%)
Who knows about Odia Wikipedia and contributes in creating and editing articles? (Only 4-5 people said yes, I found 2-3 of them being contributors to Odia Wikipedia)

I started my talk with a brief introduction to the history of Odia Wikipedia and how it was started in 2002 as one of the first four Indic language Wikipedia projects along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi.

Odia Wikipedia was in dormant for the next eight years which was intervened when Wikimedians like Subhashish Panigrahi, Ashutosh Kar, Anshuman Giri, Mrutyunjaya Kar and others started building a community to improve and increase the content of Odia Wikipedia. Now we have grown as a community consisting about 17 active editors and the project has more than 8800 articles. The monthly page view of Odia Wikipedia has grown to more than 800,000 from merely 200,000 in 2011. We have three active Odia-language Wikimedia projects; Odia Wikipedia, the largest Odia online encyclopedia, online library Odia Wikisource, and multilingual online dictionary Odia Wiktionary. Odia Wikipedia community has not limited their work only in editing articles, rather has expanded into many other aspects of Odia computing. On the day of Odia Wikipedia’s 13th anniversary it has launched a converter that can convert many non-Unicode encodings into Unicode. We have been supported by CIS-A2K for many activities to grow our community and the Odia Wikimedia projects. Like Odia Wikipedia we have 20 more Wikipedia projects in other Indic languages and in over 288 languages globally. Hindi Wikipedia among all the Indic Wikipedia projects has the highest number of articles whereas Malayalam Wikipedia has the highest number of quality articles.


Pictured above: Participants at the conference organized by the Google Developer Group at Bhubaneswar

Some of the state governments have been quite open and positive in bringing Wikipedia into academics. The Government of Kerala has introduced Wikipedia contribution in its curriculum for BA and MA students and The Government of Tamilnadu has introduced Tamil Wikipedia to participants at the International Tamil Conference which helped the Tamil Wikimedia community in expanding the community. Awareness and community building are two major challenges for us at this moment. I invited the participants there to take part in the Wikimedia movement.

I touched upon the Odia input for the audience. While it was quite difficult a few years back for Odia input it is no longer a challenge. With the help of the Android app “Indic Keyboard” we can also edit Odia Wikipedia from mobile phones. I myself have used it for editing Wikipedia, for tweeting and posting Facebook status in Odia. After the talk I was asked a few questions. There are two important ones I would like to share here. To the question “how can I contribute in Odia Wikipedia? Do I have to install any keyboard for it?” I elaborated how anyone can edit and expand articles or create new Wikipedia articles in Odia just by creating a new account and logging in to https://or.wikipedia.org, and how the Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia have an input tool called Universal Language Selector (ULS) enabled in them and one does not need to install any additional input method. I was asked by one from the here is no support from the government at this moment but we are constant effort to collaborate audience about the Government of Odisha helping to grow Odia Wikipedia.

Many participants came and personally greeted me after the event was over. I was really excited to share the news about our (Odia Wikimedia community's plans for creating Bhubaneswar Wiki Group/WikiTungi with two active communities in engineering colleges like CET and KIIT. It was a wonderful experience at Google I/O and I hope to grow our Wikimedia community by collaborating with more like minded communities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-meets-google-developer-group

Odia Wikipedia celebrates Odisha Day, brings 14 copyright-free Odia books and a free Odia font!

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T06:16:15Z

Odisha Day 2014 was celebrated on March 29, 2014. Brokenscooter.com has published a report of the event in its website.

Read the original post here.

The Odia Wikimedia community celebrated “Odisha Day” on 29th March at Jayadev Bhawan. Inaugurating this event, eminent linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak said, ‘Collaborative effort and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language an culture’. He also discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. Majority of the Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessible. He discussed about the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts.

Odia Wikipedia has been trying to popularize use of Odia language in the Internet since 2002. Available at or.wikipedia.org it is now 6000 articles rich and growing. More than 470,000 visitors visit Odia Wikipedia every month which also gives it the status of the largest Odia encyclopedia on the Internet. To enrich the online encyclopedia and getting more books digitized, Wikipedians organized a two day event at Jayadev Bhawan. Along with Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Professor Udayanath Sahu, The Odisha Review’s editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar’s editor Pradosh Pattnaik, language researcher Subrat Prusty, Kalinga Institute of Social Science (KISS)’s principal Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa’s chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty along with the trust’s secretary Brajamohan Patnaik and senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash.

11 books of eminent Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were released in Creative Commons 3.0 license that will allow anyone to reuse and even make commercial use of the content with attribution. KISS will be digitizing these books by training their students. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia community for releasing and digitizing these books. Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty from the Institute of Odia Studies and Research also fomally released three books in Creative Commons licenses: Two Odia ones-”Bhasa O Jatiyata” and “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and an English book “Classical Odia”. Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode free font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from OdiaLanguage.com, a new Odia input tool, free softwares and offline Wikipedia. It was declared that the Odia WikiSource project will be active soon and would be available at wikisource.org.

Odia Wikipedia administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech and hosted the event. Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society read the annual report and shared the vision for the Wikimedia movement. Active Odia Wikipedians Ansuman Giri, Diptiman Panigrahi, Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Jnanaranjan Sahu, Sasanka Dash, Aditya Mahar and Srikant Kedia coordinated the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/brokenscooter-april-4-2014-odia-wikipedia-celebrates-odisha-day-brings-14-copyright-free-odia-books-and-free-odia-font

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated Odisha day

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T06:21:38Z

Odisha Day 2014 was held on March 29, 2014. A report was published in FullOrissa News on April 2, 2014.

Click to read the original story here.

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated “Odisha day” today at Jayadev Bhawan. Inaugurating this event eminent linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak said, ‘Collaborative effort and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language an culture’. He also discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. Majority of the Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessible. He discussed about the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts.

11 books of eminent Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were released in Creative Commons 3.0 license that will allow anyone to reuse and even make commercial use of the content with attribution. KISS will be digitizing these books by training their students. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia community for releasing and digitizing these books. Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty from the Institute of Odia Studies and Research also fomally released three books in Creative Commons licenses: Two Odia ones-”Bhasa O Jatiyata” and “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and an English book “Classical Odia”. Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode free font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from OdiaLanguage.com, a new Odia input tool, free softwares and offline Wikipedia. It was declared that the Odia WikiSource project will be active soon and would be available at wikisource.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/full-odisha-april-2-2014-odia-wikipedia-community-celebrated-odisha-day

Odia Wikimedia community celebrated Odisha day, bringing 14 copyright free Odia books

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T12:25:46Z

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated “Odisha day” today at Jayadev Bhawan. Inaugurating this event eminent linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak said, 'Collaborative effort and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language an culture'.

This was published in Odishadiary on March 29, 2014.

Odia Wikipedia has been trying to popularize use of Odia language in the Internet since 2002.

To enrich the online encyclopedia and getting more books digitized Wikipedians are organizing a two day event. Along with Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Professor Udayanath Sahu, The Odisha Review's editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar's editor Pradosh Pattnaik, language researcher Subrat Prusty, Kalinga Institute of Social Science (KISS)'s principal Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa's chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty along with the trust's secretary Brajamohan Patnaik and senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash.

11 volumes of eminent Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were released in free Creative Commons licenses. KISS will be digitizing these books by training their students. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia community for releasing and digitizing these books. Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode free font designed by OdiaLanguage.com, a new Odia input tool, free softwares and offline Wikipedia.

It was declared that the Odia WikiSource project will be active soon. Odia Wikipedia admin Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech. Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society read the annual report and vision of Odia Wikipedia. Chief guest Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. Majority of the Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessible. He discussed about the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm lead manuscripts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/orissa-diary-march-29-2014-odia-wikimedia-community-celebrated-odisha-day-bringing-14-copyright-free-odia-books

Odia Loves Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-04-14T09:56:20Z

Odia is a 2,500 year old language native to the area of Odisha (formerly known as Orissa). The language has recently gained the status of an Indian classical language.

The article by Laura Morris was published in Rising Voices on April 10, 2014. Subhashish's article on Odia Wikipedia is mentioned.

Recently, the Odia Wikimedia community met to celebrate the language's new status in Bhubaneswar.

The following is an excerpt from a recent article on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, by Subhashish Panigrahi, sharing information about the Odia WIki community:

14 copyrighted books have been re-licensed under the Creative Commons license and the digitization project on Odia WikiSource was formally initiated by an indigenous educational institute, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) [...] KISS is going to digitize some of these books and make them available on Odia Wikisource.

An OpenType Odia Unicode font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from Odialanguage.com was released under the OFL license. This is the first Odia OpenType font that the community actively tested.

A new Odia offline input tool called “TypeOdia” by Wikipedian Manoj Sahukar was also released for public distribution. DVDs containing the font, the input tool, Odia language dictionaries, offline Odia Wikipedia in Kiwix, Wikipedia editing guide, ISCII to Unicode font converter, various free and open source software packages and Ubuntu operating system [...]

A large majority of Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easy accessibility. [Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak] discussed the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts [...]

The Odia fonts can be downloaded for free. The developers of the font say:

We advocate for the use of Odia language in true spirit, in the domain of day-to-day administration, justice delivery, apart from the field of teaching. Besides, we have undertaken the project for developing Odia lexicon,with inclusion of typical odia version of technical words ,so as to avoid dependence on English language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/rising-voices-april-10-2014-odia-loves-wikipedia

Odia Language Wikipedia Page Grows to 800K Page Views A Month

subha — 2016-06-18T18:20:05Z

Odia Wikipedia is one of the first few Indian language Wikipedia projects celebrating such an old age. The Wikimedia community will gather in Odisha's capital of Bhubaneswar on June 3 to celebrate Odia Wikipedia's 13th anniversary.

Get more event details. Click to read the post originally published in Opensource.com on May 31.

The Odia language is spoken by more than 40 million people in the Indian state of Odisha (the 9th largest Indian state by area) and its neighboring states, as well as, the Odia diaspora living outside India. With over 5000 years of literary heritage, the Odia language has been recognized as one of the oldest South Asian languages and has been given the status of a "classical language" by the Indian government.

Odia Wikipedia was launched in 2002—a year after the world's largest online encyclopedia, the English Wikipedia—and has grown to be the largest online content repository for the Odia language in Unicode, and is also the largest online Odia encyclopedia. Odia Wikipedia has 17 active editors (known as uikiali) spread across various parts of India and abroad, and over 8,800 articles. The Odia Wikipedia community is driving progressive digital activities by converting content created with non-standard proprietary encoding systems into Unicode, optimizing the system for search engines, and relicensing copyrighted content into Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

Almost all the newspapers written in the Odia language are available in non-Unicode or other proprietary encoding systems, or as images, making it impossible to account for them in search. The same is the case for state government portals that lack Odia-language content or have content in legacy encoding systems. Today, character encoding converters are hosted on Odia Wikipedia so that the editors can convert other encoding to Unicode; making newspapers and magazines that were unaccessible because of inability to search non-Unicode content available.

Odia Wikipedia has been available in Unicode since 2002, but for nine years it was dormant. Content creation and editor activity began to pick up in 2011 and since has increased at a dramatic rate. Content now covers diverse topics, from medical science to Odia cuisine. Since, it has grown to over 808,834 page views as of March 2015.

Original photo by Subhashish Panigrahi. CC BY-SA 4.0

The Odia Wikimedia community has also organized Wikipedia workshops and Wikipedia Education Programs to relicense copyright encyclopedia content to CC licensed content by negotiating with authors and copyright holders, and by gathering resources from various sources that are were easily accessible.

Going forward we hope to make an impact on the areas slow to change, like the media for the Odia language who have resisted adopting Unicode.

The Odia Wikipedia community hopes to improve and increase the use of the Odia languague online so that users can read and communicate on the Internet in that language. An open and collaborative tool like Odia Wikipedia is a promising avenue for this challenge because it allows anyone to contribute to writing, editing and enriching articles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-subhashish-panigrahi-may-31-2015-odia-language-wikipedia-page-grows-to-800k-page-views-a-month

Odia Language gets a new Unicode Font Converter

subha — 2014-07-02T09:59:31Z

Recently, I worked on designing a font encoding converter with a fellow Wikimedian Manoj Sahukar. We worked by taking the code of a converter that was made three years back and made it work for two fonts AkrutiOriSarala99 and AkrutiOriSarala that are used by the media industry for printing and publishing.

This converter can now convert text typed using a modified ISCII based encoding and help generating Unicode text. Based on this learning from this I created another such converter for one such popular font Shreelipi that is used by Government of Odisha's official documentation including a magazine. The following is a summary of the usability of the converters:

It’s been over a decade since Unicode standard was made available for Odia script. Odia is a language spoken by roughly 33 million people in Eastern India, and is one of the many official languages of India. Since its release, it has been challenging to get more content on Unicode, the reason being many who are used to other non-Unicode standards are not willing to make the move to Unicode. This created the need for a simple converter that could convert text once typed in various non-Unicode fonts to Unicode. This could enrich Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects by converting previously typed content and making it more widely available on the internet. The Odia language recently got such a converter, making it possible to convert two of the most popular fonts among media professionals (AkrutiOriSarala99 and AkrutiOriSarala) into Unicode.

All of the non-Latin scripts came under one umbrella after the rollout of Unicode. Since then, many Unicode compliant fonts have been designed and the open source community has put forth effort to produce good quality fonts. Though contribution to Unicode compliant portals like Wikipedia increased, the publication and printing industries in India were still stuck with the pre-existing ASCII and ISCII standards (Indian font encoding standard based on ASCII). Modified ASCII fonts that were used as typesets for newspapers, books, magazines and other printed documents still exist in these industries. This created a massive amount of content that is not searchable or reproducible because it is not Unicode compliant. The difference in Unicode font is the existence of separate glyphs for the Indic script characters along with the Latin glyphs that are actually replaced by the Indic characters. So, when someone does not have a particular ASCII standard font installed, the typed text looks absurd (see Mojibake), however text typed using one Unicode font could be read using another Unicode font in a different operating system. Most of the ASCII fonts that are used for typing Indic languages are proprietary and many individuals/organizations even use pirated software and fonts. Having massive amounts of content available in multiple standards and little content in Unicode created a large gap for many languages including Odia. Until all of this content gets converted to Unicode to make it searchable, sharable and reusable, then the knowledge base created will remain inaccessible. Some of the Indic languages fortunately have more and more contributors creating Unicode content. There is a need to work on technological development to convert non-Unicode content to Unicode and open it up for people to use.

There are a few different kinds of fonts used by media and publication houses, the most popular one is Akruti. Two other popular standards are LeapOffice and Shreelipi. Akruti software comes bundled with a variety of typefaces and an encoding engine that works well in Adobe Acrobat Creator, the most popular DTP software package. Industry professionals are comfortable using it for its reputation and seamless printing. The problem of migrating content from other standards to Unicode arose when the Odia Wikimedia community started reaching out to these industry professionals. Apparently authors, government employees and other professional were more comfortable using one of the standards mentioned above. All of these people type using either a generic popular standard, Modular, or a universal standard, Inscript. Fortunately, the former is now incorporated into Mediawiki‘s Universal Language Selector (ULS) and the latter is in the process of getting added to ULS. Once this is done, many folks could start contributing to Wikipedia easily. Content that has been typed in various modified ASCII fonts include encyclopedias that could help grow content on Wikisource and Wikiquote. All of these need to be converted to Unicode. The non-profit group Srujanika first initiated a project to build a converter for conversion of two different Akruti fonts: AkrutiOriSarala99 and OR-TT Sarala. The former being outdated and the other being less popular. The Rebati 1 converter which was built by the Srujanika team was not being maintained and was more of an orphan project.
Above: Akruti Sarala - Unicode Odia converter user manual. Image credit: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-3.0

There are a few different kinds of fonts used by media and publication houses, the most popular one is Akruti. Two other popular standards are LeapOffice and Shreelipi. Akruti software comes bundled with a variety of typefaces and an encoding engine that works well in Adobe Acrobat Creator, the most popular DTP software package. Industry professionals are comfortable using it for its reputation and seamless printing. The problem of migrating content from other standards to Unicode arose when the Odia Wikimedia community started reaching out to these industry professionals. Apparently authors, government employees and other professional were more comfortable using one of the standards mentioned above. All of these people type using either a generic popular standard, Modular, or a universal standard, Inscript. Fortunately, the former is now incorporated into Mediawiki‘s Universal Language Selector (ULS) and the latter is in the process of getting added to ULS. Once this is done, many folks could start contributing to Wikipedia easily.

Content that has been typed in various modified ASCII fonts include encyclopedias that could help grow content on Wikisource and Wikiquote. All of these need to be converted to Unicode. The non-profit group Srujanika first initiated a project to build a converter for conversion of two different Akruti fonts: AkrutiOriSarala99 and OR-TT Sarala. The former being outdated and the other being less popular. The Rebati 1 converter which was built by the Srujanika team was not being maintained and was more of an orphan project.

Above: Akruti Sarala - Unicode Odia converter user manual. Image credit: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-3.0

Fellow Wikimedian Manoj Sahukar and myself used parts of the “Rebati 1 converter” code and worked on building another converter. The new “Akruti Sarala – Unicode Odia converter” can convert the more popular AkrutiOriSarala font and its predecessor AkrutiOriSarala99, which is still used by some. Odia Wikimedian Mrutyunjaya Kar and journalist Subhransu Panda have helped by reporting broken conjuncts which helps in fixing all problems before publishing. Odia authors and journalists have already started using the font and many of them have regular posts in Odia. We are waiting for more authors to contribute to Wikipedia by converting their work and wikifying it.

Recently a beta version of another Unicode font converter for Shreelipi fonts based on Odia Wikipedian Shitikantha Dash‘s initial code is released. It works with at least 85 % accuracy.

"Even after getting the classical status, Odia language is not being used actively on the internet like some other Indian languages. The main reason behind this is our writing system has not been web-friendly. Most of those in Odisha having typing skills, use modular keyboard and Akruti fonts. Akruti is not web-compatible as we know. There are thousands of articles, literary works, news stories typed in Akruti fonts lying unused (on the internet). Thanks to Subhashish Panigrahi and his associates, they have developed this new font converter that can convert your Akruti text into Unicode. I have checked it. It’s error-free. Now it’s easy for us to write articles online (for Wikipedia and other sites). Yes, we are late entrants as far as use of vernacular languages on the internet is concerned. But this converter will help us to go godspeed. Lets make Odia our language of communication and expression."

The above was originally posted on Wikimedia blog.

Quick Links

Copyright notes: "Akruti Sarala - Unicode converter screenshot mock-up.svg", "Akruti converter user manual (white).svg" by Subhashish Panigrahi , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-language-gets-new-unicode-font-converter

Odia Language Classics could Now be Read from Phones, Tablets and of course from Computers!

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:12:54Z

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library is celebrating its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar tomorrow. Available online at or.wikisource.org, the project finally went live in last year on October 20 after being incubated over two years. In a nutshell, it not just provides free and open access to readers to access text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others.

The article published by Orissadairy on October 25, 2015 quotes Subhashish Panigrahi.

All the contributors to the project are volunteers and are fondly called “uikiali” in Odia. These volunteers follow certain guidelines to check through the content digitized by others to make sure there is no copyrighted text posing copyright violation, correct typos and other grammatical mistakes and incorrect attribution.

Authors and copyright holders are also encouraged to provide permission in re-licensing their work under free licenses like CC-BY/CC-by-SA licenses so that some of their content becomes available online and fill the large gap of the Odia books online to some extent. “Last year, the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 141 books from multiple authors relicensed under the above mentioned licenses” said the Centre for Internet and Society's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi. “Where we, as an institution, could play a role in reaching out to many authors and convincing them for a small contribution to the society” added Panigrahi.

Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active contributor to the project elaborated saying, there is a great dearth of Odia books online. I try to buy some time from personal and office time to continue my contribution. Afterall, I started from an all time Odia classic “Cha'mana Athaguntha” by Fakir Mohan Senapati”. Many important books that are out of copyright are making their appearance on the Odia Wikisource. “Wikisource is different than Wikipedia as the former is published writing reublished online where on Wikipedia it is more of aggregating information published elsewhere in an encyclopaedic manner”, says Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, a long time Wikimedian.

Odia Wikisource's administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar welcomes everyone taking interest in Odia library movement in particular and Odia language in general to join this event that is being held at the Institute on Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE), Siripura, Bhubaneswar at 5 pm tomorrow.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/orissadiary-october-25-2015-odia-language-classics-could-now-be-read-from-phones-tablets-and-computers

Odia author Nirmala Kumari Mohapatra's 21 books relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0

subha — 2014-12-06T02:49:12Z

Twenty one books of renowned Odia author Nirmala Kumari Mohapatra will now be available under the Creative Commons License.

Taking into consideration the request from the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K), Odia researcher, teacher and author Nirmala Kumari Mohapatra has signed a note to release 21 of her books under CC-by-SA 4.0 license. She came and attended the "Odisha Dibasa 2014" organized by Odia Wikimedia Community and CIS-A2K on March 29 in Bhubaneswar where we got 11 books of Dr. Jagannath Mohanty. Expressing her motivation for kindheartedly donating 21 out of her 35 books she tells us, "If Jagannath Mohanty's writings could go to millions of readers online why not I also open up my work. My life as a teacher has spent on researching on simplifying education. One of the 21 books she donated "Chandaka-Damapada Hasti Abhayaranya", is one of the rarest books that has ever been written on wildlife sanctuary. It is full of many observations about the elephants that reside in the Chandaka-Damapada wildlife sanctuary. Many interesting incidents from Odisha's history like a female barber shaving Gandhi during his Padayatra that are captured in her books would add to the richness of Odia Wikipedia. These books will soon be available on Odia Wikisource for digitization.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-author-nirmala-kumari-mohapatra-21-books-under-cc

October 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-12-06T04:53:41Z

CIS newsletter for October 2019:

Highlights for October 2019
Gurshabad Grover has been nominated through the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to be a member of the Advisory Group on Open Source Software for ISO/IEC JTC 1. In the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the Christchurch Call to Action in May 2018 to “bring together countries and tech companies in an attempt to bring to an end the ability to use social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism.” CIS sent its comments to the Call. Over the past decade, a few private online intermediaries, by rapid innovation and integration, have turned into regulators of a substantial amount of online speech. Such concentrated power calls for a high level of responsibility on them to ensure that the rights of the users online, including their rights to free speech and privacy, are maintained. CIS has analyzed the companies' transparency reports for government requests for user data and content removal. The Department of Labour convened an interaction program of sorts at Vikas Soudha in Bangalore on 21st October, 2019 to hear the issues plaguing the emergent gig economy. Bharath Gururagavendran has thrown more light on this in a blog post. CIS presented a response to the ‘Gender issues arising in the digital era and their impacts on women, men and individuals of diverse sexual orientations gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics. CIS made a submission to the draft Code on Social Security, 2019 prepared by the Government of India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment. On October 17, 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, released his thematic report on digital technology, social protection and human rights. Understanding the impact of technology on the provision of social protection – and, by extent, its impact on people in vulnerable situations – has been part of the work CIS has been doing. A case study titled Farming the Future: Deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the agricultural sector in India was published as a chapter in the joint UNESCAP-Google publication titled Artificial Intelligence in Public Service Delivery. In response to our call for contributions and reflections on ‘Decolonising the Internet’s Languages’ in August, we are delighted to announce that we received 50 submissions, in over 38 languages! From all these extraordinary offerings, we have selected nine that we will invite and support the contributors to expand further. In a case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India.

CIS and the News

The following articles and research papers were authored by CIS secretariat during the month:

Setting International Norms of Cyber Conflict is Hard, But that Doesn't Mean that We Should Stop Trying (Arindrajit Basu and Karan Saini; Modern War Institute; September 30, 2019).
Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; Feminist Internet Research Network, APC; October 1, 2019).
Doing Standpoint Theory (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; Gender IT; October 10, 2019).
We need a better AI vision (Arindrajit Basu; Fountainink; October 12, 2019).
Farming the Future: Deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the agricultural sector in India (Elonnai Hickok, Arindrajit Basu, Siddharth Sonkar and Pranav M B; UNESCAP-Google publication titled Artificial Intelligence in Public Service Delivery; October 16, 2019).
The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems (Ambika Tandon; Privacy International; October 17, 2019).
Facial recognition at airports promises convenience in exchange for surveillance (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 20, 2019).
“Politics by other means”: Fostering positive contestation and charting ‘red lines’ through global governance in cyberspace (Arindrajit Basu; Global Policy and ORF; October 21, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS secretariat was consulted for the following articles published during the month in various publications:

Why conviction rate for cyber crime cases in Karnataka is abysmally low (Theja Ram; News Minute; October 1, 2019).
Will FASTag raise privacy concerns? (Shreya Nandi and Prathma Sharma; Livemint; October 15, 2019).
India's HIV-positive trans people find 'new strength' in technology (Annie Banerji; Reuters; October 17, 2019). Also mirrored in Jakarta Post and ETHealthworld.com.
Dystopia vs development: The Kashmir paradox (Asmita Bakshi; Livemint; October 19, 2019).
Trending Hate Against Muslims: Is Twitter Complicit? (Puja Bhattacharjee; News Central; October 21, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.

Wikipedia

Under a grant from Wikimedia Foundation we are doing a project for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Blog Entry

Analysis on the strategies of Mozilla and Wiki communities on gender gap aspects (Bhuvana Meenakshi; October 3, 2019).

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. As part of internet governance work we work on policy issues relating to freedom of expression primarily focusing on the Information Technology Act and issues of liability of intermediaries for unlawful speech and simultaneously ensuring that the right to privacy is safeguarded as well.

Freedom of Speech & Expression

Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, CIS is doing research on the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute studies, reports and policy briefs to feed into the ongoing debates at the national as well as international level. As part of the project we bring you the following outputs:

Research Paper

Designing a Human Rights Impact Assessment for ICANN’s Policy Development Processes (Collin Kure, Akriti Bopanna and Austin Ruckstuhl; October 3, 2019).

Submissions / Analysis

Through the looking glass: Analysing transparency reports (Torsha Sarkar, Suhan S and Gurshabad Grover; October 30, 2019).
CIS’ Comments to the Christchurch Call (Tanaya Rajwade, Elonnai Hickok, and Raouf Kundil Peedikayil; October 31, 2019).

Blog Entry

Department of Labour Interaction Program: Online Business Platforms (Bharath Gururagavendran; edited by Ambika Tandon; October 29, 2019).

Participation in Events

Roundtable Discussion on Intermediary Liability (Organized by SFLC and the Dialogue; New Delhi; October 17, 2019). Tanaya Rajwade participated in a roundtable discussion on intermediary liability.

Gender

Participation in Event

Due Diligence Project FGD by UN Women (Organized by UN; UN House, New Delhi; October 11, 2019). Radhika Radhakrishnan attended a focussed group discussion.

Privacy

Under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC we are doing a project on surveillance. CIS is researching the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar. As part of our ongoing research, we bring you the following outputs:

Submissions

Comments to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report on Gender and Privacy (Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Pallavi Bedi; October 24, 2019).
Comments to the Code on Social Security, 2019 (Aayush Rathi , Amruta Mahuli and Ambika Tandon; October 27, 2019).

Participation in Events

BSides Delhi 2019 Security Conference (Organized by Bsides Delhi; New Delhi; October 11, 2019).
ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 27 meetings (Organized by ISO/IEC JTC; Paris; October 14 - 18, 2019). Gurshabad Grover participated in the meetings.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy Consultation on 'Privacy and Gender' (Organized by UN Special Rapporteur; New York University, New York; October 30 - 31, 2019).

Artificial Intelligence / Digital Technology

With origins dating back to the 1950s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not necessarily new. However, interest in AI has been rekindled over the recent years due to advancements of technology and its applications to real-world scenarios. We conduct research on the existing legal and regulatory parameters:

Blog Entry

AI for Good (Shweta Mohandas and Saumyaa Naidu; edited by Elonnai Hickok; October 9, 2019).

Participation in Events

NIPFP Seminar on Exploring Policy Issues in the Digital Technology Arena (Organized by Indian Institute of Advanced Study; Shimla; October 10 - 11, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in this seminar as a discussant.
AI Opera- AI as a total work of art (Organized by Goethe; Bangalore; October 11, 2019). Shweta Mohandas and Mira were panelists.
Launch of Google-UNESCAP AI Report (Organized by Google; United Nations Convention Centre; Bangkok; October 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.
Discussion at CyFy on Technology, Policy and National Security: Building 21st Century Curricula in India’s Law Schools (Organized by Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and Observer Research Foundation; Villa Medici, Taja Mahal Hotel, Man Singh Road, New Delhi; October 20, 2019).

Researchers@Work

The researchers@work programme at CIS produces and supports pioneering and sustained trans-disciplinary research on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society; organise and incubate networks of and fora for researchers and practitioners studying and making internet in India; and contribute to development of critical digital pedagogy, research methodology, and creative practice.

Announcement

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions! (P.P. Sneha; November 1, 2019).

Case Study

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System (Ambika Tandon; October 17, 2019).

Participation in Event

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions (Organized by Whose Knowledge; London; October 23 - 24, 2019). P.P. Sneha participated in this meeting.

Blog Entries

Mobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit (Sujeet George; October 1, 2019).
How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Aishwarya Panicker; October 11, 2019).

About CIS

CIS is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

Follow CIS on:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

Support CIS:

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

Collaborate with CIS:

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2019-newsletter

October 2018 Newsletter

Admin — 2018-11-15T02:44:58Z

Highlights

Published an article titled "Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study" in International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities. The authors of the article were Hindi faculty members of Christ University. Ananth Subray from Centre for Internet & Society provided research assistance.
Ananth Subray wrote an article "History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ University" which has given an insight of Christ Wikipedia Education Program, how students are involved in different capacities in the program and shares the best practices of the Education Program.
CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".
Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu co-authored a research paper that was published as part of the Briefings from the Research and Advisory Group (RAG) of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) for the Full Commission Meeting held at Bratislava in 2018.
Arindrajit Basu in an article published by Oxford Human Rights Hub has argued that artificial Intelligence offers the potential to augment many existing bureaucratic processes and improve human capacity, if implemented in accordance with principles of the rule of law and international human rights norms.
Agnidipto Tarafder and Arindrajit Basu in an article published in Socio-Legal Review has traced the journey of the recent 377 (Navtej Johar v Union of India) and assessed its societal implications.
CIS invites applications for *three Research Fellow positions* to undertake field studies of platform-work in two cities, including Bangalore and another city (to be decided). The project seeks to produce a comparative understanding of at least two different kinds of platform-work as unfolding across Indian cities. Each fellow will be responsible for one field study (one form of work in one city) based on their language fluency and research experience.

Articles

377 Bites the Dust: Unpacking the long and winding road to the judicial decriminalization of homosexuality in India (Agnidipto Tarafder and Arindrajit Basu; Socio Legal Review; October 11, 2018).
Digital Native: Time to Walk the Talk (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 14, 2018).
Why Data Localisation Might Lead To Unchecked Surveillance (Pranesh Prakash; Bloomberg Quint; October 15, 2018).
Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Arindrajit Basu; Oxford Human Rights Hub; October 23, 2018).
Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 28, 2018).
Lessons from US response to cyber attacks (Arindrajit Basu; Hindu Businessline; October 30, 2018). The article was edited by Elonnai Hickok.

Media Coverage

Gmail users beware while giving access (Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; October 4, 2018).
Are online shows obscene? (Anila Kurian; Deccan Herald; October 10, 2018).
Internet services not to be affected as DNS servers undergo update (Hindustan Times; October 12, 2018).
Spending too much time on social media? Tech abuse may lead to mental health issues (Divya Shekhar; Economic Times; October 13, 2018).
Sales of surveillance cameras are soaring, raising questions about privacy (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; October 14, 2018).
Not Surprised by Indian govt's data localisation directives: Michael Dell (Anand J.; VC Circle; October 17, 2018).
Factcheck: No, phones of users who provided only Aadhaar as proof of identity won’t be disconnected (Kanishk Karan; Scroll.in; October 18, 2018).
Rural Indians don’t trust messages on WhatsApp blindly: Survey (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; October 19, 2018).
Brazil’s experience a red flag for WhatsApp in Indian polls, say experts (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; October 21, 2018).
Reliance-Jio Users Complain Of Porn Websites Being Blocked; Company Yet To Issue Official Statement (Logical Indian; October 27, 2018).

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Access to Knowledge
-----------------------------------
Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Peer Reviewed Article

Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study (Dr. George Joseph,Dr. Sebastian K.A, and Kavitha A with research assistance from Ananth Subray; International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, Volume 6, Issue 8, August 2018).
.

Blog Entries

South India Copyright Workshop (Subodh Kulkarni; October 21, 2018).
History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ (Deemed to be University) (Ananth Subray; Wikimedia Blog; October 29, 2018).

Event Organized

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli (Co-organized by TRTI and CIS-A2K; Gadchiroli; October 2 - 5, 2018).

Participation in Event

Community Toolkit for Greater Diversity (Organized by Wikipedia Community; Mandrem, Goa; October 5 - 7, 2018). P.P. Sneha participated in the event.

►Copyright and Patent

Media Coverage

5th Global Congress On IP And The Public Interest: Successes, Strategies Highlighted (David Branigan; Intellectual Property Watch; October 3, 2018).

Participation in Events

KEI Seminar on "Appraising the WIPO Broadcast Treaty and its Implications on Access to Culture" (Organized by KEI; Geneva; October 3 - 4, 2018). Anubha Sinha spoke on the panel titled "Rationale, Beneficiaries and Scope (of the Treaty)".
Stakeholders Consultation on draft WIPO Treaty to Protect Broadcasting Organization (Organized by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Govt. of India; Copyright Office, New Delhi; October 23, 2018). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Participation in Event

Panel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge (Organized by DST Centre for Policy Research (IISc); Bangalore; October 23, 2018). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist and moderator at the event.

Media Coverage

Sting job by Hyderabad scientist exposes fake journals (Business Standard; October 11, 2018).

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Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Participation in Events

Confidentiality of Communications and Privacy of Data in the Digital Age (Organized by INCLO and Privacy International; Human Rights Council 39th ordinary session; September 25, 2018). Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.
Meetings of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 'IT Security techniques' (Organized by Standards Norway with support from NTNU, Microsoft, Telenor, et.al.; Gjøvik, Norway; September 30 - October 4, 2018). Gurshabad Grover participated in the meetings.
State of Work in India (Organized by Bangalore International Centre, TERI and Azim Premji University; Bangalore; October 3, 2018).
Technology Foresight Group Tandem Research's AI policy lab on the theme AI and Environment (Organized by Tandem Research; Goa; October 5, 2018). Shweta Mohandas attended a roundtable discussion on artificial intelligence and environment.
Indian Feminist Judgment Project Workshop (Organized by Jindal Industries; New Delhi; October 6 - 7, 2018). Swaraj Paul Barooah participated in the discussions.
Community Standards Roundtable Conversations (Organized by Facebook, School of Media & Cultural Studies, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences; Bangalore; October 7, 2018). Ambika Tandon participated in the roundtable discussions.
Surveillance Stories: Optimizing rights and governance (Organized by National Centre for Biological Sciences; Bangalore; October 16, 2018). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.
Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life (Organized by International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners; Brussels; October 24 - 25, 2018). Elonnai Hickok was a speaker in the panel "Move Slower and Fix Things".

►Cyber Security

Research Paper

Conceptualizing an International Security Regime for Cyberspace (Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu; October 26, 2018).

Event Organized

Roundtable on Cyber-security and the Private Sector (Omidyar Network Office; Bangalore; October 17, 2018).

Participation in Event

CyFy 2018 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 3 - 5, 2018).

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Policies & the Public Interest (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 2018 and Organizing India Blogspot; October 4, 2018).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Job

Call for Research Fellows - Field Studies of Platform-Work: The Research Fellows will be associated with CIS from December 2018 to June 2019, undertake fieldwork, participate in two research workshops, and prepare an Ethnographic Report based on the fieldwork.

-----------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2018-newsletter

October 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T00:53:03Z

October 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India. Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post. Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done. Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

Highlights

CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India.
Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post.
Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done.
Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

CIS in the News:

Attempted data breach of UIDAI, RBI, ISRO and Flipkart is worrisome (DailyO, October 4, 2017).
Sex, drugs and the dark web (Hindu; October 7, 2017).
Ahead of data protection law roll out, experts caution that it shouldn't limit collection and use of data (First Post; October 12, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: The economics and business models of IoT and other issues (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: Data standards for IoT and home automation systems (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
Majority of top politicians' Twitter followers fake: audit (Furquan Moharkan; Deccan Herald; October 24, 2017).
Awards for those working on employment opportunities for disabled (Eastern Mirror; October 24, 2017).
Nibbling away into your bank account, salami attackers cart away a fortune (New Indian Express; October 25, 2017).
Nirmita Narasimhan wins the 18th NCPEDP-Mindtree Helen Keller Award 2017! (National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People; October 31, 2017).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource Turns 3 (Manasa Rao; October 22, 2017).
Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi (A. Gopalakrishna; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia (Manasa Rao; October 24, 2017).

►Openness

-----------------------------------

Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Freedom of Expression

ICANN’s Problems with Accountability and the .WEB Controversy (Padma Venkataraman; October 24, 2017).
Why Presumption of Renewal is Unsuitable for the Current Registry Market Structure (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).
CIS’ Efforts Towards Greater Financial Disclosure by ICANN (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

CyFy 2017 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 2 - 4, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

GDPR and India: A Comparative Analysis (Aditi Chaturvedi; October 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Securing The Digital Payments Ecosystem (Organized by NITI Aayog; October 9, 2017).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Revisiting Per Se vs Rule of Reason in Light of the Intel Conditional Rebate Case (Shruthi Anand; October 4, 2017).

Event Organized

Emerging Issues in the Internet of Things (CIS, Bengaluru; October 23, 2017). Andrew Rens gave a talk.

-----------------------------------

Telecom
-----------------------------------
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

NPAs & Structural Issues (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 2017).

Articles

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy (Nishant Shah; October 9, 2017).
Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer (Nishant Shah; October 22, 2017).

-----------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2017-newsletter

October 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-02-06T12:52:02Z

Welcome to the October 2016 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Dear readers,

We are pleased to bring you the Centre for Internet & Society's October newsletter. The month of October was fervent for CIS as can be gauged from the number of outputs in various publications and our overall presence in the media. A research paper co-authored by Prof. Arunachalam has shed light on the contribution of Indian researchers in open access journals which has been considerably higher as against contributions from rest of the world.

Vipul Kharbanda and Elonnai Hickok in continuance of their research on mutual legal assistance treaties, examined a new approach to international bilateral cooperation being suggested in the United States, by creating a mechanism for certain foreign governments to directly approach the data controllers.

CIS also published the impact report form for receiving the Annual Plan Grant from Wikimedia Foundation.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In a research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, published in the National Medical Journal of India and on the eprints@IISc repository, Prof. Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan have stated that ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, makes research more discoverable. It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. In a research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam published in the Indian Institute of Science Repository, the authors have raised the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. The paper has thrown light on the fact that Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. The second iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM), a month-long edit-a-thon to create and improve Asia-related articles on Wikipedia began on November 1, 2016. Tito Dutta in a blog post revisited the stats of the 2015 iteration of the event and also spoke to Addis Wang, an organizer of WAM, to know more about their progress and preparation. CIS published the impact report form for receiving the Annual Plan grant from Wikimedia Foundation. The time period of this report is the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). RBI directions for account aggregator services in India seem to lay great emphasis on data security by allowing only direct access between institutions and do away with data scraping techniques, wrote Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda in a blog post. The recent security breach in an Indian payment switch provider, was confirmed by National Payments Corporation of India. This forced domestic banks into damage control mode over the past few days. Udbhav Tiwari analyzed the developments in a blog post published by Bloomberg.

CIS in the news:

Eye on Mumbai (Tariq Engineer; Mumbai Mirror; October 2, 2016).
Indian language localization community meets in New Delhi (Mayank Sharma; Opensource.com; October 3, 2016).
An 'app'ening world (Chetana Divya Vasudev; Deccan Herald; October 4, 2016).
Changing Wikipedia’s (and society’s) male bias is work in progress (Shrabonti Bagchi; Factor Daily; October 5, 2016).
A Market Structure for Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; October 5, 2016).
If all goes well, Indian IT Act may enter 21st century (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; October 6, 2016).
Tech for the blind: How app developers can help end the ‘disturbing touchscreen trend’ (Naina Khedekar; First Post; October 10, 2016).
Tech companies like Gmail, WhatsApp may be asked to store user information (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; October 14, 2016).
Here is why government twitter handles have been posting offensive and partisan messages (Danish Raza; Hindustan Times; October 15, 2016).
Digital Native: The Future is Now (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 16, 2016).
New regulations in place; Aadhaar Card records to be preserved for 7 yrs by Centre (Financial Express; October 17, 2016).
Govt to keep Aadhaar record for 7 years, activists worried (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; October 17, 2016).
The Big Debit Card Breach: Three Things Card Holders Need To Understand (Alex Mathew; Bloomberg; October 20, 2016).
Intelligence agencies will not have open access to Aadhaar data: UIDAI chief (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; October 20, 2016).
‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys (Madanmohan Rao; Your Story; October 23, 2016).
Some Key Words Are Missing (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; October 23, 2016).
Bridging the gap: Tech giants bring the internet to women in rural India (KumKum Dasgupta; Hindustan Times; October 28, 2016).
Behind Modi’s Heartwarming Diwali Ad for Soldiers, An App That’s Primed for Political Messaging (Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty; The Wire; October 29, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Request for Specifics: Rebuttal to UIDAI (Hans Varghese Mathews; Economic & Political Weekly; September 3, 2016; Volume 51, Issue No.36). This was mirrored on CIS website in the month of October.
Love in the Time of Tinder (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 2, 2016).
IANA Transition: a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes? (Vidushi Marda; Digital Asia Hub; October 6, 2016).
Internet democratisation: IANA transition leaves much to be desired (Vidushi Marda; Hindustan Times; October 6, 2016).
Services like TwitterSeva aren’t the silver bullets they are made out to be (Sunil Abraham; Factor Daily; October 6, 2016).
Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up (Anubha Sinha; October 12, 2016).
What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India (Subhashish Panigrahi; Your Story; October 20, 2016).
How Long Have Banks Known About The Debit Card Fraud? (Udbhav Tiwari; Bloomberg; October 22, 2016).
How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias (Subhashish Panigrahi; Opensource.com; October 24, 2016).

Jobs

CIS is presently seeking applications for the following positions

Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Programme Officer (Communications)
Intern (Pervasive Technologies Project) - Application accepted throughout the year
Internship - Application accepted throughout the year
Survey Participants for Research on Musician Livelihood

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Our project with the Hans Foundation got over this month. Archives of the reports can be accessed on this page.

►Pervasive Technologies

Participation in Events

Workshop on Innovation, Economic Development and IP in India and China (Co-organized by the Singapore Management University, O.P. Jindal Global University, and Renmin University of China; September 27 - 28, 2016). Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané made presentations. The event details were published on the website in the month of October.

Workshop on Competition Law and Policy (Co-organized by National School of Law India University and the Delegation of European Union to India; New Delhi; October 19 - 21, 2016). Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané participated and made presentations.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form (Tanveer Hasan; October 9, 2016).
UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; October 20, 2016).
Querying Wikipedia Data (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; October 21, 2016).

Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November (Tito Dutta; October 30, 2016).

►Openness

Journal Articles

Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication (Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan; National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016 and Indian Institute of Science Repository; October 28, 2016).
Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published (Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam; Indian Institute of Science Repository; October 29, 2016).

Participation in Events

OpenData Week in Madrid - OD4D Summit, Open Data Charter Meetings, and IODC16. Sumandro Chattopadhyay took part in three open data events in Madrid in the first week of October 2016:

OD4D Summit (Organized by IDRC; October 3, 2016).
Open Data Charter Meeting (Organized by Open Data Charter Lead Stewards; October 5, 2016).
4th International Open Data Conference (IODC 16) (Organized by red.es, IDRC, the World Bank and Open Data; October 6-7, 2016).

Blog Entries

(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards (Harsh Gupta; October 20, 2016).
Technical Alternative to Encrypted Media Extensions (Harsh Gupta; October 20, 2016).

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Internet Governance
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Not Everyone Plays by the Rules in the Digital Playground: Addressing Online Child Sexual Exploitation (Organized by International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, Singapore (ICMEC) and TULIR - Centre for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse, India; October 3 - 4, 2016; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi). Japreet Grewal was a speaker.

►Privacy

Participation in Events

The Future of Privacy in the Age of Big Data (Organized by Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom; September 3 - 10, 2016; Berlin and Hamburg). Vanya Rakesh was one of the participants from South Asia.
LITD 17 Committee, Bureau of Indian Standards Meeting (Organized by Bureau of Indian Standards; September 23, 2016; Bengaluru). Vanya Rakesh attended the meeting.

Blog Entries

MLATs and the proposed Amendments to the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; October 20, 2016).
RBI Directions on Account Aggregators (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; October 21, 2016).

►Big Data

Event Organized

Workshop on Big Data in India: Benefits, Harms, and Human Rights (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; October 1, 2016).

Upcoming Event

Workshop on 'Privacy after Big Data' (Co-organized by CIS and the Sarai Programme, CSDS; New Delhi; November 12, 2016).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

National Cyber Defence Summit 2016 (Organized by National Cyber Safety and Security Standards in association with State & Central Governments, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, AICTE & Anna University; Chennai; September 30 and October 1, 2016). Vanya Rakesh attended the event.
Hakon 2016 (Organized by by Ninja Information Security Systems; Indore; September 30 - October 2, 2016). Udbhav Tiwari attended the conference.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Participation in Events

Seminar on Quality of Services in Telecom and Data Services: Issues, Challenges and Solutions (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi; September 21, 2016). Shyam Ponappa was a speaker. This was mirrored on CIS website in October.
Free data, net neutrality: Discussion on TRAI paper (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; Hyderabad; October 24, 2016).

Event Organized

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (CIS, New Delhi; November 3, 2016). William F. Stafford, PhD candidate in UC Berkeley, made a presentation on "Public Measurements, Private Measurements, and the Convergence of Units.

Participation in Event

Learning through Archives: A Colloquium on Digital Scholarship (Organized by FLAME University; Pune; October 16, 2016). P.P. Sneha participated in the dialogue.

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About CIS
-----------------------------------
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2016-newsletter

October 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T17:59:14Z

Our newsletter for the month of October is below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is happy to share the tenth issue of CIS newsletter (October 2015). It has been a significant month for us. There have been crucial public debates on the violation of digital privacy of individuals and institutions, discussions on India’s national policy on access to knowledge rights, and re-examination of bans on access to internet services imposed by various state governments in India. CIS kept itself engaged with research on these topics from a public interest perspective. Previous editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

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Highlights
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NVDA team conducted a training programme in West Bengal in the month of September. Fourteen delegates attended the programme. Nirmal Verma was the trainer.
Nehaa Chaudhari authored an article that provides insights into the final draft of India’s National IPR Policy.
Odia Wikisource celebrated its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar. The event was prominently covered in various news channels. Subhashish Panigrahi wrote a blog post.

In 2013, the interview project “WikipediansSpeak” was launched in response to observations that many noteworthy Wikimedians were being underrepresented both locally and globally. For improving their visibility and reach, CIS-A2K interviewed Telugu Wikimedian Viswanadh B.K.

CIS initiated an effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital, online and telephonic privacy of persons and organizations in India and shared the full list of public incidents under CC-BY-SA international license.

Sunil Abraham wrote a column in the Week telling readers that internet of things phenomenon is based on a paradigm shift from thinking of the internet merely as a means to connect individuals, corporations and other institutions to an internet where all devices in (insulin pumps and pacemakers), on (wearable technology) and around (domestic appliances and vehicles) humans beings are connected.

Pranesh Prakash, Padmini Baruah and Jyoti Panday wrote a blog post that questions the division of the three IANA functions — names, numbers and protocols — given that there is no no real technical stability to be gained from a unified Post Transition IANA.

CIS analysed five main mailing lists where the IANA transition plan was formulated. The research found that the discussions around IANA transition have not been driven by the “global multi-stakeholder community”, but mostly by males from industry in North America and Western Europe.

In recent months, there was a spree of bans on access to Internet services in Indian states, for different reasons. State governments relied on Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code for imposing the bans. Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah in a blog post argued that Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 should be evoked if necessary and not that of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly's Overall Review of implementation of WSIS Outcomes was released on October 9. CIS responded to the call with its comments.
Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column published in the Business Standard talks about Digital India and the Prime Minister’s visit to the Silicon Valley.

CIS has announced the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC 2016), an annual conference series. The first edition is expected to take place from February 25 to 27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). CIS invites you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

# Monthly Updates

October 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; October 31, 2015).

# Event Report

Training in use of eSpeak Bengali with NVDA (Organized by CIS; Turnstone Matruchaya, Siligudi, West Bengal; September 7 – 9, 2015). The report was published in the month of October.

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Access to Knowledge
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As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

# Blog Entries

Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; March 15, 2015). This post was recently updated.
Comparison of National IPR Strategy September 2012, National IPR Strategy July 2014 and Draft National IP Policy, December 2014 (Amulya Purushothama; October 15, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: Quick Observations on the Leaked Draft of the National IPR Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; October 18, 2015).

# Participation in Event

IPEX 2015 (Organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Hotel Westin, Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.

►Wikipedia

# Blog Entries

WikipediansSpeak: Telugu-language library catalog project helps Wikipedia grow (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 11, 2015). This was published on Wikimedia blog in two languages English and Ukranian.
A Kannada Wikipedia brochure for newbies (U.B. Pavanaja; October 19, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to Celebrate Its First Anniversary in Bhubaneswar (Subhashish Panigrahi; Mybhubaneswar.com; October 24, 2015).

# Op-ed

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା (Need for an Odia-language Wikisource) (Subhashish Panigrahi; Samaja; October 25, 2015).

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ସମାଜ (Full Odisha.com; October 24, 2015).
Odia Wikisource celebrates 1st anniversary this 25th October (Bhubaneswar Buzz; October 24, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to celebrate its first anniversary tomorrow! (Odisha Sun Times; October 25, 2015).
Odia language classics could now be read from phones, tablets and of course from computers! (Orissadairy; October 25, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to Hold 1st Anniversary (Pioneer; October 26, 2015).
Otago Southland are the Coolest (Library and Information Association of New Zealand; October 26, 2015). The submission was accepted for Wikimania 2015.
India & France to digitise manuscripts, artworks & archives (Medianama; October 29, 2015).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

►Big Data

# Article

Connected Trouble (Sunil Abraham; November 1, 2015).

# Upcoming Event

Big Data in the Global South International Workshop (Organized by Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro; Hotel Windsor Florida, Rua Ferreira Viana, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; November 16 – 17, 2015). Sunil Abraham and Vipul Kharbanda will be speaking at this event.

►Privacy

# Blog Entries

Contestations of Data, ECJ Safe Harbor Ruling and Lessons for India (Jyoti Panday; October 14, 2015).
Crowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; October 16, 2015).

# Event Organized

Communication Rights in the Age of Digital Technology (Organized by CIS; Deck Suite Hall, 5th Floor, Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, Near Air Force Bal Bharti School, New Delhi; October 30, 2015).

# Participation in Events

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend the Young Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.
Porn. Panic. Ban: A Conversation on Sexual Expression, Pornography, Sexual Exploitation, Consent (Organized by Point of View and the Internet Democracy Project; New Delhi; October 28 - 30, 2015). Rohini Lakshané was a speaker. Tanveer Hasan also attended this conference.

►Free Speech and Expression

# Submission

Comments on the Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly’s Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (WSIS+10) (Geetha Hariharan with inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham, Japreet Grewal and Nehaa Chaudhari; October 16, 2015).

# Blog Entries

The Legal Validity of Internet Bans: Part I (Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah; October 8, 2015).
The Legal Validity of Internet Bans: Part II (Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah; October 8, 2015).
Peering behind the veil of ICANN's DIDP (II) (Padmini Baruah; October 15, 2015).
The 'Global Multistakholder Community' is Neither Global Nor Multistakeholder (Pranesh Prakash; October 20, 2015).
Do we need a Unified Post Transition IANA? (Pranesh Prakash, Padmini Baruah and Jyoti Panday; October 23, 2015).

# Event Organized

Cyber Security Policy Research (CIS, New Delhi; October 18, 2015). Tim Maurer gave a talk.

# Participation in Events

Cyfy 2015: The India Conference on Cyber Security and Internet Governance (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; Hotel Tajmansingh; New Delhi; October 14 – 16, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session "Protection of Intellectual Property and Business Secrets in the Knowledge Economy".
ICANN 54 (Organized by ICANN; INEX - Ireland’s Internet Neutral Exchange, Dublin; October 18 – 22, 2015). Pranesh Prakash, Snehashish Ghosh, Jyoti Panday and Padmini Baruah participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

# Op-ed

Digital India - Now to Work (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 1, 2015; Organizing India Blogspot; October 2, 2015).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

# Submission

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; October 1, 2015). CIS is contributing to this submission.

# Blog Entry

Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective (Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne; October 16, 2015). CIS was featured in this report.

# Upcoming Event

First Edition of Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Organized by CIS; New Delhi; February 25 – 27, 2016).

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News & Media Coverage
---------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

The rise and rise of slacktivism (Divya Gandhi; Hindu; October 3, 2015).
Modi's Valley hug sparks swadeshi talk (Sujit John and Shilpa Phadnis; The Times of India; October 6, 2015).
CIS in Top 50 Tech Blogs of India (rebateszone; Ocotber 7, 2015).
Access at the cost of Net neutrality? (Suhrith Parthasarathy; Hindu; October 8, 2015).
Dadri reopens debate on online hate speech (Amulya Gopalakrishnan; The Times of India; October 9, 2015).
How To Win Friends, FB Style (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; October 12, 2015).
Supreme Court provides partial relief for Aadhaar (Apurva Vishwanath and Saurabh Kumar; October 15, 2015).
Digital India: Did Modi get it wrong in Silicon Valley? (Ayeshea Perera; BBC News; October 16, 2015).
Net advocacy body probing linkages between telcos and Facebook’s auto-play video option (Prabhu Mallikarjunan; Financial Express; October 28, 2015).

---------------------------------
About CIS
---------------------------------
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2015-bulletin