Centre for Internet and Society

Annual Report 2014-15

praskrishna — 2016-12-11T07:29:05Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/reports/annual-report-2014-15.pdf

Guru Gomke is a Stylish Ol Chiki Typeface for India’s Santali Speakers

praskrishna — 2016-12-01T14:56:41Z

The blog post was published by AIGA.org on November 29, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was consulted.

Back story: Ever met a teenaged girl yearning to be a typeface designer? Yes? Then perhaps you know Pooja Saxena, who recognized her life’s calling when she was still in high school. Saxena went on to study with type historian and designer Fiona Ross at the University of Reading in the UK.

The idea for Guru Gomke came from a chat she had with Panigrahi, whose work with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Program at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore underscored the lack of tools and resources available for India’s minority languages online. For example, Ol Chiki is the alphabet needed to write the language Santali, used by over 5 million people in India and its neighboring countries. “At the time of our conversation, we couldn’t find a single Unicode-compliant font in the script—forget a typeface family with a bold or an italic. [Noto Sans Ol Chiki, in regular and bold, has since been released]. Subhashish mentioned all these minority scripts in India that people can’t use because fonts and keyboards for them don’t exist,” Saxena says. “I was enthusiastic to help create a free open-source typeface family and input methods in Ol Chiki, and thanks to Subhashish’s work with A2K, he was able to make it happen.”

Why’s it called Guru Gomke? Guru Gomke is a title of respect for Pandit Raghunath Murmu, creator of the Ol Chiki script in the early 20th century. The name translates to “great teacher.” It was recommended to Panigrahi by one of the language experts consulted by the designers, and they found it a wonderful nod to the history of the script.

What are its distinguishing characteristics? Its very existence, frankly. It’s now one of just two Unicode-compliant fonts with both bold and italic character sets.

What should I use it for? Next time you need to set absolutely anything in Ol Chiki.

What other typefaces do you like to pair it with? Matched to Source Sans Pro visually and proportionally, these two fonts are visually harmonic used anywhere Ol Chiki and Latin texts have to work together. In fact, the Latin glyphs included in Guru Gomke are derived from Source Sans Pro.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/eye-on-design-aiga-guru-gomke-is-stylish

November 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-02-06T12:52:38Z

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

Dear readers,

As we bring in the new year here at CIS, we thank you for your continued interest and support.

Over the course of the previous year, government services and functions became more dependent on information technologies, concerns over cybersecurity and the vulnerability of electronic infrastructure grew, and new developments and challenges arose in the fields of Internet governance and free speech and expression.

In the wake of this major year of developments, the work that CIS does is even more important. We look forward to engaging with these and other emerging issues, in 2017 and beyond.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
Geethanjali Jujjavarapu and Udbhav Tiwari undertook a high-level literature review of the most commonly used technological tools and processes in the big data life cycle. In the research paper the authors have argued that big data life cycle is a conceptual construct that can be used to study the various stages that typically occur in collecting, storing and analysing big data, along with the principles that can govern these processes. Nirmita Narasimhan in a blog post published by Your Story has thrown light on the various challenges which persons with disabilities have to overcome. She has stressed that promoting use of technology and open source software and imparting training at an early age will go a long way in making students with disabilities self-sufficient and independent. Government of India's work is not available under free and open licenses as is the case in various other nations. Tito Dutta has called upon the Indian government to make its work freely licensed, wherever possible and applicable. The 33rd WIPO-SCCR was held in Geneva from November 14 - 18, 2016. Anubha Sinha attended the meeting. CIS made its statements on the GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment and the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. What if our phones were to go silent? Would you be able to deal with the silence? Nishant Shah has explored this in an article published in the Indian Express. In a consolidated compilation titled Privacy after Big Data we have put together a series of articles that we have developed as we explore the impacts – positive and negative – of big data. This is a growing body of research that we are exploring and is relevant to multiple areas of our work including privacy and surveillance. CIS has called for comments for this compilation. The second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) is scheduled to take place in Bengaluru between March 3 - 5, 2017. From the 23 submitted session proposals CIS will select 10 to be part of the final Conference agenda. The selection will be done through votes casted by the teams that have proposed the sessions. This will take place in December 2016.

CIS in the news:

Using Kannada in technology made easier with smartphones (New Indian Express; November 1, 2016).
'Delink ICANN from US jurisdiction' (Deccan Herald; November 12, 2016).
Google, Facebook will not place ads on sites distributing fake news (John Riberio; IDG News Service and CIO; November 14, 2016).
How The U.K. Got A Better Deal From Facebook Than India Did (Payaswini Upadhyay; Bloomberg Quint; November 17, 2016).
The thrill of saving India from cybercrime (Peerzada Abrar; Hindu; November 20, 2016).
Free Net advocates flay Trai's public Wi-Fi paper (Anita Babu; Business Standard; November 20, 2016).
Popular apps are inaccessible to millions of disabled: Study (Arpita Raj; The Times of India and ET Brand Equity; November 21, 2016).
Caught in a filter bubble (Chethana Divya Vasudev; November 22, 2016).
A world apart (Meera Siva; Hindu Businessline; November 27, 2016).
Disabled kid? sorry, no admission! (New Indian Express; November 28, 2016).
Guru Gomke is a Stylish Ol Chiki Typeface for India’s Santali Speakers (AIGA.org; November 29, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Where Are There So Few Books For The Print-Impaired? (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; November 3, 2016).
4 tips for DIY makers (Subhashish Panigrahi; November 18, 2016).
Digital native: The Voices in Our Heads (Nishant Shah; November 20, 2016).
The Quest for Education – Persons with Disabilities, Severely Challenged (Nirmita Narasimhan; Your Story; November 24, 2016).
Demonetisation Survey Limits the Range of Feedback that can be Provided by the User (Udbhav Tiwari; November 24, 2016).

Jobs

CIS is presently seeking applications for the following positions

Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
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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Access to Knowledge
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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.

►Copyright & Patent

Blog Entries

33rd SCCR: Opening Statement by India on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific Group (Anubha Sinha; November 14, 2016).
33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Anubha Sinha; November 16, 2016).
33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment (Anubha Sinha; November 18, 2016).

►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).

Event Organized

Sambalpur University Workshop (Sambalpur; November 27, 2016).

Participation in Event

CIIPC-NLUD Workshop on Wikipedia Editing and Open Source Knowledge Sources (Organized by Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition (CIIPC), National Law university, Delhi; November 11 - 12, 2016). Rohini Lakshané and Tanveer Hasan conducted and facilitated this workshop.

Blog Entries

Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November (Tito Dutta; November 1, 2016)
100 Wikidays: The Journey so Far (Tito Dutta; November 23, 2016)
Free Knowledge and Indian Government Work (Tito Dutta; November 26, 2016).
Improving Telugu Village Articles (Pavan Santhosh; November 26, 2016).

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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 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

Blog Entry

Conference on the Digitalization of the Indian Legal System (Leilah Elmokadem; November 16, 2016)

Participation in Event

Industry Consultation Panel on Data Retention - DSCI (Organized by the Data Security Council of India; New Delhi; November 23, 2016). Udbhav Tiwari was a panelist.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Privacy after Big Data: Compilation of Early Research (Saumyaa Naidu; November 12, 2016).
Big Data in India: Benefits, Harms, and Human Rights - Workshop Report (Vidushi Marda, Akash Deep Singh and Geethanjali Jujjavarapu; November 14, 2016).

►Cyber Security

Blog Entry

CERT-In's Proactive Mandate - A Report on the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team’s Proactive Mandate in the Indian Cyber Security Ecosystem (Udbhav Tiwari; November 19, 2016).

►Free Speech and Expression

Blog Entries

If the DIDP Did Its Job (Asvatha Babu; November 3, 2016)
Internet's Core Resources are a Global Public Good - They Cannot Remain Subject to One Country's Jurisdiction (Vidushi Marda; November 9, 2016)
How Workstream 2 Plans to Improve ICANN's Transparency (Asvatha Babu; November 10, 2016).
ICANN Begins its Sojourn into Open Data (Padmini Baruah and Sumandro Chattapadhyay; November 11, 2016).
Navigating the 'Reconsideration' Quagmire (A Personal Journey of Acute Confusion).

Participation in Events

ICANN 57 (Organized by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India; Hyderabad International Convention Centre; November 3 - 9, 2016). Vidushi Marda was a speaker.
10th NLSIR Symposium - Regulating E-Commerce in India (Organized by National Law School of India University, Bengaluru; November 27, 2016). Vidushi Marda was a panelist.

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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:

Blog Entry

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selection of Sessions (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; November 16, 2016).

Event Organized

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (CIS; New Delhi; November 3, 2016).

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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

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.

► Request for Collaboration

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/november-2016-newsletter

4 tips for DIY makers

subha — 2016-11-22T02:36:39Z

I started learning stencil printing and hand lettering this year, and became quite enthralled with it. These age old techniques really add something special to postcards, which I usually send to myself, my wife, and my friends while traveling.

The article was published in Opensource.com on November 18, 2016

Of course, I started considering how I could make the artwork from these postcards open to others.

First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, usually Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 International. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.

Sometimes, I capture the postcard-making process as well, and upload those images to Wikimedia Commons.

If you're considering making your DIY project open, here are four main considerations:

1. To share or not to share?

Deciding whether to share your craft project or image might be an easy "sure, why not?" but you may be wondering "but, is it useful to others?"

My opinion is that yes, everything you make could be interesting to others, so why not make it open? There is certainly something in every maker activity that is worth sharing publicly. When I was making a stamp that was quite special and personal, and I did not want the whole world to see it because it was personal, but I did capture the stamp carving process for others to see. You might want to ask around friends and other people in any maker community you are part of. Also, try asking yourself what really would matter to other people so that you can share only useful outcomes and tips rather than sharing everything.

2. Choosing a license

I wrote about three tips for sharing your work online. And there are many other resources out there, including Creative Commons and GitHub.

A simple rule of thumb is: Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the Public Domain, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed.

3. Where to share

There is almost a platform to share anything these days. Most popular multimedia platforms support Creative Commons-licensed works, like YouTube and Vimeo for video, Flickr for images, Medium for writing, Jamendo for music, and many more. Wikimedia Commons, mentioned above, is a sister project of Wikipedia and the world's largest multimedia repository; it allows original works to be uploaded and shared by Copyright holders and others of works like images (.jpg, .png, .gif), presentations (.pdf), videos (.webm and .ogv), and audio files (.ogg).

Know of more places to share works? Let us know in the comments.

4. Meet birds of feather and exchange ideas

There are tons of global and local events that bring people of all maker interests under a single roof.

An event that I love is Mozilla's Maker Party. I have been to one in my city of Bengaluru, India and can guarantee it is lots of fun!

Events like this help connect you with other makers who live nearby.

Tell us about your experience

I hope these tips have helped. Do you have other tips to share? Leave us a comment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/opensource-november-18-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-4-tips-for-diy-makers

September 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-02-06T12:51:22Z

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

Dear readers,

Thank you for reading the Centre for Internet and Society's September newsletter. The past month was notable for the media presence that various CIS members had. Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan continued our work looking at the inaccessibility of everyday electronics with a piece in the Huffington Post about mobile applications and their low usability for persons with disabilities.

Ting-Yi Chang continued her research into the gender gap in Wikipedia, with a series of blog posts looking at the various movements and discoveries she has made about the Indian and the global context.

We are also happy to announce that CIS, in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy, will organize the second Internet Researchers' Conference next year.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS in partnership with Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy will organize the second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) from March 3 - 5, 2017 at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bengaluru. It is a free and open conference. Sessions must be proposed by teams of two or more members on or before Friday, October 21, 2016. All submitted session proposals will go though an open review process, followed by each team that has proposed a session being invited to select ten sessions of their choice to be included in the Conference agenda. Final sessions will be chosen through these votes, and be announced on January 2, 2017. In an article published in the Huffington Post, Nirmita Narasimhan threw light on the fact that mobile applications which today form an essential part of our lives such as booking cabs, ordering groceries, making payments online, or simply connecting to friends are still excluding millions of people in India particularly the visually impaired who want to use them. Rohini Lakshané has published a methodology to answer the research questions pertaining to working statements of mobile technology patents in India, also known as Form 27, using the granted patents from the landscape. In furtherance to the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2011 editor survey which revealed gender imbalance on online encyclopaedia, Ting-Yi Chang in a blog post series (of three parts) has summarized the movements and discoveries about Wikipedia gender gap on both local (India) and global scales. In an article published in the DNA, Subhashish Panigrahi has explained the concepts of FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS in light of the Software Freedom Day celebrated every year. Pranesh Prakash in a response note to Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) reply to Hans Verghese Mathews' article titled “Flaws in the UIDAI Process” (EPW, March 12, 2016) has noted that UIDAI do not illustrate the extent to which the false positive identification rates is expected to grow—neither in their initial paper, nor in their rebuttal to Mathews—whereas Mathews provides a method of estimating the increase of false positive identification rates. The article by Pranesh was published in the Economic & Political Weekly. CIS made a submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks. Through comments prepared by Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode, CIS pointed out that Wi-Fi, a radio transceiver must be deregulated further to bridge India's digital divide.

CIS in the news:

Talking Point: Futile Battle Against Torrents (Deccan Herald; September 1, 2016)
Despite SC order, thousands booked under scrapped Sec 66A of IT Act (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; September 7, 2016).
The DigiLocker was supposed to cut down paperwork but less than 0.1% of Indians are using it (Mayank Jain; Scroll.in; September 12, 2016).
How does the government track all its legal cases? (Shreeja Sen; Livemint; September 13, 2016).
SpaceX Explosion Slows Facebook & Israeli Efforts To Control Online Content (Kit O' Connell; Mint Press News; September 13, 2016).
India's Aadhaar mandate for smartphone makers may rile global firms (Alnoor Peermohammed; Business Standard; September 14, 2016).
“Made in India” Innovation Policy (Prof. Collen Chien and Prof. Contreras; SpicyIP; September 19, 2016).
Is India Prepared for a Cyber Attack? Suckfly And Other Past Responses Say No (Sushil Kambampati; September 21, 2016).
To embed a tweet or not? (Vidhi Choudhary; Livemint; September 23, 2016).
WhatsApp ruling: Experts seek privacy law (Apurva Venkat and Moulishree Srivastava; Business Standard; September 24, 2016).
When the war’s on WhatsApp (Manju V.; The Times of India; September 25, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Internet Rights and Wrongs (Pranesh Prakash; India Today; September 1, 2016).
Digital India Needs These Policy Changes (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; September 1, 2016).
Glaring Errors in UIDAI's Rebuttal (Pranesh Prakash; Economic & Political Weekly; Vol. 51, Issue No. 36; September 3, 2016).
Quarter Life Crisis: The World Wide Web turns 25 this year (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 3, 2016).
Indians Ask: Is Visiting a Torrent Site Really A Crime? (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; September 5, 2016).
Making Telugu Suitable for Internet (Rahmanuddin Shaik; Ammanudi; September 6, 2016).
Where is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Headed? (Anubha Sinha; Spicy IP; September 12, 2016).
Software Freedom Day: The Importance of Free and Open Source Software (Subhashish Panigrahi; DNA; September 17, 2016).
ଆମ ହାତେ ଆମ କୋଡ୍ ଲେଖିବା (Subhashish Panigrahi; Samaja; September 17, 2016).
It's September, and That Means It's Time for Software Freedom Day (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; September 17, 2016).
Who Owns Your Phone? (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 18, 2016).
Mobile Apps Are Excluding Millions Of Indians Who Want To Use Them (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; September 22, 2016).
Delhi High Court’s Ruling Against Publishers is a Triumph For Knowledge (Anubha Sinha; September 23, 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

Monthly Report

September 2016 Report (Suman Dogra; August 31, 2016).

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entry

Methodology: Statements of Working (Form 27) of Indian Mobile Device Patents (Rohini Lakshané; September 14, 2016).

Participation in Events

Workshop on Innovation, Economic Development and IP in India and China (Organised by the Singapore Management University, O.P. Jindal Global University, and Renmin University of China; New Delhi; September 27 - 28, 2016). Anubha Sinha made a presentation on Investigating Limits to Innovation and Peer Production in India's Mobile Apps Economy. Rohini Lakshané made a presentation on Exploring Open Hardware in Mass Produced Mobile Phones.
Law and Economy Policy Conference 2016 (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy and Institute of New Economic Thinking; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; September 28 - 30, 2016). Sunil Abraham served as a discussant on the "Towards a privacy framework for India" session of this conference.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka (Ting-Yi Chang; September 1, 2016).
A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates (Pavan Santhosh; September 12, 2016).
Another 5 Years: What Have We Learned about the Wikipedia Gender Gap and What Has Been Done? (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3; Ting-Yi Chang; September 18, 2016).
ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସ: ଆମ ହାତେ ଆମ କୋଡ଼ ଲେଖିବା (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 18, 2016). The blog post was mirrored in Your Story, Odisha Story and Aajira Odisha on September 17, 2016. The originally published piece can be accessed here.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses (Pavan Santhosh S. & Subhashish Panigrahi; September 20, 2016).

►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.

Submission

Comments on the Telangana State Open Data Policy 2016 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 1, 2016).

Participation in Event

Fuel Gilt Conference 2016 (Organized by Fuel Project; New Delhi; September 24 - 25, 2016). Subhashish Panigrahi participated and made a presentation.

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Internet Governance
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►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.

►Big Data

Participation in Event

Young Scholars' Programme, CPRSouth 2016 (Organized by Communication Policy Research South; September 6 - 7, 2016; Zanzibar). Rohini Lakshané participated in this programme.

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

CYFY 2016 - The India Conference on Cyber Security and Internet Governance (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; September 28 - 30, 2016; New Delhi). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

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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:

Submission

TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks (Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode; September 1, 2016). Shyam Ponappa and Arjun Venkatraman provided inputs.

Event Organized

7 Ways to Con/fuse the Internet with Analogy (Intergalactic Mix) - Talk by Surfatial (CIS, Bangalore; September 26, 2016). Surfatial, a trans-local collective that works with text and sound gave a talk about their essay.

Blog Entries

IIRC: Reflections on IRC16 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 6, 2016)
Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Call for Sessions (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 23, 2016).
How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Aishwarya Panicker; September 23, 2016).
Mobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit (Sujeet George; September 27, 2016).

Participation in Event

Designathon 2016 (Organized by Sequoia India; Bangalore; September 10 - 11, 2016).
Workshop on Center for IT and Society (Organized by IIIT, Delhi; September 17, 2016). Sumandro Chattapadhyay participated in the event.

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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/september-2016-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

►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.

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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► 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

Open source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Bengaluru

subha — 2016-10-27T01:07:06Z

The free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The group consisted of open source contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map, and users of FOSS solutions.

This was originally published by Open Knowledge International Blog on October 26, 2016.

Each participant shared their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it plays in their day-to-day life. From how a father has been trying to introduce about open source to his young son while migrating from proprietary to open source back and forth as his job demands so, to an Open Street Map contributor who truly believes that large-scale contributions to open source can make the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lies in it. All of those who gathered agreed with the fact that FOSS has widened their freedom in choosing how they want to use, share and remix the software they use.

When Software Freedom Day was started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined. It grew to a whopping 1000 by 2010 across the world. About the aim of the celebration, SFD’s official website says,

“Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high-quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit organization Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their communities.”

The participants in our group bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and we are moving towards adopting openness as a society. And all the participants also agreed that there is a significant disconnect in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing. So they planned to meet more regularly in events organized by any of the FOSS communities and try to connect with more people using social media and chat groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof.

What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?

Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both Free software and open source software. Adopted by well-known software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, the free software has many names — libre software, freedom-respecting software, and software libre are some of them.

As defined by the Free Software Foundation, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and non-commercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and non-commercial way, however, depends on the particular license the software is released under.

The Creative Commons licenses have recommendations for a broad range of free licenses that one can choose for the software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are several different open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “Open Source” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by educational advocacy organization Open Source Initiative. Open source software is created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

Supported by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD encourages everyone to gather in their own cities (map of places where SFD was organized this year), educate people around them about free software, promote on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2016 this year), even hacking with free software, organizing hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software!

From South Asia, there were 13 celebratory events in India, 8 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh and 4 in Sri Lanka. South Asian countries have seen the adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The Free Software Movement of India was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has launched an open data portal at data.gov.in portal for, initiated a new policy to adopt open source software, and asked vendors to include open source software applications while making Requests for proposals. Similarly, several free and open source communities and organizations like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India in India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh in Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal in Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan in Pakistan, Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka, that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software.

We promote open source and open Web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.
“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from Mozilla India wiki)

Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a research paper that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money that are spent in purchasing proprietary software,

“A large sum of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because the government is providing computers to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason, the government is to expend a significant amount of many for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying a significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize the cost of the projects.”

Check more ideas for celebrating Software Freedom Day, and a few more here while planning for next year’s Software Freedom Day in your city.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-knowledge-international-blog-october-26-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-open-source-in-everyday-life-how-we-celebrated-the-software-freedom-day-in-bengaluru

How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-10-25T01:39:42Z

Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.

This was published by Opensource.com on October 24, 2016.

Indian-language Wikipedias and open access

Most commonly spoken Indian languages have had Wikipedia projects for almost a decade. Languages like Konkani and Tulu are new entrants in the Wikipedia family, and currently there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias. One example of high-quality open access content is the Open Textbook of Medicine, an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, which was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happen to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high-quality, open content like this.

To help fuel the growth of Wikipedia and its various projects, such as the Indian-language Wikipedias, the Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem with Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates, which are run by both volunteers and paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization responsible for fundraising, technical, and community support. In India, Wikimedia India, the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates working on catalyzing the growth of the content and the communities.

Whereas Wikimedia India focuses on expanding all the Indian-languages content, Punjabi Wikimedians focus on Punjabi language content (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), and CIS-A2K focuses on five languages: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.

Indian-language Wikipedia projects can only grow with the help of volunteers editing their own language Wikipedias and adding missing information from a reliable sources, which is where open access content can help.

Open in action

The 2016 International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30, 2016. The theme this year is Open in Action. The announcement explains, "International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year's theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting preprints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research."

Indian contributors show the spirit of Open in Action as they help add content to the various Indian-languages Wikipedias. They depend on open access to research and other publications to help millions of people, including those living in rural areas, who are joining us online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias

‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys

praskrishna — 2016-10-25T00:40:09Z

From success to status, witness the memorable journey of Indian entrepreneurship in these excerpts and stories! StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous post here). Share these 25 gems and insights from the week of October 16-22 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights!

The article by Madanmohan Rao was published by Your Story on October 23, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

When it comes to e-commerce, IoT will exceed overall expectations. – Avinash K Gautam, Silvan Innovation Labs

Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service. – Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk

The customer experience is important, especially when things go wrong. – Radhika Aggarwal, ShopClues

Organisations will have to prepare for a digital future and they will have to use technology skills that offer artificial intelligence and design thinking. – Vishal Sikka, Infosys

Design isn’t only about ‘wow’ features. Learn about user preferences and behaviour. – Jay Dutta, SAIF Partners

Overall, there are 30–40 million sarkari naukri aspirants in the country. - Konark Singhal, Sarkari.Jobs

The growth of energetic startups is sure to translate into growth for the agriculture sector if channelised appropriately. - Varun Khurana, Crofarm

Awareness with respect to organic food is on the rise. - Likhita Bhanu, Terra Greens

Almost 100 percent of adhoc transport still happens through truck stands or ‘nakas’. - Kausalya Nandakumar, SmartShift

The opportunities to build connected mobility and electric vehicles in India are immense. - Chetan Maini, Reva

We foresee a paradigm shift in corporate outlook towards on-site childcare. - Chirag Shah, Little Big World

There is need for collective action towards bolstering growth for our cottage industry. - Parul Mehta, Ishanya Foundation

India has more than 250 million students enrolled in government and private schools. Unfortunately, more than 70 percent of children never complete their education. - Anil Bhansali, Microsoft India

Sales this festive season have probably not changed too much over last festive season. - K.Vaitheeswaran, retail entrepreneur

India has become our largest market outside of the Chinese mainland. - Lei Jun, Xiaomi

There is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language. - Subhashish Panigrahi, Centre for Internet and Society

Both men and women have to balance work and life, however, a woman is at the receiving end of prejudiced approaches more than men. - Shweta Jain, William Grant & Sons

Mistreating and disrespecting women doesn’t make a man cool, it makes him a monster. - Sunny Leone

Social crowdfunding is here to change the face of social activism. - Piyush Jain, Impact Guru

It’s beneficial that angel investing is considered sexy. - Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Babygogo

Future growth depends on empowering people. Innovation and globalisation have created opportunity the likes of which has never before existed. – Alec Ross, ‘The Industries of the Future’

Live in the present and be grateful for what you have in life. - Anni Sharma, SelfV Survivor

Follow your dream and passion consistently. - Shyamala Ramanand, Akanksha

Life’s not an easy journey. We live only once and we are responsible for own happiness. - Haritha Khandabattu

If you solve a real problem, you will do well. And God knows we have a lot of problems to solve. – Suveen Sinha, ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

Entrepreneurship should be a happy and joyous journey and a journey filled with purpose to be called truly successful. - Ashok Soota, Happiest Minds

Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession. - Sanjay Padode, DaRT

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/your-story-madan-mohan-rao-october-23-2016-startup-journeys-quotes-respectable-profession

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

subha — 2016-10-22T04:12:40Z

The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.

This was published by Your Story on October 20, 2016.

State of Indian languages on the internet

Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind mentioned that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the declining data charges because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in rural India is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over 90 percent of the users being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Open access, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not paywalled, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to Creative Commons licenses and several other licenses that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias, including newest entrants like Konkani and Tulu. That said, these projects are growing with more and more encyclopedic content written with a neutral point of view, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the people’s encyclopedia and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is Open Textbook of Medicine ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

The list of challenges to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem by having several Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the Wikimedia Foundation, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.

With the Open Access Week—a week dedicated for promoting Open Access globally—around the corner with “Open in Action” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india

Workshop of Competition Law and Policy Brochure

praskrishna — 2016-10-21T14:58:21Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/workshop-brochure-cci.pdf

Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form

hasan — 2016-10-09T14:40:36Z

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year).

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success.

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	157	CIS-A2K has been able to increase participation of female editors across its Focus Language Areas.
2. # of new editors	799	Our WEP initiatives have helped in introducing and retaining editors across FLA (except for Odia).
3. # of individuals involved	1200	Public events and anniversary celebrations held in Odia and Kannada have helped Wikimedia projects in reaching the general public as these events have been widely covered by media.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	2823	Photo-walks, WEP activities and image re-licensing efforts have helped the A2K team in achieving this metric.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	18998	Thematic edit-a-thons anchored by A2K and Collaborative edit-a-thons that have been supported by A2K have been a big hit during the last grant period amongst Indic Wikimedians.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	109.64 MB

Kannada

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	23	As of now the Kannada community is relatively small, A2K would like to expand the user and editor base by taking Wikimedia activities to various parts of the state.
2. # of new editors	609	These numbers include new editors from WEP initiative and editathons conducted as part of 13 Kannada Wikipedia anniversary.
3. # of individuals involved	700	Public event organised during the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary has boosted our reach.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	1290	Due to the Photo walk organised as part of the 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary celebrations.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	8132	Most of the articles created under WEP initiative are still under sandbox (as a quality enforcing measure), hence the number is low. The number also includes Wikisource folios.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	56.5 MB

Konkani

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	4	Activities in Konkani Wikipedia dipped after the project became live.
2. # of new editors	20	The new editors were introduced to Konkani Wikipedia with the help of Nirmala Institute of Education, Panjim an institutional partner of CIS-A2K.
3. # of individuals involved	50
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	34
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1546	Konkani Wikipedians took the project of creating one article per village in Goa quite enthusiatically.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	8.11 MB

Marathi

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	64	Events conducted at Pune University, Pune and IIT-Bombay involved existing Wikipedians.
2. # of new editors	59	Activities conducted at SWERI, Pandharpur, TISS, Mumbai and IIT-Mumbai have contributed to this.
3. # of individuals involved	150	Involvement of Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited opened up new readership to get involved in Marathi Wikimedia projects.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	27	A2K team could not organise a dedicated photo walk or invest in image re-licensing activity.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	331	Although the number of the articles is low, many new female editors were introduced and have taken up editing on Marathi Wikipedia.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	2.64 MB

Odia

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	21	Wiki Tungi activities are lead by active Wikimedians from the Odia community.
2. # of new editors	56	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon gained a lot of currency on the social media platforms which in turn resulted in new editors for Odia Wikimedia projects.
3. # of individuals involved	120	Three events with Puri WikiTungi (Puri Workshop, 15th Anniversary celebration, and Mission Odisha event), Wikipedia workshop in Utkal University.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	601	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon had an in-built component of adding images related to the Rathayatra.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1780	Only pages created in Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource are indicated and not article improved.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	9.56 MB

Telugu

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	30
2. # of new editors	45	Need to try getting more New users on to the board.
3. # of individuals involved	150
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	871
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1342	Includes folios digitized in Wikisource.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	7.23 MB

Train-a-Wikipedian

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	15	Editors who have participated in at least one training session.
2. # of new editors	10	Editors who got beginners' training (includes account creation and basic Wikipedia training such as Wikiformatting, components of Wikipedia, article structure).
3. # of individuals involved	30	#1+#2 and the people who were involved during training sessions.
4. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	5867
5. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	25.6 MB

Telling your program stories - all programs

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.

Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.

We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.

We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.

You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.

A2K key activities

During this grant period CIS-A2K has organized and supported a number of events in collaboration with Indic Wikimedia community members. Some of those are:

July 2015	August 2015	September 2015
Konkani Wikipedia goes live, (See more)	Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore (See more)	Seminar on "Empowering Marathi Schools", Pune, Kannda Wikipedia meetup (See more)
October 2015	November 2015	December 2015
Konkani language book donation (See more)	4 Indic language communities IRC meeting, Community discussion for making Tulu Wikipedia live (See more)	Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Initiative to bring 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia (See more)
January 2016	February 2016	March 2016
Konkani-language Edit-a-thon and English-Romi Konkani dictionary release, Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon (See more)	Digitisation sprint at Andhra Loyola College, Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary (See more)	(See more) National Wikipedia Education review program, Odia-language Women’s History Month edit-a-thons (See more)
April 2016	May 2016	June 2016
Odia Wikipedia's 14th anniversary (See more)	Mini TTT and MWT in Pune, Advanced training for Kannada-language Wikimedians (See more)	Train the Trainer 2016, MediaWiki Training (See more)

Capacity building

Train the Trainer

Train the Trainer (or TTT in short) is a residential program that attempts to groom leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedians. Participating Wikimedians interact with A2K staff members and community leaders towards designing, implementing and documenting activities such as outreach, GLAM projects, edit-a-thons, etc. Various topics such as grants' structure, funding opportunities both with A2K and WMF, effective reporting and documentation, use of Global and other metrics, etc., are also covered.

After the first 2 iterations in 2013 and 2015, the third iteration of the training program was conducted in June 2016.

Diversity

In this iteration—

Language: 16 Wikimedians from 10 different language communities participated as shown in the pie chart below.

Participants of TTT 2016, representing different language communities

Gender: This year we had 5 female participants (out of 15 participants). After the 2013 iteration we felt we should try to encourage more female Wikipedians to participate in TTT. However, this does not mean that we had any different eligibility criteria set for the female Wikipedians.

Participants division by gender

Representation of Indic Wikimedia communities: We had participants from all over India. Although TTT is a national-level event, we also had participants from outside of India (Nepal and Sri Lanka).

Lessons learnt

TTT 2016 participants

After the 2015 version we found that a few participants faced difficulties to understand and work on the pre-event presentations. This year (2016), we have given more detailed instructions and were in touch with the participants while they were doing pre-event works.
By dovetailing TTT and MWT, A2K team was able to bring Indic Wikimedians working for outreach and on technical front together. This helped the participants to create a wishlist regarding tools, gadgets, and other technical help required to conduct effective outreach activities.

Based on participants' feedback and suggestions plus our own observations, while keeping Wikimedia Foundation's guidelines in mind, we make necessary changes to our program structure. In this year's TTT we made a number of changes‖

We encouraged more eligible female editors to participate.
We found that the objective and aims of the event remained unclear to a few participants in the earlier iterations. This year we have given more attention to explain the program's objectives, aims and expectations.

Challenges

We expected that the participants would be in touch with us while planning, conducting, and making reports of an event. After 2015 TTT^[1] we found a few participants did not respond to our emails or messages.
While TTT 2016 participants have shown active interest during WCI-related edit-a-thon, the same level of interest was not seen during regular monthly meetups.
Despite having communicated to the TTT 2015 participants that a mini TTT should be organized in their communities, however this was not taken up actively.

Mediawiki Training

Participants of MWT 2016, during the workshop

MediaWiki Training (MWT) is an annual residential training workshop that intends to bridge the prevalent gap between outreach volunteers and MediaWiki volunteers and developers. MWT attempts to create and groom 'tech' leaders from the existing Indian language Wikipedians. It aims to facilitate discussions around nurturing leadership regarding technical issues such as filing bugs that hinder the growth of Indian language Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. At the same time, it encourages active contribution towards improving the existing MediaWiki software from the participants to understand importance of utilizing technology for outreach activities.

The first iteration of the event was held on 24-27 June 2015. 14 editors from 8 Indic communities participated in this workshop. Some of the topics taught during the workshop were: Bugs -presentation, demo & case study, Bots - Pywiki & AWB, MediaWiki tools, TranslateWiki, Quarry, WikiMetrics, APIs, User scripts.

The second iteration of the workshop was conducted on 17-19 June 2016 in Bangalore. MWT 2016 was planned to facilitate an idea-exchange platform between outreach volunteers and MWT participants. 11 editors from 6 Indic Wikimedia communities recieved training during this workshop. Some of the topics discussed during the program were Wikidata, usage of Wikimedia labs tools, templates and infobox creation, as well as AutoWikiBrowser (AWB).

Lessons learnt

Ensure better logistics co-ordination thus guaranteeing involved participation from the participants.
Priority topics must be given more time.

Challenges

Scheduling follow-up events such as mini version of MWT across Indic Wikimedia communities.
To identify female Wikimedians and encourage them to participate in MWT.

Train-a-Wikipedian

Train-a-Wikipedian session in Hyderabad on 15 May 2016

Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW) was started in December 2015 to identify enthusiastic Indic Wikipedians, to train and groom them to develop their editing skills. Inspired by the Adopt-a-User program of the English-language-Wikipedia, this initiative is working on encouraging new Wikimedians who nominate themselves to learn basic Wikimedia policies. Until 30 June 2016, more than 25 training sessions have been conducted.

The concept of Train-a-Wikipedian was appreciated by several Indic Wikimedians from different communities.
More than 25 Wikimedians signed up for this program.

Reflections

These are some of the reflections/feedback we received from Train-a-Wikipedian participants:

Username

	Community	Topics/Learnings	Feedback/Reflections
User:Nrgullapalli (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	Policy discussion such as civility, stub, How to search in a better way using operators etc on the web to get references Introduction to The Wikipedia Library / Resource exchange / CIS-A2K Resource exchange.	“ The training was helpful, I learned a couple of new tools. But I feel such trainings should be conducted on regular basis and follow-ups should be done. ”
User:Mouryan (Training page)	Bengali Wikipedia	Essentials of conducting local Wiki-event. Using special pages such as Special:UncategorizedPages,, Special:ShortPages etc., Google Books citation, Metrics.wikimedia.org	“ It was amazing and a quite enriching experience for me at a personal level sir. The things I learnt at Train-a-Wikipedian Hyderabad actually paid the results soon enough.and it enabled to successfully conduct my first offline Wikipedia Meetup in Kolkata just within one month's time. . . ”
User:Rajasekhar1961 (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	AdminTools such as MoreMenu, QuickWikiEditor, Citation making using Google Books citation tool, autofilling (from reftoolbar), DOI citation tool; Quick Page purging	“ I picked up some very useful skills & learnt good tools. But, I became a little inactive after that so could not utilize these learnings much. I hope to do so in future.

Lessons learnt

This initiative was inspired by English Wikipedia's program Adopt-a-user, however we found that we must make necessary changes to meet requirements of Indic Wikimedians.
Real-life training sessions left a deeper impact and motivated Wikimedians much more than online training modules.

Challenges

We failed to conduct sufficient number of offline training sessions.
Follow-ups have not been done for a couple of workshops, for example a TAW workshop was conducted in Hyderabad on 15 May and was well-received, but no follow-up TAW workshop has been conducted since then in the city.
From A2K's side sometimes there were delays in connecting and co-ordinating with the signed-up participants. On the other hand sometimes, we did not got responses from the participants when we contacted them.

Policies and guidelines on Indic Wikipedias

Indic Wikipedia policy handbook

CIS-A2K started working on a project to support and encourage Indic Wikipedians to create and/or localize policies in their native languages. A survey was conducted and a policy handbook was also created.

Lessons learnt

Efforts must be taken to initiate discussion regarding creation, localisation of policies in events organized by A2K

Challenges

Although a few policy-discussion meetups have been conducted (such as this one), we faced difficulties finding volunteer translators to translate the handbook into Indic languages.

Play media

Dr. Soubhagyavathi talks about Kannada Wikipedia

Kannada

Kannada Wikipedia Edit-a-thon partcipants at DSERT in January 2016

Kannada Wikipedia has reached the 20,000 article mark during this year. Kananda community members collaboratively designed the plan for the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary. This activity brought together Wikimedians from different parts of Karnataka. By applying for a PEG Kannada Wikipedians have interacted with global Wikipedians and WMF staff. This event resulted in new editors and outreach activities in various parts of Karnataka. A2K has appointed a Program Associate as per its revised strategy A2K 2.0 for Kannada Wikimedia projects.

Institutional partnership

Two new partnerships have been initiated during this grant period–

The Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Government of Karnataka and
Alva's Education Foundation at Moodabidri.

While Alva's Education Foundation is going to be a partner in implementing Wikipedia Education Program. DSERT is an institution that trains school teachers all across Karnataka state. A2K will be training the trainers about using and editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the context of their classroom. However, the 3 other institutional partnerships - Karnataka Janapada University, Manjusha Museum, Dharmasthala, and Tumkur University, Tumkur- that were anticipated during the writing of workplan, could not materialize. This was due to the delay in recruiting a Program Associate for the Kannada Wikimedia projects.

A2K has successfully continued its earlier partnerships and has benefited from their advice regarding our WEP activities and workplan.

Awareness and Outreach

Both the DSERT partnership and the 13th anniversary helped raise awareness around thematic article writing which encouraged Kannada Wikipedians to engage in projects. Various editing projects on literature, science, engineering subjects were taken up actively by the community members. Approximately 225 articles were created exclusively as part of 13th year anniversary celebrations.

Offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives like this during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary

CIS-A2K also tried to engage in skill-building activities for the Kannada community members. As per the requests from volunteers, capacity building programs were arranged both in groups and in one-on-one settings to individual Wikimedians. Both TTT and MWT saw active participation from Kannada community. The results of these would be visible in the coming months.

In order to increase the offline readership of Kannada Wikipedia, offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary held at Mangalore. 50 such flash drives have been distributed so far to those in need.

Lessons learnt

Kannada was not properly represented in terms of blogs and media coverage and we have been working on addressing this issue.
A better communication method would be devised with inputs from the community members.

Gating factors

A2K has not been successful towards re-releasing of textbooks published by the Government of Karnataka under CC-by-SA licences.

An orientation for Kananda bloggers, some of who could be potential Wikimedians, has not taken place.
Some community members have repeatedly emphasized on having better communication, documentation of activities taken up by the Program Associate.

Odia

Active editors in Odia Wikipedia during the period July 2015 to Feb 2016

Through the community building activities such as the formation of Puri WikiTungi and revival of Bhubaneswar WikiTungi, active editors of the Odia Wikipedia movement reached 30 editors (as of 30 June 2016). Regular follow-up with Wikimedians on-Wiki and via different social media channels along with monthly meetups has helped in editor retention. This has further encouraged Odia Wikimedians to participate in both on-Wiki and off-Wiki activities.

CIS-A2K has supported the community to celebrate the 14th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia, which facilitated 30 Wikimedians to meet and discuss the future activities for Odia Wikimedia projects.

Formation of Puri WikiTungi

Play media

Adyasha Sahu a Wikimedian from Puri community sharing her journey in the Wikimedia movement.

Puri WikiTungi is a city-based editing group formed by Wikimedians from Puri to spread awareness about Odia Wikimedia projects in and around the city. This group was formed after the first Wikipedia workshop in Puri. Around 30 individuals attended the workshop. 14 participants from this workshop have emerged as active editors on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. They are also involved in conducting offline meet-ups, seminar and workshops.

Bridging the Gender gap

Gender diversity in Odia Wikimedia community during 2014-16. For this statistics Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource have been considered.

CIS-A2K has engaged with seven new female Wikipedians and this has resulted in their active participation on Odia Wikimedia projects. One of the female Wikmedians, Chinmayee Mishra has independently conducted a Wikipedia orientation workshop. This workshop has boosted participation of female Wikipedians. Their efforts have been discussed through blog posts and other social media platforms.

Lessons learnt

Two organizations are unofficially supporting Odia Wikimedia community by providing meetup space and internet access for Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungis. A2K must make official agreements with these institutions.

Gating factors

Failed to build a partnership with any institution for running Education program for Odia Wikimedia projects. Awareness about the importance of WEPs is required for achieving this.

Telugu

A2K team has been successfully collaborating with Telugu Wikipedia community to improve content quality on Telugu Wikipedia and strengthen the community by increasing its reader and editor base. The team also shares ideas by providing and extending support such as involving community members in discussions with potential partners and designing programs based on their suggestions. Such collaboration has strengthened communities to conduct many Edit-a-thons which have resulted in a wide variety of quality articles. A2K intends to continue such collaborative activities resulting in improvements of stub and poorly translated articles.

Activities and Events

CIS-A2K team has been involved in conducting (holding or co-ordinating) several edit-a-thons in Telugu Wikimedia community, while a few were anchored in Telugu, others were multi-lingual. Many initiatives of the last grant period (i.e. July 2014 to June 2015) have been continued. A2K and the community have collaboratively organised an of sharing resources has resulted in which focused on improving Telugu movie articles. Community members have expanded stubs with information, references and photos. For the edit-a-thon A2K provided resources and references and the community members developed stub articles and created new articles.

Capacity building activities have also been carried out with Telugu Wikipedians. A copyrights session was conducted to improve Telugu Wikimedians' understanding on the subject and clear doubts for Wikisource contributors. Community members, Meena Gayathri and T.Sujatha, attending CIS A2K's Train-a-Wikipedian session have expressed that they gained invaluable knowledge and skills in content translation. The two later initiated a project to improve the quality of Google Translated articles. More than 30 such articles have been improved through it.

Similarly, the Quick introduction sessions held in Hyderabad community meet-ups by CIS A2K helped explain some online tools usage and enabled Wikipedians to contribute better for Wikimedia projects. One of the most active Wikipedians, Swaralasika, said that he was able to make better citations after the sessions which has helped him improve his editing.

Institutional Partnership

With the institutional partnerships established between CIS A2K and Annamayya library, Telugu Wikisource community members have uploaded some of the missing pages in on Telugu Wikisource. Due to the attempts of the community members towards proofreading these books can be downloaded now. The Andhra Loyola College partnership has also cultivated new editors and engage in WEP activities.

Outreach and Media

Increased media coverage has helped the cause of Telugu Wikimedia projects. Hard work of several Telugu Wikipedians (such as Pranayraj and Viswanadh) has been recognized and highlighted. Pranayraj points out that the media coverage helped him reach more people who want to contribute to Wikipedia.

Lessons learnt

A2K team has been working to make Telugu Wikipedia more visible in popular Telugu media, especially in printed media such as off-wiki and on-wiki events coverage in major local newspapers like Eenadu, Sakshi, Andhra Jyothi
WEP activities at partner institutions need to be synchronized with their academic schedule.

Gating factors

Technical support requests from the community were delayed on our end. To overcome this, we are trying to find interns to assign technical tasks requested from communities.

Konkani

Play media

Darshan Kandolkar talks about Konkani Wikipedia

Having gone live since July 2015 after nine years of incubation, Goan Konkani Wikipedia has developed and expanded with the help of CIS A2K to draw more contributors and resources into the project. CIS-A2K has attempted to develop Konkani Wikipedia in all the three scripts (Romi, Devanagari, Kannada). Institutions such as Thomas Stephen Konkani Kendra (TSKK) for Romi script, Goa Konkani Sahitya Academy for Devanagari script, Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Academy for Kannada script have agreed to donate content.

Department of Computer Science, Goa University, had organized an edit-a-thon to include the villages of Goa state on Konkani Wikipedia.

Due to the discontinuation of the Program Associate for Konkani, several of our programmatic activities have not been accomplished during this grant period.

Partnership

In the past year, CIS-A2K had the honour to collaborate with Mannd Sobhaann and World Konkani Centre, organizations working with Konkani language and culture, to bring in more resources into Konkani Wikipedia. These two organizations work for popularization and conservation of Konkani culture and language. Mannd Sobhaan has donated three Konkani books under CC-BY-SA license which has provided great sources for citation and references. On the other hand, these organizations have also agreed to hold GLAM activities, while A2K would digitize their archives of audio, video and text resources to further expand resources available for Konkani Wikimedia projects.

Activities and Events

A one-day edit-a-thon was organized at Krishnadas Shama Central Library, Goa in January 2016. Members of CIS-A2K participated in this event to help mentor the participants. The event created 100 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia in a single day.

Lessons learnt

Increase editor base by engaging academicians and bloggers.
Increase readership by introducing Konkani Wikipedia in primary and higher primary schools.

Gating factors

Activity in the end of 2015 was low in Konkani Wikipedia that no new articles were created in November and December.
Non-availability of a Program Associate

Marathi

Partnership

Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) has re-licensed 1000 books on the culture, history, and literature under CC-by-SA 4.0 license in October, 2015. In December 2015, a discussion was initiated by CIS A2K at The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) to plan digitization and uploading of the books for Marathi Wikisource.

Events and Outreach

A two-day workshop was organised by the CIS A2K Program Associate in August 2015 at Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University. This workshop was an attempt to bridge the gender gap on Marathi Wikipedia. The "Sau Dhuni Teen" project focused on creating Wikipedia articles on notable women, themes and works related to gender studies. This event attracted new editors and introduced to them input methods for Marathi methods and basic guidelines of contributing to Wikipedia. The event also served as an important initiative to utilize Wikipedia in generating Indian language annotations on academic sources in Women's Studies and the Social Sciences.

In May, 2016, CIS A2K organized a two-day mini version of Train-the-trainer (TTT) and Mediawiki Training (MWT) for Marathi Wikimedians in Pune. Topics covered in the Mediawiki training include Wikidata, bug triage, Mediawiki extensions, etc., while the TTT session focused on advanced editing skills, outreach planning, and grants structure introduction.

Lessons learnt

A strategy is required to utilize books donated by Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) as references on Marathi Wikipedia.
Spreading Marathi Wikipedia-related activities to different parts of Maharashtra .

Gating factors

Some participants of workshops reflect that unavailability of sandboxes in Marathi Wikipedia was a concern for new editor as they were unsure if the article might be changed during the time they edit.

General Support and Service to the Movement

Play media

Odia Wikisourcer Pankajmala Sarangi shares her experience and future plans to grow the community. Video by Pankajmala Sarangi (original video) and Subhashish Panigrahi (post production), CC BY-SA 4.0. Pankajmala recorded the video herself covering a few specific topics sent over email.

Partnership Summary

Growing partnerships in WEPs: A2K team has successfully continued all the partnerships form the previous grant period and has also been able to bring new partners onboard thus adding value to the Wikimedia movement. A2K conducted a review program for its WEP partners in Bangalore during the last grant period. This review program allowed the WEP partners across 3 different states to meet and discuss the salient features of the WEP initiative being run at their institutions. This review program helped A2K team to understand institutional expectations and challenges. The review meeting also helped us to generate inter institutional collaboration and sync A2K schedule with academic calendar of these institutions.
Book/Resource donation and digitization: A2K team is immensely happy to have partnered with Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha which has donated 1000 books about the Maratha administration, culture, history and social life. Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited, Pune has offered us in-kind support by digitising all these books and making them available to be uploaded on Marathi Wikisource.
Our collaboration with Manasu Foundation, Bangalore has also allowed us to digitise content donated to A2K for free. Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada now hosts a Digital Resource Lab that provides nevessary infrastructure (Computers, Internet access and printing facility) for all the Telugu Wikimedians.
Centurion University, Bhubhaneswar has expressed in digitising Odia publications from the copyright lapse period. With this partnership A2K expects to add close to 50000 folios to Odia Wikisource.
Goa University partnership and Indian village articles: After a brief lull in the activities of Konkani Wikipedia activities have spiked up again mainly because of the encouragement offered by Goa University. Prof. Madhav Gadgil with support from Goa University has launched a project of using the Census of India data to create articles on Villages of India. This activity has been eagerly taken up by the Konkani community members.Encouraged by the level of enthusiasm shown by the Konkani community members Telugu, Marathi and Odia community members have also been engaged in creating articles on villages of India in their respective languages.
Partnership in image re-licensing: Alva's Education Foundation have donated more than 15000 images under CC-BY_SA license. These images depict the folk art forms, famous personalities, cultural practices, tribal costumes and other areas regarding the social and cultural life of Karnataka in particular and South India in general.
Decision of focusing on existing partnerships: Many institutions that were indicated under the category 'To be explored' for a partnership during this plan year have not been approached as A2K team worked towards consolidating its work with the existing institutions rather than crowding our resources. This decision was taken in accordance with the suggestion of community members and FDC suggestion.
Partnership re-assessment: A further re-assessment of Institutional partnerships based on the parameters of RoI, contribution to Global Metrics and community support will be undertaken during the grant period July 2016- June 2017. Thus providing the A2K team opportunity to consolidate its work further and adopting course corrections (such as working with a different Wikimedia project, changing target group, conducting intensive summer/winter camps and if necessary exiting the partnership).

Outreach Strategies Development

Online and offline media outreach strategies: Stories related to Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects used to get less attention in the regional language media in India. There has been a hike in news articles and columns related to Indic-language Wikimedia projects both in print and electronic media. One of the most important reasons behind this is the establishment and growing relations with journalists and news editors that are responsible for specific genre of news. Actively writing opinion pieces to newspaper editorials and making blog posts on popular online portals are another reason.
Laying out strategies for recruiting new contributors using social media: Learning from our past initiative experiences such as the movement where new contributors on social media helped Odia Wikisource go live^[2], CIS-A2K has been helping communities with online outreach strategies. Some of the lessons learned can be found in this learning pattern.

Other Communication and Contribution

Balance of Focus Language Area (FLA) and non-FLA language: As CIS-A2K has been working primarily in five focus languages (Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu, with Tulu and Santali as two additional languages), there has been more attention paid to the aforementioned seven languages and less on the remaining Indian languages. The same pattern also reflects in our media outreach. To balance this and to provide support in the larger Indic language community, CIS-A2K has made efforts in connecting non-FLA Wikimedians with global community leaders^[3] and writing about work accomplished in non-FLA communities.^[4]
Highlighting the' community-led projects and less-known languages: CIS-A2K has contributed and highlighting in promoting the projects that are primarily community-led^[5] that are not necessarily catalyzed by the CIS-A2K. Also, via public speaking and publications, CIS-A2K has attempted to promote indigenous and the less-known languages of India.^[6]

Challenges

Labor intensive WEP programs: WEP initiative at many of our institutions have proven to be labour intensive. A2K team has not been able to integrate its efforts with the community members. There has also been a perception that the participating Higher Education institutions are required to only provide infrastructure and carve time out of academic schedule. This leads to a situation where the A2K team is often forced to devote time and resources towards the evaluation of assignments.
Lack of institutional partnership in Odia community: Despite the A2K team's attempts to establish formal institutional partnership and further a WEP initiative in Odia language, we have not been successful. With the consent of the Odia community A2K team has approached Centurion University regarding setting up a Wikisource Learning Centre.

CIS-A2K request page

CIS-A2K has a request page intended for Wikimedian/s from India to place requests for support from CIS-A2K. Between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016, CIS-A2K has supported 21 such programs/initiatives. The communities supported by CIS-A2K include Odia, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali etc. Besides offering financial support to conduct events, CIS-A2K has also provided non-financial support such as SWAG material, and technical and documentaion support.

Some of the events/initiatives we have supported are

Odia Wikipedians conducting Nabakalebara edit-a-thon (July 2015), Odia Wikisource 1st anniversary celebration (October 2015), Wikipedia's 15th Birthday celebration (January 2016)
funding Bengali Wikipedia community to conduct a workshop (Wikiacademy) (August 2015), a meetup (October 2015), and an "in-depth Meet-up of Bengali Wikipedia editor community in Kolkata" (June 2016)
helping Malayalam Wikimedia community to organize a meet-up at Kozhikode, Kerala (July 2015), and Wikisangamotsavam 2015 (December)
support Telugu Wikipedians to conduct a photowalk and a joint Telugu-English Wikimedians’ meetup in Hyderabad (both in December)
supporting two-day workshop on Samskrit Wikisource - 2016

Lessons learnt

WMF grants opportunities should be discussed and promoted amongst Indic Wikimedia communities.
Wikimedia communities must be encouraged to optimize in-kind support such as event venue, internet connectivity.

Challenges

We have continuously informed communities that a request (specially if it is a large one) should come to us at least 3-4 weeks before the event date(s). However we have received requests at the last moment and hence faced difficulties (such as time-pressure) reviewing and process these requests in time.
We ask communities to submit expenditure details and narrative report of an event soon after its completion. However, we have faced difficulties collecting the said records in time.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Provide exchange rate used:

1 USD = 61.88 INR

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.

Revenue source	Currency	Anticipated	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Anticipated ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Explanation of variances from plan
GSMA	INR	263,783.00	263,783.00	-	-	-	263,783.00	4262.73	4262.73
Wikimedia Foundation	INR	12,000,000.00	6,997,845.00	-	4,998,082.00	-	11,995,927.00	193,923.72	193,857.90
Kusuma Foundation	INR	15,000,000.00	7,500,000.00	-	7,500,000.00	-	15,000,000.00	242,404.65	242,404.65
MacArthar Foundation	INR	6,593,625.00	6,593,625.00	-	-	-	6,593,625.00	106,555.03	106,555.03
Cybersteward Project	INR	495,100.00	495,100.00	-	-	-	495,100.00	8,000.97	8,000.97
Big Data MF	INR	4,578,734.00	-	4,578,734.00	-	-	4,578,734.00	73,993.76	73,993.76
Privacy International	INR	3,883,300.63	-	405,388.00	3,477,912.63	-	3,883,300.63	62,755.34	62,755.34
IDRC	INR	6,751,260.57	-	-	6,751,260.57	-	6,751,260.57	109,102.47	109,102.47
The Mozilla Corporation	INR	662,173.00	-	-	-	662,173.00	662,173.00	10,700.92	10,700.92

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Grants	Explanation
GSMA	This fund is allocated to CIS for GSMA project undertaken in collaboration with Privacy International. The research has sought to understand different legal and regulatory aspects of security and surveillance in India.
Wikimedia Foundation	Wikimedia Foundation has given this grant, as part of their APG, to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. In addition, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of free knowledge within India.
Kusma Foundation Fund	Kusuma Foundation funds the core of CIS programmes.

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)

Expense	Currency	Budgeted	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Budgeted ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Percentage spent to date	Explanation of variances from plan
Staff Cost	INR	5,884,320.00	986,800.00	1,328,057.00	1,695,815.00	1,455,531.00	5,466,203.00	95,092.44	88,335.54	92.9	Slightly under spent
Staff Travel & Stay	INR	985,000.00	211,267.00	162,566.00	453,724.00	-	827,557.00	15,917.91	13,373.58	84.02	Due to inclusion of Program Associates presence staff travel has come down
Volunteer Support	INR	1,530,000.00	41,847.00	422,041.00	100,631.00	764,787.00	1,329,306.00	24,725.27	21,482.00	86.89	Increased activities with the intervention of Program Associates
Meetups	INR	895,000.00	84,285.00	4,679.00	151,904.00	114,825.00	355,693.00	14,463.48	5,748.11	39.74	A2K team has conducted Train-the-Trainer and Media Wiki Training during the last quarter of the grant period. These receipts will be updated in the final cumulative financial report
Digitization	INR	150,000.00	5,250.00	-	10,250.00	-	15,500.00	2,424.05	250.48	39.74	Purchase of scanners to assist communities towards digitisation has been done
Equipment	INR	80,000.00	-	170,000.00	362,430.00	122,660.00	655,090.00	1,292.82	10,586.46	819	Essential equipment such as laptops, video camera and hard disks purchased for newly hired Program Associates and A2K staff
Assistant/Intern	INR	110,000.00	20,000.00	30,000.00	110,000.00	-	160,000.00	1,777.63	2,585.65	145.45	Hiring of 3 Program Associates has resulted in over spending
Consumables (Printing, Statinery, Swag)	INR	460,000.00	-	-	-	-	0	7,433.74	0	0	A2K was unable to utilise these funds for publishing and distributing of Community Resources
Miscellaneous	INR	165,000.00	89,003.00	21,207.00	50,978.00	50,442.00	211,630.00	2,666.45	3,420.01	128	Unanticipated expenses regarding orientation of PA
Design/Documentation & Research	INR	50,000.00	-	20,950.00	-	16,508.00	37,458.00	808.02	605.33	75	Optimal spending
Program Advisor	INR	580,800.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	528,000.00	9,385.91	8,532.64	90.9	Optimal spending
TOTAL	INR	11,979,132.00	1,570,452.00	2,291,500.00	3,067,732.00	2,656,753.00	9,586,437.00	193,586.49	154,919.80	80	Final Financial report will have the cumulative details.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Compliance

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

References

2016 TTT version was conducted between 15–17 June 2016, and in this impact report we are reporting only till 30 June 2016. Although we have seen positive impact after this year's TTT, we are not including these in this report.
Panigrahi, Subhashish. "More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource". Wikimedia Blog (21 October 2014).
[ Roali], an IME for Assamese language that is quite popular in the Assamese speakers, came live after long time. CIS-A2K has worked closely with the developer of this IME, some of the Assamese Wikipedia community members and Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team in the entire process.
Broadening the scope of blogs CIS-A2K has contributed to the larger Indic communities has been a constant effort, though in a limited capacity. A few such blogs can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.
In this article, a community-led project for creating a script encoding converter for the Odia-language Wikimedia projects was highlighted. There were more publication in the Odia newspapers and the project was promoted on social media so that more people contribute using the Unicode standard. The latter will eventually help spread the language's reach on the Internet.
CIS-A2K and type designer Pooja Saxena submitted a paper and presented a paper titled "Bringing Ol Chiki to the digital world" at the Typoday 2016, an annual conference in India to bring type designers and script experts under one roof. The presentation is about CIS-A2K's work in bringing a freely-licensed typeface for the Ol Chiki script that is used to write Santali, an indigenous language spoken across several countries in South Asia.

Signature

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Lahariyaniyathi (talk) 17:01, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Resources

Resources to plan for measurement

Global metrics are an important starting point for grantees when it comes to measuring programmatic impact (Learning Patterns and Tutorial) but don’t stop there.
Logic Models provide a framework for mapping your pathway to impact through the cause and effect chain from inputs to outputs to outcomes. Develop a logic model to map out your theory of change and determine the metrics and measures for your programs.
Importantly, both qualitative and quantitative measures are important so consider both as you determine measures for your evaluation and be sure to ask the right questions to be sure to capture your program stories.

Resources for storytelling

WMF storytelling series and toolkit (DRAFT)
Online workshop on Storytelling. By Frameworks institute
- The origin of storytelling
- Story frames, with a focus on news-worthiness.
Reading guide: Storytelling and Social change. By Working Narratives
- The uses of the story.
- Case studies.
Blog: 3 Tips on telling stories that move people to action. By Paul VanDeCarr (Working Narratives), on Philanthropy.com
Building bridges using narrative techniques. By Sparknow.net
- Differences between a report and a story
- Question guides and exercises.
Guide: Tools for Knowledge and Learning. By Overseas Development Institute (UK).
- Developing a strategy
- Collaboration mechanisms
- Knowledge sharing and learning
- Capturing and storing knowledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/grants-apg-proposals-2014-2015-round2-the-centre-for-internet-and-society-impact-report-form

How we celebrated Software Freedom Day

subha — 2016-10-07T02:02:18Z

A small group of 6 FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map and users of FOSS solutions gathered in Bengaluru to celebrate Software Freedom Day. Subhashish Panigrahi who was a part of the event, reports the developments.

What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?

Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, free software has many names — free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both free software and open source software. As defined by the Free Software Foundation — one of the early advocates of software freedom — free software allows users to not only use the software with complete freedom, but also study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form however depends on the particular license the software is released under. The Creative Commons licenses have recommendations for a wide array of free licenses that one can choose for the software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are several different open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “Open Source” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by an educational-advocacy organization Open Source Initiative. Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

Supported by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD encouraged everyone to gather in their own cities (map of places where SFD was organized this year) to: educate people around them about free software, promote it on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2016 this year), hacking with free software, organizing hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software!

In South Asia, there were 13 celebratory events in India, 8 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh and 4 in Sri Lanka.

South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The Free Software Movement of India was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has launched the open data portal at data.gov.in, initiated a new policy to adopt open source software, and asked vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals. Similarly, there are many free and open source communities and organizations that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India in India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh in Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal in Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan in Pakistan, Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka.

We promote open source and open web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.

“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from Mozilla India wiki)

A Large amount of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because government is providing computer to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many* for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects.

This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in Bengaluru. The group consisted of FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map (OSM), and users of FOSS solutions. Each participant shared their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it plays in their day-to-day life — from how a father tries to introduce his son to open source software while migrating from proprietary to open source back and forth as his job demands so, to an OSM contributor who truly believes that large scale contributions to open source can make the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lie in it. The participants bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and how as a society we are moving towards adopting openness. There is a great disconnect in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing, agreed all the participants. So they planned to meet more regularly and try to connect more people using social media and chat groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof.

The blog post which was originally published by Mozilla Open Mic on October 6 can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/subhashish-panigrahi-mozilla-open-mic-october-6-2016-how-we-celebrated-software-freedom-day

August 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2016-10-02T02:09:36Z

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

Dear readers,

Thank you for reading the Centre for Internet and Society's August newsletter. The past month for us was a very exciting one. We supported and attended Wiki Conference 2016 in Chandigarh, which was a great opportunity to see the variety and scope of various Wiki projects across the country. The Tulu language Wikipedia also went live during this period, making it the 23^rd Wiki in a South Asian language.

We continued our work on telecom with our submission to TRAI on broadband proliferation across the country. We also continued to provide inputs to the media on a range of issues related to UIDAI and online streaming and piracy, e-accessibility and our continuing Wiki work.

We also published two articles on the inaccessibility of public and private phone apps, and the social impact of this, in FactorDaily. I was also honoured to receive the NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Awardin the "Persons with Disabilities" category.

All in all, a very productive month. We at CIS look forward to many more to come.

- Nirmita Narasimhan

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan got the NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Award in the "Persons with Disabilities" category. Shri Krishan Pal Gurjar, Hon'ble Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment presided over the event, in the presence of Som Mittal, Jury Chair and Chariman, NCPEDP, Dr. Meenu Bhambhani, VP & Head - Corporate Social Responsibility, Mphasis Ltd, and Javed Abidi, Honorary Director NCPEDP, several corporates and winners. Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month. The project waited as long as eight years in the Incubator before becoming the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia. Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia was held in Chandigarh from August 5-7, 2016. CIS supported this event. Sunil Abraham was a panelist. Information Technology, Electronics & Communications Department of the Government of Telangana released the first public draft of the Telangana State Open Data Policy 2016, and sought comments from various stakeholders in the state and outside. CIS submitted its comments. CIS wrote an article analyzing India’s alignment with the recommendations of the report of the Group of Governmental Experts. This policy brief attempts to articulate the major policy actions that may be considered by India to further incorporate and implement the principles enunciated in the Report. CIS submitted comments to TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks. The comments were prepared by Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode.Shyam Ponappa and Arjun Venkatraman provided advice. As part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series, Abhimanyu Roy has explored the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com.

Highlights

Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan got the NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Award in the "Persons with Disabilities" category. Shri Krishan Pal Gurjar, Hon'ble Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment presided over the event, in the presence of Som Mittal, Jury Chair and Chariman, NCPEDP, Dr. Meenu Bhambhani, VP & Head - Corporate Social Responsibility, Mphasis Ltd, and Javed Abidi, Honorary Director NCPEDP, several corporates and winners.
Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month. The project waited as long as eight years in the Incubator before becoming the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia.
Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia was held in Chandigarh from August 5-7, 2016. CIS supported this event. Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
Information Technology, Electronics & Communications Department of the Government of Telangana released the first public draft of the Telangana State Open Data Policy 2016, and sought comments from various stakeholders in the state and outside. CIS submitted its comments.
CIS wrote an article analyzing India’s alignment with the recommendations of the report of the Group of Governmental Experts. This policy brief attempts to articulate the major policy actions that may be considered by India to further incorporate and implement the principles enunciated in the Report.
CIS submitted comments to TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks. The comments were prepared by Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode.Shyam Ponappa and Arjun Venkatraman provided advice.
As part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series, Abhimanyu Roy has explored the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com.

CIS in news:

CIS gave inputs to the following media coverage:

Why experts are worried about Aadhaar-based authentication (Citizen Matters; August 2, 2016).
Apps can give personal information to strangers (Mebin John; New Indian Express; August 8, 2016).
Indian companies need to boost encrpytion adoption rate: experts (Koustav Das; Deccan Chronicle; August 9, 2016).
Implementing Indian languages in feature phones will be difficult (Gulveen Aulakh and Neha Alawadhi; Economic Times; August 10, 2016).
Aadhaar-enabled smartphones will ease money transfer (Neha Alawadhi and Gulveen Aulakh; Economic Times; August 10, 2016).
And now, Aadhaar-enabled smartphones for easy verification and money transfer (Business Insider; August 10, 2016).
Rational Internet laws essential to fulfil India’s digital goals (Krishna Makwana; Deccan Chronicle; August 14, 2016).
Using technology to address issues (The Hindu; August 14, 2016).
Responses to Trai’s consultation paper on free data contain some good suggestions (Asheeta Regidi; First Post's Tech 2; August 15, 2016).
Accessing pirated content might lead to prison term & Rs 3-lakh fine (Alnoor Peermohammed; Business Standard; August 22, 2016).
Extending Aadhaar to more areas is a hare-brained idea, it should be dropped (Seetha; First Post; August 23, 2016).
Festival scan on social media (The Telegraph; August 26, 2016).

Talking Point: Futile Battle Against Torrents (Deccan Herald; August 30, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles:

US Copyright law faces constitutional challenge (Anubha Sinha; Spicy IP; August 5, 2016).

South Asia's Largest Wikimedia Conference Kicks Off in India (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; August 5, 2016).
The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off (Subhashish Panigrahi; Opensource.com; August 5, 2016).

Do I Want to Say Happy B’day? (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; August 7, 2016).
3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators (Subhashish Panigrahi; Opensource.com; August 16, 2016).

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଓସିଆର: ଛପା ଲେଖାର ଛବିରୁ ଡିଇଟାଲ ଲେଖା (Subhashish Panigrahi; Samaja; August 21, 2016).
Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia (Subhashish Panigrahi; August 26, 2016).
Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language! (Subhashish Panigrahi; August 28, 2016).

We Tested 18 Government Apps, and Most are not Fully Accessible to the Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Factor Daily; August 31, 2016).
The moral imperative and business case for accessibility in technology (Nirmita Narasimhan; Factor Daily; August 30, 2016).
We Truly are the Product being Sold (Vidushi Marda; Hindustan Times; August 31, 2016).

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Report

August 2016 Report (Suman Dogra; August 31, 2016).

►Other

Award

Nirmita Narasimhan gets NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Award: NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Awards were given away in the capital on August 14, 2016. Nirmita Narasimhan got the award in the "Persons with Disabilities" category.

Participation in Events

Bridging the Digital Divide (Organized by Wipro; Bangalore; August 25, 2016). Nirmita Narasimhan spoke on digital accessibility at this All Hands Meet.
Universal Design & Accessibility Conclave (Organized by IIMA in collaboration with Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment; Ahmedabad; August 27, 2016). Nirmita Narasimhan was a speaker.

Media Coverage

An India Where the Disabled have a Choice (Dataquest; August 5, 2016).
How India’s top firms fare in employing women and persons with disabilities (Sachin P. Mampatta, Amritha Pillay and Ritika Mazumdar; Livemint; August 9, 2016).
Using technology to address issues (Hindu; August 14, 2016).
NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Awards given away in the capital (India PR Wire; August 15, 2016).
NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Awards given away in the capital (Hans India; August 17, 2016).
India has a long road ahead in becoming a disabled-friendly country (Sourav Roy; Your Story; August 31, 2016).

►Copyright and Patent

Participation in Event

International Conference on Innovation for Shared Prosperity (Organized by O.P. Jindal Global University and Jindal Initiative on Research in IP & Competition; August 20 and 21, 2016; New Delhi). Rohini Lakshane attended the conference.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Tools orientation for Telugu Wikimedians of Hyderabad (Pavan Santhosh S; August 1, 2016).
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool (Subhashish Panigrahi; August 17, 2016).
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps (Elisa Chang; August 17, 2016).
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; August 17, 2016).
Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief (Subhashish Panigrahi and Ting-Yi Chang; August 24, 2016).
Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka (Ting Yi-Chang; August 31, 2016).

Events Organized

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses (Organized by by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and CIS; August 5 - 7, 2016; Chandigarh).
Wikipedia WikiMeetup at Bangalore (CIS, Bangalore; August 14, 2016).

Participation in Events

WikiConference India 2016 (Organized by Community of Wikimedians in India; August 5 - 7, 2016; Chandigarh). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.
Tulu Wikipedia Conference in Mangaluru (Organized by Times of Kudla; August 13 - 14, 2016; Malki, Mangaluru). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation on Tulu Wikipedia.

Media Coverage

WikiConference India 2016 Starts Friday in Chandigarh (Indo Asian News Service and NDTV; August 4, 2016).
Tulu Wikipedia Goes 'Live' (Wikimedia Blog; August 5, 2016).
India's 23rd regional Wikipedia, in Tulu, goes live (IANS and Business Standard; August 6, 2016).
After eight years, Tulu Wikipedia goes live (Raviprasad Kamila; Hindu; August 7, 2016).
In Tulu, India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Goes Live (Naina Chaturvedi; Huffington Post; August 7, 2016).
ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲೂ ಬಂತು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ (Asianet Suvarna News; August 7, 2016).
India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Launches (CMM.net; August 8, 2016).
ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಮನ್ನಣೆ! (Mumbai News World; August 8, 2016).
Wikipedia launches in Tulu, its 23rd Indic language (Vivek Pai; Medianama; August 9, 2016).
Telugu Wikipedians create Articles on Punjab in Telugu Wikipedia (Sakshi; August 11, 2016).
Telugu Wikipedians create Articles on Punjab in Telugu Wikipedia (Eenadu; August 11, 2016).
Tulu gets official Wikipedia page, but Mumbai linguists say more is needed (Anju Maskeri; Mid-Day; August 21, 2016).
Punjab edit-a-thon & Telugu Wikipedia success (Andhra Jyothi; August 26, 2016).
Data Xgen launches paid Hindi email service (Sneha Johari; Medianama; August 29, 2016).

►Openness

Submission

Comments on the Telangana State Open Data Policy 2016 (Anubha Sinha and Sumandro Chattapadhyay; August 31, 2016).

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

►Privacy

Blog Entries

Policy Brief on the Report of the UN Group of Governmental Experts on ICT (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; August 23, 2016).
Report on Understanding Aadhaar and its New Challenges (Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickock Vanya Rakesh and Japreet Grewal; August 31, 2016).

Event Organized

UIDAI and Welfare Services: Exclusion and Countermeasures (Institution of Agricultural Technologists; Bangalore; August 27, 2016).

Participation in Events

IGF Academy Regional Workshop (Organized by LIRNE Asia; Colombo; August 4, 2016). Sunil Abraham made a presentation.
Public Panel Discussion: Digitalisation for Social Change (Co-organized by Mount Carmel College, Bangalore and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, India Office; Bangalore; August 22, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

Submission

Submission to TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks (Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode; August 28, 2016).

Blog Entries

101 Ways of Starting an ISP:* No. 53 - Conversation, Content and Weird Fiction (Surfatial; August 3, 2016).
The Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India (Abhimanyu Roy; August 30, 2016).

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About CIS
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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 withdisabilities, 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.

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

Fuel Gilt Conference 2016

praskrishna — 2016-09-25T03:27:38Z

Fuel Gilt Conference 2016 was organized by the Fuel Project is being held in New Delhi on September 24 and 25, 2016. This is the fourth conference in series. Subhashish Panigrahi made a presentation at this event.

Technical and other interface strings that fall under the ambit of FUEL are actually a subset of several other localization projects. They can also be used for bettering the corpus of machine translation. And there is a need for collaboration between communities and institutions -- both free and open source, and the proprietary ones -- to help grow their corpus. More and more collaborations in place will help the volunteer localizers even more as the localization suggestions will increase drastically with partnerships are more. Two existing such partnerships could be Pontoon by Mozilla and Content Translation by the Wikimedia Foundation. When the former shows localized strings from memory as suggestion and even include translations by proprietary organizations like Microsoft, the latter helps Wikipedians create Wikipedia articles faster by translation suggestions sourced from the corpus of Apertium and Yandex. Bettering collaboration needs strengthening two major aspects; a) growing professional and mutual bonding with other communities/organizations that are there in the same domain, and b) creating technical infrastructure to address the aforementioned pluralism. In my talk, I will detail about my own experience and best practices from working with several communities beyond borders and lessons learned from from my own work and the work of many others. A larger discussion with other colleagues at the Conference will hopefully shape into creating a manual or a few Open Educational Resources of some kind to help the future localization leaders. For more info, click here.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2016

Centre for Internet and Society

Annual Report 2014-15

Guru Gomke is a Stylish Ol Chiki Typeface for India’s Santali Speakers

November 2016 Newsletter

4 tips for DIY makers

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4. Meet birds of feather and exchange ideas

Tell us about your experience

September 2016 Newsletter

October 2016 Newsletter

Open source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Bengaluru

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‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys

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Fuel Gilt Conference 2016

Video

We promote open source and open Web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.
“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from Mozilla India wiki)