Centre for Internet and Society

Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap

subha — 2014-08-04T03:29:44Z

I interviewed Wikimedian User:CFCF who is managing the entire project to understand how it is going to work and wrote on Global Voices' Rising Voices about it.

The article was published in GlobalVoices on July 27, 2014. It can be accessed here. It was republished in the Wikimedia Blog on July 30, 2014.

Internet users from around the world often turn to Wikipedia to answer questions of all kinds. The information offered there includes medical subjects, especially important in parts of the world where access to medical professionals may be limited.

However, much of this information can be unreliable and is available only in the most oft-spoken languages.

A group of experienced Wikipedia editors and medical professionals is trying to change that with the Medicine Translation Project, an effort to improve health care-related topics in English Wikipedia and translate them into other languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Persian, Tagalog, Indonesian and Macedonian.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grant (IEG), a microgrant supporting work on Wikipedia-related activities, granted 10,000 US dollars to the Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing project, which aims to enhance communication and coordination among the team.

Medical student and Wikipedian User:CFCF along with two advisors, Dr. James Heilman (User:Doc James) and Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) lead the group. We spoke to founder CFCF over email.

Rising Voices (RV): How did the project get started? What inspired it and how did you identify the needs it would fulfill?

CFCF: [...] The project itself started off in 2011 when Dr. James Heilman and a number of translators from Translators Without Borders: Enrique Cavalitto and Ildiko Santana teamed up in an effort to translate medical articles. Since then, the project has exploded into a larger translation forum with hundreds of translators translating articles into almost a hundred different languages. [...]

For Wikimedia projects with a large pool of editors, we have been taking help from editors to assess what is needed, and what should be translated. On smaller projects we have simply set the goal to get anything on World Health Organization (WHO)’s list of essential medicines, as well as anything about neglected tropical diseases, also from a list by the WHO. As for these articles the project is still in an early phase, but we want to cover basically anything that might be relevant to readers, from cancer to emergency medicine.

RV: How is the process of translation going?

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

RV: How do you address this?

CFCF: To fix all this, it is best to have a local Wikipedian who can integrate the text. Most of the work has already been done. But, getting these things right is very crucial, especially on Wikipedias with vast content, where there already is a lot of content to link in.

I think the resistance we met early in the project's life was not against translation of content. But, because we did not spend enough time getting the translated articles up to shape before sending them live on the target Wikipedia.

What we saw on the Polish Wikipedia was that much of the issues were down to how they used different templates, and after I commissioned a bot to fix this, the articles started going live very quickly. After this, more and more editors became interested in helping out [...]

RV: Are you in conversation with the Wikipedia Zero team — a mobile data project focused on Wikipedia access in the developing world — about popularising this with their partners in the developing nations?

CFCF: Currently we are not in touch with the Wikipedia Zero team specifically, even though our works target the same communities. The difference between us and them is that we target developed countries as well as countries where there barely is any mobile connectivity at all, such as Burma where I do not know if we will be seeing Wikipedia Zero in the foreseeable future [...]

RV: What are your plans to engage with the larger Wikimedia communities that are multilingual and totally diverse?

CFCF: We aim to get high quality content in as many languages as we can. It is difficult to translate such deeply technical content, so we are really looking for professional translators, or individuals with some form of medical background so that information loss and corruption of content in translation is minimal.We recruit translators either off-wiki, or on the medical WikiProjects. We are still looking for translators who feel they are comfortable with such topics, and we especially need them in smaller languages. We are also searching them at Babylon on Meta Wiki.

WikiProject Med Foundation was the first attempt to get a truly global organization of medical Wikipedia editors. Most medical professionals are fluent in English, and we really try to engage in discussion in other languages when we can, so I think there is a real benefit in creating a global community for medical editors.

We are not large enough yet that we have all the relevant people on English Wikipedia, and we will probably never be because there are always specialists in other countries with very specific knowledge that we can leverage. That makes international collaboration really great.

As for the local language integrators, the idea is to have editors who are willing help out and be an intermediary between that community and our translator community. We have a page where all our finished translations are added. An integrator would patrol that page on a regular basis, inform the respective language Wikipedia that the new translation is ready. The language Wikipedia’s reader community share feedback on the translation quality and suggest for improvement. For us, it is really easy to just add articles without going through them thoroughly. But, that would not work at all. For things to work, we need someone who both knows Wiki markup and the target language so that the integration can go smoothly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-july-27-2014-doctors-and-translators-are-working-together-to-bridge-wikipedias-medical-language-gap

Digitize any Book in the Public Domain

subha — 2014-04-03T08:41:18Z

The article is about a mass scale digitization project for Kannada WikiSource by two Wikipedians.

This was originally published in Opensource.com on March 27, 2014.

A form of poetry in India called Vachana sahitya is part of the popular Indian language, Kannada. It evolved in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th as part of the religious Lingayatha movement. Since that time, more than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, have compiled over 11,000 Vachanas (verses).

21,000 of these verses were digitally published into 15 volumes, called Samagra Vachana Samputa, by the government of Karnataka. These volumes were then turned into a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya; this project was taken on by two Kannada Wikimedians, a Kannada linguist, and the author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy—to enrich the Kannada WikiSource. This team used Unicode, a standard of consistency for converting text (and code) into a new format.

Swamy was trying to access these poems, and was having trouble because it was in ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. We began writing scripts to make the Vachanas (poems) searchable by an index. But, in order to do that well, we had to build a platform for everyone to use: the linguistic researchers, students, and the public at large who are interested in reaching this literature.

Omshivaprakash, a Kannada Wikimedian, worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements, and chose the open source software tools to use. I was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, our repository, Vachana Sanchaya, has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these poems. The public has been using our repository and accessing Vahanas (poems) from our Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not just meant for reading the poems, it is also meant for research. So, we have added a way for researchers to help us review the content and will be adding references from various research papers.


Above: A screenshot of the Vachana sahitya page

The most commonly searched words are:

ಕರ್ಮ(Karma: English: work/deed)
ಸತ್ಯ(SathyaEnglish: truthfulness )
ನದಿ(Nadī: English:river)

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

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

We encourage other projects of this kind to follow our method and use any part of our process that is helpful.

Going foward, we would like to:

Initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary
Continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyasa and Muddann (work not yet started)
Extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-march-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-digitize-any-book-in-public-domain

Digital Futures of Indian Languages - Notes from the Consultation

Tejaswini Niranjana — 2016-01-15T05:55:53Z

A consultation on 'digital futures of Indian languages' was held at the CIS office in Bangalore on December 12, 2015, to generate ideas and structure the Indian languages focus area of the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF). It was led by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), and Tanveer Hasan, A2K programme at CIS; and was supported by CDIF. Here are the notes from the Consultation.

The group that gathered at CIS on Dec 12, 2016, brought a wealth of digital Indian language experience to the meeting, including database creation, working to develop wikimedia, TEI initiatives, digital glossary creation, localisation and standardisation, development of open platforms and content management systems for teaching-learning, font development, and optical character recognition (OCR).

There was a detailed discussion of existing digital projects in Indian languages, and presentation of a few new ideas for development of applications that would strengthen digital infrastructure for research and teaching in social sciences and humanities. Among the proposed ideas were:

concept-clustering tool for multiple language comparisons,
semantic mapping tool or data visualisation tool that connects concepts to exisiting wikipedia entries,
online interactive bank of questions, to convert learnables into material that can be grasped conceptually,
annotation tool that aggregates tagged material across databases, eg. Shodhganga, Digital South Asia Library, Digital Library of India (Hindi example), and
gamifying as a way of enhancing teacing-learning as well as research process.

The participants agreed that increased archiving and digitisation, and annotation of digitised material, was a priority for Indian language work. Alongside the curation of the material to be thus processed – whether as an archive or a database, it was important also to develop better OCR systems, fonts and typefaces, DIY scanners, tagging and annotation tools.

CDIF would like proposals that might further some of these objectives. Priority will be given to those projects for which there is no funding already potentially available from other sources. Wherever possible, CDIF will try to synergise its work with existing efforts taken up by the government, or by platforms such as Wikimedia. CDIF will see its primary role not as a funding body but as an incubator of new ideas, and to this end will seek to provide technical support and other expertise apart from seed money.

Participants

Tejaswini Niranjana, CILHE, CSCS, CIS
SV Srinivas, CSCS, APU
Rajesh Ranjan, Govt of India
Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai
Sohnee Harshey, TISS Mumbai
Sherin B.S., EFLU Hyderabad
Swati Dyahadroy, Pune University Women’s Studies Centre
Tanveer Hasan, CIS
Tito Dutta, CIS
Sneha P.P., CIS
Jnanaranjan Sahu, Odia Wikimedia community
Spandana Bhowmick, JU, Kolkata and IFA Bangalore
Ravikant, Historian, CSDS Delhi
Veeven, Telugu wikimedia community
Rahmanuddin Shaik, CIS
Abhinav Garule, CIS consultant, Marathi
Ashwin Kumar AP, formerly CSCS, now Tumkur University
Subhashish Panigrahi, CIS
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, CSCS
Ravichandra Enaganti, Telugu Wikipedia
Ananth Subray, CIS consultant, Kannada
Om Shivaprakash, Kannada Wikimedia community
Pavithra H, Kannada Wikimedia community

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-futures-of-indian-languages-2015-consultation-notes

Developing Open Educational Resources in Indian Languages

Sohnee Harshey* — 2016-06-10T01:50:22Z

The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), has been involved in organising workshops on developing open educational resources (OER) in Indian languages with undergraduate and postgraduate students across various partner institutions. The objective of these workshops is to introduce students to: a) tools of collaborative knowledge production on the Internet, and b) methods for generating new online content in Indian languages.

During November 2015 - February 2016, four such workshops have been organised at TISS’ Mumbai and Tuljapur campuses, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre (KSPWSC), Pune University, and at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

A one and half day workshop was organised at KSPWSC, Pune during January 22-23, 2016. A total of 20 students attended this workshop along with three faculty members from the Centre. This workshop is a part of CILHE's ongoing and sustained engagement with KSPWSC to generate and strengthen content pertaining to women's studies on the Marathi Wikipedia.

Pune
On Day 1, after the opening address by Dr. Anagha Tambe from KSPWSC, Sohnee Harshey from CILHE, TISS spoke about the importance of creating open educational resources in Indian languages for social sciences and humanities. She sought responses from participants about the nature of their engagement with their research areas—which languages they used while collecting data, whether they had accessed reading material in languages other than English, and what were their sources of information. All the participants had used languages other than English in their learning process, some had even accessed Indian language Wikipedias, and all of them felt the need for more resources in Indian languages—especially in simpler and more accessible formats. Tanveer Hasan from CIS then spoke about the utility of Wikipedia for knowledge consumers and its immense potential for students to become knowledge producers, especially in the Indian languages.

In order to familiarize the participants with social sciences (specifically women's studies) terminology in Indian languages, an exercise was conducted, wherein they were asked to describe a concept (from a given list) without using the term itself. The idea behind this was to highlight what function a concept performs in a sentence and in the language context, and what assumptions are made while using this concept. This was followed up with another exercise where the participants were encouraged to choose two concepts and explain their denotation and connotation. This was done in order to familiarise them with the web of other concepts in which a concept is located. The concept of ‘labour’ or ‘shram’ (in Marathi) was chosen for discussion.

On Day 2 of the workshop, Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate with A2K-CIS, introduced the participants to the basics of Wikipedia editing through a hands-on activity. They navigated through both the English and Indian language Wikipedias to see how the edit, talk, and view history functions work, what the key characteristics of a good article are, and how one can read more about a certain topic through interwiki and external links and categories. This was interspersed with recalling the exercises done on the previous day and comparing the critical thinking process involved.

Since one of the simpler ways to populate Indian language Wikipedias is through translation of existing content in English, participants were encouraged to try this with an entry of their choice. They were asked to also list difficulties that they faced in the process of translation. At the end of this exercise, a range of ‘problems’ like lack of appropriate terminology for complex concepts, the dangers of oversimplification, differences between languages in terms of the structure of sentences, and lack of references in Indian languages, were highlighted by the participants. While they were still thinking about these problems, another challenge was put forth for them to look at two conflicting or opposing references for a topic (for example, a movie review, or reporting around an event) and come up with a ‘neutral’ write-up about it. Questions of what constitutes a valid reference, issues of plagiarism, personal opinion, codes of civility on Talk pages formed part of this discussion.

Following this, the participants chose one topic (each) on which they wished to create a Wikipedia article in an Indian language. Most of the participants worked on the Marathi Wikipedia. They worked in groups of 3-4 to edit and create a range of articles including ones on patriarchy, colonialism, masculinity, family, and tribes, among others. A total of 12 entries were created in this workshop. Participants also explored Wikimedia Commons, Meta, and Wikisource as allied repositories. The students have now become active as knowledge producers and will join the existing group of editors at KSPWSC in the wiki-sprints to generate new content every month.

Hyderabad:

Similar exercises were also conducted during the two-day workshop at EFLU, Hyderabad in February 2016. The participants worked on the Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi Wikipedias. Articles were written on geographical entities like Tamil Eelam and West Godavari district, on academic figures like M.S.S. Pandian and Maxine Berstein, academic and literary works such as My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and Towards a World of Equals by Susie Tharu, among other topics. Since creating an article from scratch also involved deliberation regarding issues of translation, and the limits of concepts and their meanings in the Indian context, it is hoped that these new editors will find it useful for their own research to think critically about the process of generating content on the Indian language Wikipedias.

* Sohnee Harshey works at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Article edited by Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/developing-open-educational-resources-in-indian-languages

Design and the Open Knowledge Movement

saumyaa — 2019-04-01T12:13:00Z

With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other. In this post, Saumyaa Naidu shares the learnings from the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.

Introduction

Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge

Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice

Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education

Conclusion

Introduction

Design has historically been functioning in a closed paradigm, both with regard to practice and education. The design process, resources, and products are largely proprietary and limit who can access them. On the other hand, increased use of digital technology offers the potential for greater access and knowledge sharing. In this setting, a dialogue on design and openness becomes essential. There is a need to build sensitivity among designers towards open knowledge and open access practices. Such an exchange can not only allow for design resources and products to be available in the open domain, but also help designers build an extensive shared knowledge base.

With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation from 28th to 30th September, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other.

The discussion was preceded by an introduction to the open knowledge movement and its potential in creating access and inclusion, by Satdeep Gill. Satdeep is a community outreach coordinator for India at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also one of the founding members of Punjabi Wikimedians User Group. Satdeep was the programme leader for the Wikiconference India in 2016. The introduction provided a brief history of copyrights and the beginning of the copyleft movement. It discussed creative commons licensing and the role of Wikipedia in the open knowledge movement.

The panel included Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, Pooja Saxena, and Shyamal. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan is the dean at the School of Design in Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Her research has been on multiple areas such as history of craft and design, and design education in India. Her practice focuses on social communication design. Pooja Saxena is a typeface and graphic designer whose work centres on multi-script design. She has designed an Ol Chiki typeface for Santali language which is available for free and open use. Pooja also teaches typography at several design schools including Pearl Academy, National Institute of Design, and Srishti school of Art, Design, and Technology. Shyamal is an independent researcher and an ornithologist. He has been contributing to Wikipedia for over fifteen years now. In addition to his contributions about the biodiversity of birds, he has also created several illustrations relating to the same. The panel was moderated by Saumyaa Naidu, a designer and researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

The discussion was aimed at addressing three primary questions around design and the open knowledge movement; how academic materials in design inform unstructured or open knowledge spaces and in what ways do these unstructured spaces come back into design education?, what are the potential means of engagement with open knowledge in design practice?, and in what ways can it be applied in design education?

Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge

The discussion began with an enquiry into the challenges faced in the design of knowledge production and the knowledge production of design. It was directed at understanding the various ways in which design education and academia interact with open knowledge. Prof. Suchitra responded by saying that it is still early days for such an interaction to take place as the discipline of design itself is very proprietary in its approach. The work created in different areas of design is often guarded. Locating the discussion at the School of Design in AUD, she suggested that the Social Design course, which looks at the social application of design, believes in socially produced knowledge and contributing to it. However, the university is constrained by the academic environment which does not facilitate the open exchange of knowledge. There is a culture of copyright and protection of work in academia, and heavy funding is required for journal subscriptions. There is an imbalanced gatekeeping of knowledge as countries like India, which have weaker currencies, cannot access this knowledge or contribute to it. The social design community, a small community yet, is interested in making this knowledge freely accessible, in community participation, in co-designing, and in challenge the idea of one ‘super-designer’ who gets all the credit.

Open knowledge spaces such as Wikipedia often make their way into classrooms when students use these resources for assignments. It was pointed out by Prof. Suchitra that there is a lack of regard among students for giving due attribution to material taken from such platforms. Social Sciences universities also consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source, and discourage its use. There is a need to build the culture of knowledge sharing, borrowing, and contribution. She believes that this should be initiated at the level of school education, and not just design schools, so it is internalised at an early stage. She also shared an epistemological concern regarding such a cultural shift in design as it is commonly believed that the knowledge designers produce belongs to them and their livelihoods are connected to it. Hence, open knowledge and open source are antithetical to the profession. This means that the profession itself has to be imagined differently. The social design programme, in this regard, is trying to ensure that when students create work based on interactions with a community, also go back and present it to the community. This is to say that the work produced cannot be exclusively owned by the designers.

The open knowledge movement in India is closely tied to accessibility of information in Indian languages. The availability of a design knowledge base in Indian languages was discussed in this context. Prof. Suchitra explained that most design education in India is in English and is borrowed from another cultural and geographical setting. Design is a discipline of making, and making has its own language. In that sense, the act and content of design transcends language. But, it is the pedagogy which is held by language. The act of making, which is ubiquitous, and is done naturally by everybody, gets held back when it comes to the transmission in different languages. There can be sanskritised words for design terminology, but the vocabulary of everyday use should be applied to represent this knowledge. The School of Design is looking for ways in which important and more provocative texts in design can be made available in other Indian languages. When students are exploring a career in design and they want to learn about it, the information about courses, programmes, and universities should also be available in their language.

The students at AUD recently demanded that education at the university be provided in multiple languages. Since AUD is funded by the Delhi state government, the students want the medium of instruction to include languages of the state (Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi) apart from English. However, in order to accomplish this, the university would require multilingual teachers. At a personal level, Prof. Suchitra feels that the medium of instruction cannot be monolingual, and that it is good to be multilingual. There is also the conflict that it doesn’t do justice to either languages, and there is no neat answer yet. She believes that technology provides some answers in the sense that students can access the material through translations in whichever language they prefer. Being located in Delhi, the university attracts students from all parts of the country, so it needs to be multilingual in different ways. Technology can intervene and provide a layer by which access can be given in the language of one’s choice. She inferred that this is not a question of one or two languages, but of languages everywhere.

Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice

Presently, there is limited participation from design practitioners on open knowledge platforms. From the perspective of a design practitioner and educator, Pooja Saxena explained that apart from Wikipedia, designers use The Noun Project, which offers both free and paid ways to use icons. She mentioned how students also use this platform but it appears that they are not as interested in contributing to it. They are guarded about the work they create but are fine with using someone else’s work that is available for free. Pooja suggested a much needed change in the understanding that open knowledge simply means that it is open for use. It must be seen as a community which one needs to engage with in whichever capacity and give back to. Agreeing with Prof. Suchitra, Pooja also observed that students fail to give fair attribution when any work is available for free. There is a lack of training and communication around attribution among designers. Regarding open source softwares meant for image making and creating illustrations, Pooja said that despite her several attempts of using them, she has always gone back to proprietary softwares. She believes that there are not enough people contributing to making these open source applications better to work with. A middle path she recommended for designers is creating work in formats which can be edited across applications, so that the work created can be built upon in any application, and is not bound by a proprietary software.

As an experienced Wikipedian, Shyamal also stressed upon the idea of finding ways to productively give back to the open knowledge community. He talked about the opportunities that design students have in terms of creating quality images and graphics, and making them available for public use. An example of such an opportunity could be creating clipart or icons that can be used for roadside signages or other such public resources. Another possibility he proposed was publishing rough drafts or discarded work on platforms like Wikipedia, so it can be refined and used by others. It is not well known that aside from the textual part of Wikipedia, there exists a larger environment which includes projects like Wikidata, which is a semantic database, and Wikimedia Commons, which is meant for a variety of media such as images, video, audio, and even 3D models now. This offers a variety of options to designers to make their work available for open use. Another aspect that Shyamal brought attention to in this regard is to make the work available in a way that it can be easily found by others, by effectively using metadata and writing appropriate descriptions.

A relevant example of engagement of design with the open knowledge community was shared by Pooja through her type design project. This included designing a typeface family for the Ol Chiki script, which is used to write in the Santhali language. The project was initiated by Subhashish Panigrahi at CIS in order to set up the Santhali Wikipedia. But, at the time there were no unicode compliant fonts available for Ol Chiki. This was a clear example of how a design intervention in the form of a typeface could lead to knowledge being shared and possibly even created in the future. The project was then funded by the Access to Knowledge programme at CIS. Pooja described the process of designing the typeface. She mentioned that even though the Santhali language is spoken by over 6 million people, Ol Chiki is not a commonly used script. The script itself was invented less than a hundred years ago, which meant that there is little documentation available of the script to look at. The team then engaged with the community to understand how they would like the letters to look like, and whether the letters in the font were correct. This was done through comprehensive feedback forms to test the letters and ask specific questions around their form and placement. The exercise was repeated a number of times to get accurate letters.

Through this process, Pooja made a key observation on perfection. Designers are often trained to share or show their work only when they think it is perfect. But, in the case of the typeface, it was impossible to achieve something even close to being finished without showing it and seeking help from the community. The project also led to inspiring a design student from the National Institute of Design, who belongs to the Santhal community, to create letters in Ol Chiki script as part of the ‘36 days of type’ challenge on Instagram. The typeface thus, can contribute towards such projects as well. Pooja concluded that the typeface being available for free can also lead to students making a version of it that serves their purpose better.

Further on open typefaces for Indian languages, Shyamal spoke about the several issues regarding the use of Indian languages, specific to Wikipedia and in general as well. He correlated the lack of academic disciplines in Indian languages with the lack of vocabulary of technical terms. Several people also oppose borrowing words from other languages. In an example of needing to translate the labels of an illustration of a four-stroke engine into an Indian language, the engineer would not know the terms in that language, and the language expert will not know enough about engineering. Shyamal suggested transliterating English words as a first step, so that somebody who doesn’t know English can understand what the word sounds like. Another technical concern is the use of open source fonts of Indian languages for better compatibility on Wikimedia Commons. The platform replaces proprietary fonts with equivalent open source ones during the process of uploading. This changes the typesetting in the illustration in terms of spacing between the letters and sentences, and the resulting design can end up looking different from the intended one. Hence, it is important to include identification and use of open source fonts as part of the learning process in design.

Shyamal further talked about the need to create more awareness about copyright. He explained that the fact that anything we create is automatically copyrighted is not really understood by most people. People posting images on Facebook and Instagram would allow others to use their work when asked, but would hesitate to give a written permission. It would be useful to license out the work. This lack of copyright awareness hinders the creation of a vast visual database on Wikimedia Commons. There is little visual information available online about objects, monuments, maps, places, etc. in India. The advantage of using systems like Wikipedia is that you can geotag places, you can semantically describe them so that people who speak other languages can find that content. The value of availability of such content online for an outsider is not well understood yet. As a practice, when learning something new, Shyamal himself tries to add it on Wikipedia or on related projects, so that it can be of use to anyone else looking for it as well.

On encouraging designers to contribute to open knowledge, Pooja advised that designers can contribute through side projects or self-initiated projects as they are not looking to make any money from them to begin with, and would be able to share the work for free. These side projects can take the form of resources or tools that other people can use to build something else. She also pointed out that it is not necessary that designers cannot get paid to do open work, and shared the example of the Ol Chiki typeface, which was paid for by a patron. There are also organisations that commission projects which are supposed to be available for free use because those organisations need that product to be available for free. Google fonts for example, commissions the typefaces to designers which are eventually available as free and open fonts. It is important for designers to be aware that such opportunities exist, and that they need to be sought.

Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education

The discussion led to several suggestions on involving design students in the open knowledge movement. Pooja recommended that students can be encouraged to make their assignments available on Wikimedia Commons. Design students are often expected to work on projects that address problems that exist in the real world. In most cases, these projects remain with the students and not get implemented in the real world. If such projects were available on open platforms like Wikimedia Commons, they can be taken forward by others who are tackling the same concerns. It is also something that design students would benefit from because their work will be publicly available.

In order to address the disregard for attributions pointed out earlier, Prof. Suchitra stressed upon the need to build a culture among design students to attribute fairly. This would allow for acceptable acknowledgement to someone who has produced work and contributed it to the open domain. She added that this is being initiated in other design spaces such as the Decolonise Design group, which some design faculties are a part of. The group looks at ways of finding different cultural anchors for design. One such project is where design faculties have gotten together to share design assignments, in order to see what kind of assignments we set in the classroom for teaching various kinds of concepts in design. The faculties are trying to form an international platform where teaching methods can be shared and a bank of design assignments can be created. These methods and assignments are otherwise considered proprietary.

Prof. Suchitra also talked about the onus on public funded educational institutions to make their work available on open platforms, at least in projects which have a larger use. The Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Powai already has a portal on which design related educational material is available for anyone who is interested. They offer an online course in design which anyone can register for and attend. It is only for the certification at the end of the course, that one needs to pay to take an exam. Design courses otherwise tend to be quite expensive. She mentioned that the School of Design at AUD has been contemplating sharing the thesis work that students produce on Academia, a platform for academics to share research papers, where it can be downloaded for free. This allows for the work to be viewed by people outside the school, which is a significant step for young designers. Design as a profession fundamentally does not allow sharing, and this certainly needs to change. She gave the example of textiles, where the traditional artworks and motifs are picked up from different sources and placed on fabrics. Such reuse borders on unethical practice. Therefore, we need to identify the boundaries of open source. The ethical aspects of it need to be opened up and discussed, otherwise it can lead to asymmetrical knowledge practices. The attribution or acknowledgement that the work individually or culturally belongs to somebody, needs to be recognised.

On the learning by doing approach in design education, Pooja raised the concern that there is a lack of attention towards ‘learning by reading’. Design related reading materials are not available on open platforms and in different languages. She suggested that even if the readings are available in English, it is also useful for them to be available in a vocabulary that is more acceptable for someone for whom it is not their first language. Further, the ‘doing’ is also framed by a certain perspective, and often that perspective is quite closed. It does not take into account where the students is coming from. For example, a branding assignment for a product for new mothers does not consider how eighteen year old students would understand the product without any interaction with the users. It doesn’t ask why does it have to be branding to begin with. It also limits the objective to ‘selling something’ while there are other ways in which design can intervene. In the assignments where students engage with a community, there is often a clear asymmetry between the students and the people they are designing for. There is a vast gap in the knowledge and experience shared by the two. Consequently, students are forced to either assert themselves in this community or misrepresent themselves. This also takes away from students wanting to share their work on open platforms. Pooja recommended that they would be more willing to put the work out in the open when they are working with their own community because they can then see how it affects people in a much more direct way.

Conclusion

The discussion brought forward various intersections in design and open knowledge, and the possible ways in which the two can lend to each other. Broader interventions such as a cultural shift in design around sharing work and discussing its ethical aspects, availability of academic material in design on open platforms and in different Indian languages, sensitivity around fair attribution and copyrights among designers, and designers seeking out or self initiating projects that contribute to the open domain were discussed. In terms of specific steps, ideas including design practitioners creating works in formats which are editable on open applications, adding more visual content on platforms like Wikimedia Commons, creating and using more open typefaces in Indian languages, and students sharing their assignments on open platforms were considered. Other ways of engagement with design education could be through internships and workshops that demonstrate the need for open knowledge systems.

During the interaction with the audience, another key concern was brought up by Govind Sivan, a student at the School of Design at AUD. He spoke about the prevalent approach in design schools of giving primary importance to originality. Students work towards thinking of unique ideas and any similarity between their own and a classmate’s assignment is seen as a failure of creativity. Such an approach goes on to curb shared knowledge and collaborative working, and needs to be changed in order to make way for openness in design. Prof. Suchitra also advised that there is more value to design in thinking of it as a collaborative project.

Design is also gradually opening up its process to include the people being designed for through open research methods such as co-design and participatory design. All aspects of a design process such as need identification, data gathering, and the end product can be conceptualised for openness. These directions can be explored by both designers and the open knowledge community for the creation of a greater and more accessible knowledge base.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement

Delhi meet focuses on Bhagabat Tungi revival

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T05:47:00Z

The Intellects, a Delhi based organisation of Odia intellectuals, and Shree Jagannath Mandir and Odisha Art and Cultural Center held a seminar on “Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age” on the occasion of one year celebration its mission ‘Asa Sikhiba Amari Bhasa’. The initiative is to spread and promote Odia language and literature in New Delhi.

The event report was published in the Pioneer on April 26, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi from CIS-A2K participated in the event.

The seminar was attended by Rajya Sabha MP Baisnab Parida, Dr Subash Pani, Dr Bhagaban Prakash, researcher Subrat Prusty, writer and lawyer Biraja Mohapatra, journalist and Odiakart.com founder Sahasranshu Mahapatra, Subhashish Panigrahi, Kamdev Biswal of Tyagraj Nagar Jaggnath Temple and The Intellects chairman Debendra Nath Rout. The Odia intellectuals stresses on the need for revival of Bhagabat Tungi in Odisha villages as knowledge hub.

Prusty was felicitated with The Intellects Award-2014 for his contribution to Odia language, while Ramachandra Nath was felicitated for his Pallibani mission in New Delhi.

Aabout 600 Odias attended the progremme, including Dr Anita Panda, Prof Saudamini Barik, Jayaram Samal, Indubhushan Lenka, Odia Radio founder Sitanshu Mohapatra, journalist Asit Ranjan Mishra, OdishaDiary (www.orissadiary.com) founder Prachee Naik, Rashmi Ranjan Parida, The Intellects members Sangram Dhar, Smrutidhara Rout, Anasuya Sahoo, Aditya Mohanty, Nirmal Dhal, Sanjaya Parida, Pankajamala Sarangi, Premanda Swain, lawyer Sanjeeb Kumar Mohanty and Tarun Samantray. The Intellects will also organise 7-day Bhagabata Sandhya on the premises of Shree Jagannath Mandir, Tyagraj Nagar, from April 21 to 27 in an effort to spread the noble principles of the Shreemad Bhagabat.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-pioneer-april-26-2014-delhi-meet-focuses-on-bhagabat-tunigi-revival

Delhi Declaration on Open Access

Admin — 2018-02-26T14:53:07Z

Open Access India recently released a statement to promote openness in science and research communities. CIS contributed to the text and introduced it to the participants of OpenCon 2018, Delhi.

Published by Open Access India on February 14, 2018. Read the original post here.

This declaration was drafted by a group comprising of researchers and professionals working for opening up access to research outputs for public good in India. The declaration is aimed at scientific communities, scholarly societies, publishers, funders, universities and research institutions to promote openness in science and research communications.

Preamble

The South Asian region, home to 24% of the world’s population faces major challenges such as hunger, poverty and inequality. These challenges become the collective responsibility of scholars and experts in research universities across the country. Consequently, it becomes imperative that research institutes share scientific research outputs and accelerate scientific research. The Open Access movement which aims for making all ‘publicly funded research outcomes publicly available for the public good’ is gaining momentum.

“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose(subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)” –Open Definition.

As per the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), ‘Open Access’ (to scholarly literature) is “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”.

Since the launch of the BOAI on 14th Feb. 2002, efforts are being made by various scholarly societies, academic communities and governments to make scholarly content Open. However, due to various reasons, the full potential of Open Access is not realised by the producers (scholars), publishers and readers (scholars and society at large) of this knowledge and the world is still disconnected in terms of sharing the scholarly content openly.

As per the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), India ranks 9th in the year 2016 producing about 13 lakhs articles. However, 82% of them are not Open Access and the Institutional Repositories in India are sparsely populated in spite of having Open Access mandates in place. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists only 200 out of the 20,000+ journals being published from India.

The historical BOAI is now 16 years old, but still there is a need for all of us to be educated and empowered to realize the power of Open Access to scholarly content and harness it for public good in India. With burgeoning commercial scholarly publications and increasing diversity in terms of availability of & accessibility to the information, we need to create a necessary framework for making Open Access the default by 2025 in India.

To ensure the wide availability and encourage the use of of research data and information for the purpose of addressing multifaceted challenges, Open Access to publicly funded research and scholarly outputs are to be made available under Open Licenses (e.g. Creative Commons) while duly acknowledging the intellectual property (work/rights of the creators/producers/authors).

Declaration

We, the contributors and signatories of this declaration, members of the Open Access India, Open Access communities of practice in India and the attendees of the OpenCon 2018 New Delhi held on 3rd Feb., 2018 at Acharya Narendra Dev College, Kalkaji, New Delhi (University of Delhi) agree to issue this declaration:

We advocate for the practice of Open Science (sharing research methods and results openly which will avoid “reinventing the wheel”) and adoption of open technologies for the development of models for sharing science and scholarship (Open Scholarship) to accelerate the progress of research and to address the real societal challenges
We will strive to publish our interim research outputs as preprints or postprints (e.g. Institutional Repositories) and encourage our peers and supervisors to do the same to make our research open and actionable in a timely manner.
We will practice and encourage researchers and scientists to implement openness in peer-reviewing and other editorial services, influence the scholarly societies to flip their journals into Open Access and will contribute for the development of whitelist of Open Access journals in India adhering to the “Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing”.
We will garner support of the relevant stakeholders (scholars, journal editorial teams, university libraries, research funders, authorities’ in-charge of dissemination of scholarship in higher education) for spearheading the Open Access movement.
We will take forward the concept of Open Access to further bring all the publicly funded research outputs (not limited to journal literature alone) to be freely available under open licenses to the public to use, reuse and share in any media in open formats.
We will impress upon policy makers to adopt an open evaluation system for research and an institutional reward system for practicing openness in science ,scientific communications and academic research across disciplines including Humanities and Social Sciences
We will support and work for an alternate reward system in recognition and promotion not in terms of the ‘Impact Factor’ of the journals, but the ‘Impact’ of the articles/scholarship in science and the society and impress upon all the scientists/scholars, research funders, research institutes, universities, academies and scholarly societies to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).
We strongly agree with the Joint COAR-UNESCO Statement on Open Access , Jussieu Call and Dakar Declaration. And will also follow the international initiative Open Access 2020, to develop roadmaps to support sustainable Open Access scholarly communication models which are free of charge for the authors and free of charge availability to the readers.
While learning from South South cooperation on Open Access, will work for developing a framework for Open Access in India and South Asia: National Policies for Open Access and country-specific action plans will be formulated aimed at making Open Access as the default in India and South Asia, by 2025.
For creating more awareness on Open Access, infrastructure, capacity building, funding and policy mechanisms, as well as incentivizing for the Open Access, we come forward to share success stories, studies and discussions during the Open Access Week.

Adopted on 14th February 2018

Signatories (along with their affiliation):

Anasua Mukherjee, BRICSLICS
Anubha Sinha, CIS India
Anup Kumar Das, Open Access India; CSSP, JNU
Arul George Scaria, NLU Delhi
Barnali Roy Choudhury, Open Access India
Bhakti R Gole, Open Access India
Girija Goyal, ReFigure.org
Javed Azmi, Jamia Hamdard
Kavya Manohar, Open Access India
Neha Sharma
Nirmala Menon IIT Indore
Sailesh Patnaik, Access to Knowledge, CIS
Savithri Singh, Creative Commons India
Sridhar Gutam, Open Access India
Subhashish Panigrahi, Internet Society, O Foundation
Vijay Bhasker Lode, Open Access India
Virendra Kamalvanshi, Banaras Hindu University
Tanveer Hasan A K, Access to Knowledge, Bangalore
Waseem A Malla

Ahsan Ullah, Bangladesh
Anila Sulochana, Central University of Tamil Nadu
Anoh Kouao Antoine, Ecole Supérieure Africaine des TIC, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
Antonio Solís Lima,México
Atarino Helieisar, FSM Supreme Court Law Library, Federated States of Micronesia
Bidyarthi Dutta, Vidyasagar University
Binoy Mathew, INELI
Boye Komla Dogbe, Ministère De La Communication, De La Culture, Togo
Srikanth Reddy, CBIT
Cajetan Onyeneke, Imo State University, Nigeria
Chantal Moukoko Kamole, Universitty of Douala, Cameroun
D Puthira Prathap, Extension Education Society
Daniel Bossikponnon, Ministère du plan et du Développement, Bénin
Dare Adeleke, the Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria
Dilip Man Sthapit, TU Central Library/LIMISEC, Nepal
Emmy Medard Muhumuza, Busitema University Library, Uganda
Fabian Yelsang, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Consultancy Services, Ghana
Fayaz Loan, University of Kashmir
GJP Dixit, Central Library, Central University of Karnataka
Gurpreet Singh Sohal, GGDSD College
Harinder Pal Singh Kalra, Punjabi University
Hue Bui, Thainguyen University of Sciences, Vietnam
Jacinto Dávila, Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela
Jaishankar K, International Journal of Cyber Criminology
Jancy Gupta, National Dairy Research Institute
JK Vijayakumar
Jonathan Tennant, Open Science MOOC, Germany
Julián Vaquerizo-Madrid, Unidad de Neurología Clínica Evolutiva, Spain
Kamal Hossain, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), Bangladesh
Kasongo Ilunga Felix, Democratic Republic of Congo
Kavita Chaddha
Kojo Ahiakpa, Research Desk Consulting Ltd., Ghana
Krishna Chaitanya, Velaga, the Wikipedia Library
Kumaresan Chidambaranathan, New Zealand
Kunwar Singh, Banaras Hindu University
Luis Saravia, PERU
Mahendra Sahu, Gandhi Institution of Engineering & Technology,Gunupur
Maidhili S., Meenakshi College for Women
Manika Lamba, University of Delhi
Md. Nasir Uddin, BRAC University, Bangladesh
Md. Nazim Uddin, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh
Md. Nurul Islam, International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh
Md. Shahajada Masud Anowarul Haque, BRAC University, Bangladesh
Mir Sakhawat Hossain, Kabi Nazrul Government College, Bangladesh
Munusamy Natarajan, CSIR-NISCAIR
Murtoza Kh Ali, Bangladesh
Subash Pillai, ICAR-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research
Nasar Ahmed Shah, Aligarh Muslim University
Nimesh Oza, Sardar Patel University
Niraj Chaudhary, United States
Poonam Bharti
Prerna Singh, Central University of Jammu
Rabia Bashir, Law and Parliamentary Affairs, Pakistan
Rajendran Murugan, Department of Education, University of Delhi
Rama Kant Shukla, Delhi Technological University
Raman Nair R, Centre for Informatics Research and Development
Rebat Kumar Dhakal, KUSOED Integrity Alliance, Nepal
Revocatus Kuluchumila, AMUCTA, Tanzania
M. Humayun Kabir, Tutul, National Health Library & Documentation Centre, Bangladesh
Sabuj Kumar, Chaudhuri, University of Calcutta
Sandipan Banerjee
Satwinder Bangar
Shahana Jahan, Bangladesh
Shamnad Basheer, SpicyIP
Shivendra Singh
Shreyashi Ray, NLU, Delhi
Sivakrishna Sivakoti
Soumen Kayal, Maharaja Manindra chandra College
Srinivasarao Muppidi, Sanketika Vidya Parishad Engineering College
Stephanie Gross, MSLIS from Pratt Institute, USA
Sujata Tetali, MACS-Agharkar Research Institute
Surjodeb Lulu Hono Basu
Susmita Das, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, Bangladesh
Susmita Chakraborty, University of Calcutta
Thilagavathi, Thillai Natarajan, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women
Umesh Kumar
Umme Habiba, Noakhali Science and Technology University, Bangladesh
Vinita, Jain, M D College of Arts, Science and Commerce
Virginia Inés Simón, Red Iberoamericana de Expertos sobre la Convención de los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad, Argentina
Vrushali Dandawate, AISSMS College of Engineering/DOAJ
Waqar Khan, Dhaka Shishu Hospital, Bangladesh
Wilbert Zvakafa, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Zimbabwe
Yasser Ahmed, South Valley University, Egypt
Yohann Thomas, Wikimedia India
Zakir Hossain, International Association of School Librarianship, International Schools Region, Switzerland
Dahmane Madjid, CERIST, Algeria
Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR
Sulyman Sodeeq Abdulakeem, Federal Polytechnic Offa, Nigeria
Leena Shah, DOAJ
Hamady Issaga Sy, Sénégal
Sanket Oswal, Wikimedia India
Chitralekha, University of Delhi
Chris Zielinski, University of Winchester, United Kingdom
Mourya Biswas, Prateek Media

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/delhi-declaration-on-open-access

December 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2016-01-13T14:07:01Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2015 is below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is happy to share the twelfth issue of CIS newsletter (December 2015). Previous editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights
The 4th edition of the Global Congress themed around "Three Decades of Openness, Two Decades of TRIPS" was organized in New Delhi from December 15 - 17, 2015. The largest ever in Asia, the Congress was jointly organised by CIS, NLU-D, Open A.I.R., CREATe, Columbia University and American University. Nehaa Chaudhari summarized the developments of the 4th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest in a blog post that was originally published on the Global Congress blog. Sunil Abraham wrote a blog entry stating the institutional position of CIS on the Net Neutrality discussion going on in India. Catch News interviewed Sunil Abraham about the recent advertisement by Facebook titled "What Net Neutrality Activists won't Tell You or, the Top 10 Facts about Free Basics" . Sunil argued against the validity of all the 'top 10 facts'. Odia author and cultural historian Jagannath Prasad Das has recently permitted 30 volumes of his notable works to be re-license under an open license (Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0) . Subhashish Panigrahi wrote a blog post on this in Discover Bhubaneswar, a web portal in Odisha. CIS has established institutional partnerships with University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs for furthering Wikipedia growth. Tanveer Hasan analyses the developments and lists out the possible future plans in this regard. CIS along with Observer Research Foundation, Centre for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Internet Policy Observatory organized an event in New Delhi on Net Neutrality across South Asia . Today the quantity of data being generated is expanding at an exponential rate. From smartphones and televisions, trains and airplanes, sensor-equipped buildings and even the infrastructures of our cities, data now streams constantly from almost every sector and function of daily life, stated Scott Mason in a blog post. The Government of India is in the process of developing 100 smart cities in India which it sees as the key to the country's economic and social growth. Vanya Rakesh gave an overview of the Smart Cities project currently underway in India in a blog post. For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Fields of View has produced and shared the recording. An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken last year. The 'mapping digital humanities in India' enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. P.P Sneha published the third,fourth, and fifth sections of the study this month. The RAW programme has initiated a new annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC). The first edition of the Conference, organised around the theme of "studying internet in India" will be held in Delhi in February 2016

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

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Updates

● December 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; December 31, 2015).

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

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entries

Abuse of Dominant Position in Indian Competition Law: A Brief Guide (Sarthak Sood; December 9, 2015).
GCIP2015: Notes from the Inaugural Session (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 14, 2015).
GCIP Day 1 Session 3: Challenges in Re-Articulating Public Interest (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 17, 2015).
GCIP 15 Day 2: Discussions on Health Technology, Innovation and Access (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 17, 2015).
Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions in abeyance (Anubha Sinha; Anubha Sinha; December 21, 2015).
4th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest: Statement of Conclusion for the IP and Development track (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 25, 2015). This was also published on the Global Congress Blog.

Event Organized

Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (Organized by National Law University, Delhi, American Assembly, Columbia University, Open A.I.R., American University, and CIS; New Delhi, December 15 - 17, 2015).

Participation in Event

CODE Session (Organized by IDRC; December 17, 2015; New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Media Coverage

NLSIU Conference on Access to Copyrighted Works for Persons with Disability: An enriching experience (Abolee Vaidya and Nuhar Bansal; SINAPSE; December 14, 2015). This is an event report on a one-day national conference on the 'Access to Copyrighted Works for Persons with Disability' for which Pranesh Prakash was a speaker .

►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).

Articles

30 Books of Odia Author and Historian Jagannath Prasad Das to Come Online on Odia Wikisource (Subhashish Panigrahi; Discover Bhubaneswar; December 4, 2015).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର (Subhashish Panigrahi; Sambad; December 6, 2015).

Blog Entries

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books (Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule; December 3, 2015). This was published on Wikimedia Blog.
Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership (Tanveer Hasan; December 3, 2015).
Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Analysis of Institutional Partnerships: University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Touch Point Report: Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University and St. Aloysius College, Mangalore (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
TTT 2015 (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon at Mangaluru (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; December 29, 2015).

Events Organized

Talk on bringing 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia (The Energy and Resources Institute; Bangalore; December 1, 2015). Avinash Chaphekar, Joint Secretary, Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha gave a talk.
Odia Wikimedia community meetup (Organized by Odia Wikipedia Community and CIS; Cuttack; December 3, 2015).
Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Edit-a-thon (Women's Studies Centre, University of Pune; December 3, 2015).

Participation in Events

Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015, Photo Walk (Organized by Telugu Wikipedians; Dr. YSR State Archaeological Museum, Hyderabad; December 13, 2015). Pavan Santhosh attended the event. One of the popular Telugu news channel TV9 covered the event and telecasted the same. Eenadu published a special item on photo walk on December 13, 2015.
English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon (Organized by Wikipedia community; Golden Threshold, Hyderabad; December 20, 2015). The event was covered inSakshi and Andhra Jyoti.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Post More Articles on Kannada Wikipedia (Indian Express; Mangaluru edition; December 12, 2015).

A Kannada Wikipedia Editathon was conducted in Mangalore on December 10, 2015. The following are the media coverage for the same:

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Udayavani; December 7, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Vijayavani; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Vijaya Karnataka; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Udayavani; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Prajavani; December 10, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Prajavani; December 13, 2015).

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

►Free Speech and Expression

Interview

Facebook shares 10 key facts about Free Basics. Here's what's wrong with all 10 of them (Shweta Sengar; Catch News; December 24, 2015).

Blog Entry

CIS's Position on Net Neutrality (Sunil Abraham; December 4, 2015).

Event Organized

Net Neutrality across South Asia (Organized by Observer Research Foundation, Centre for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Internet Policy Observatory and CIS; New Delhi; December 12, 2015).

Participation in Event

Consultation on "Understanding the Freedom of Expression Online and Offline" (Organized by Digital Empowerment Foundation and Association for Progressive Communications; YMCA, New Delhi; December 10, 2015). Jyoti Panday was a speaker at this event.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Benefits and Harms of "Big Data" (Scott Mason; December 30, 2015).

►Cyber Security

Blog Entry

Ground Zero Summit (Amber Sinha; December 22, 2015).

Participation in Events

Second Regional Conference on Connectivity for All: Future Technologies, Markets and Regulation (Organized by International Telecommunications Society, IIMA IDEA Telecom Centre of Excellence and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; New Delhi; December 13 - 15, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

Event Organized

Bangalore Chapter Meet - DSCI (CIS, Bangalore; December 1, 2015). CIS hosted the Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI. Pronab Mohanty, Inspector General of Police gave a talk on Cybercrimes. Sunil Abraham presented the outcome of his study "Anonymity in Cyberspace".

►Privacy

Blog Entries

UID Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
DNA Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Privacy Policy Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Sectoral Privacy Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Security Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 3, 2015).
Eight Key Privacy Events in India in the Year 2015 (Amber Sinha; December 31, 2015).

Participation in Events

Kick Off Meeting for the Politics of Data Project (Organized by Tactical Tech; Phnom Penh; December 7-8, 2015). Amber Sinha participated in the event.
Unbundling Issues of Privacy, Data Security, Identity Matrics, for Financial Inclusion (Organized by Indicus Foundation and MicroSave; December 10, 2015; Metropolitan Hotel and Spa, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Miscellaneous

Blog Entry

Smart Cities in India: An Overview (Vanya Rakesh; December 21, 2015).

Participation in Event

Elite Capture of Governance (Organized by Forum for Urban Governance and Commons; December 16, 2015; Bangalore). Vanya Rakesh participated in the event.

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

Articles

The Free Basics debate: Trai has a point in imposing temporary ban on net neutrality (Sunil Abraham; FirstPost; December 24, 2015).
Millions of Indians Slam Facebook's 'Free Basics' App (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 29, 2015).

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

Upcoming Events

A.I. Hype Cycles and Artistic Subversions (CIS, Bangalore; January 22, 2016). Gene Kogan will give a talk.
First Edition of Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Organized by CIS; New Delhi; February 25 - 27, 2016).

Blog Entries

RAW Lecture #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video (P.P. Sneha; December 1, 2015).
FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; December 2, 2015).
Reading from a Distance - Data as Text (P.P. Sneha; December 7, 2015).
The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities (P.P. Sneha; December 7, 2015).
Living in the Archival Moment (P.P. Sneha; December 14, 2015).

---------------------------------
News & Media Coverage
---------------------------------

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

India's net neutrality debate is unique and complex (Pratap Vikram Singh; Governance Now; December 14, 2015).
Start-up India turns the heat on Facebook Free Basics (Anita Babu; Business Standard; December 22, 2015).
A Scam Masquerading as Santa (Apurva Venkat & Vandana Kamath; Bangalore Mirror; December 25, 2015).
Facebook goes out all guns blazing in push for Free Basics, Net neutrality advocates cry foul (IBN Live; December 29, 2015).
Foreign Media on Zuckerberg's India Backlash (Bhuma Shrivastava; NDTV; December 30, 2015).
Mark Zuckerberg's India backlash imperils vision for free global web (Bhuma Shrivastava; Livemint; December 30, 2015).

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

► Offices

Bengaluru - No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru, 560071. Location on Google Map .

Delhi - First floor, B 1/8, Hauz Khas, near G Block market, after Crunch, New Delhi, 110016. Location on Google Map.

► Follow Us

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

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru, 560 071.

► 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/december-2015-bulletin

December 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-01-12T16:56:54Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wishes you a very happy new year and welcomes you to the twelfth issue of the newsletter (December 2014).

Highlights

CIS prepared a policy brief that identifies the problem areas with the current work flow being used to publish documents and proposes suitable modifications to make them easy to locate, authentic and accessible.
NVDA team conducted two workshops. The first one was held at the Hyderabad Central University for reading and writing in Telugu. The second one was held at the Blind Empowerment Foundation in Kolkata for reading and writing in Bangla.

Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the 29^th WIPO-SCCR held in Geneva from December 8 to 12, 2014 and on behalf of CIS gave statements on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations , Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching, Research Institutions and Persons with Disabilities , made a brief pointed intervention on the Broadcast Treaty , and briefly interviewed Prof. Crews on his Updated Study on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives .
Nehaa Chaudhari analyses the broadening of definitions/concepts in the Proposed Broadcast Treaty versus those in pre-existing international instruments.
Maggie Huang, an intern at CIS as part of the Pervasive Technologies projects conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings are highlighted in two separate blog entries. The first one explores some of their views on the current intellectual property system and the second explores the tension between market forces and governmental intervention in providing access to mobile technology .
Tejaswini Niranjana, a distinguished fellow at CIS wrote an op-ed in the Hindu telling readers to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system.
Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya have co-authored a white paper that seeks to identify aspects of privacy in Islamic Law and demonstrate that the notion of privacy was recognized and protected in traditional Islamic law.
Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya have produced a white paper seeks to locate privacy in Classical Hindu Law, and by doing so, displace the notion that privacy is an inherently 'Western' concept that is the product of a modernist legal system.
Vipul Kharbanda authored a white paper establishing the relationship between privacy and confidentiality.
Geetha Hariharan in a blog entry examines the constitutional validity of Section 69A and the Blocking Rules.
Shyam Ponappa in an article published by the Business Standard writes that India's current policies for telecommunications don't serve our interests and tells readers what must change.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Update

December 2014 Report (Suman Dogra; December 30, 2014).

Events Organized

Telugu eSpeak Training with NVDA (Organized by NVDA team; Hyderabad Central University, Hyderabad; December 1-2, 2014).
Bangla eSpeak training with NVDA (Organized by NVDA team; Blind Empowerment Foundation, Kolkata; December 19-20, 2014).

Upcoming Event

Training in Use of eSpeak with Malayalam (Co-organized by CIS, DAISY Forum of India and Chakshumathi Assistive Technology Centre; Trivandrum; January 24 - 25, 2015, Trivandrum).

►Other

Blog Entry

Availability and Accessibility of Government Information in Public Domain (Sunil Abraham, Nirmita Narasimhan, Beliappa, and Anandhi Viswanathan; December 9, 2014).

Participation in Event

First meeting of the high level committee on National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility (Organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology; December 30, 2014; New Delhi). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting.

Media Coverage

When technology is able but the mindset is not (Governance Now; December 1-15 issue). Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan gave their inputs.

Access to Knowledge

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

►Pervasive Technologies

As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Maggie Huang conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings from the samples are highlighted in four part series. The third and fourth parts have been published:

Blog Entries

[Open] Innovation and Expertise > Patent Protection & Trolls in a Broken Patent Regime (Maggie Huang; December 26, 2014).
"Copyright Management in the Age of Mobile Music" - Living Methodology Document (Maggie Huang; December 26, 2014).

►Other

Blog Entries

Nehaa Chaudhari attended the 29^th WIPO-SCCR held in Geneva from December 8 to 12. The following are the outputs:

29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS Intervention on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 9, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS- 2nd (brief) Intervention on the Broadcast Treaty (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 11, 2014).
The Broadening of Definitions in the Proposed Broadcast Treaty Compared to Other International Conventions (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 11, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS Intervention: Questions to Prof. Kenneth Crews on his Updated Study on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 14, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: Statement on the Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching, Research Institutions and Persons with Disabilities (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 20, 2014).
Protection of Broadcasting Organisations under the Proposed Treaty as Compared to Other International Conventions (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 21, 2014).

Participation in Event

Save the Date - 10 December 2014: The Broadcasting Treaty: A Solution in Search of a Problem? (Organized at WIPO; December 10, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker at this side event. The details were originally published by Knowledge Ecology International.

Media Coverage

SCCR 29: Public Interest Organizations Statements regarding the Broadcasting Treaty (Knowledge Ecology International; December 9, 2014).
SCCR 29 Libraries, Archives and Public Interest NGOs in Q&A with Dr. Crews (Knowledge Ecology International; December 11, 2014).
At WIPO, Study On Copyright Exceptions Stimulates Broad Discussion With Author (Catherine Saez; December 18, 2014).
WIPO Delegates Hear Concerns of NGOs on Exceptions for Libraries (Catherine Saez; IP Watch ; December 19, 2014).

►Wikipedia

Newspaper Article

Beyond the Language Tussle (Tejaswini Niranjana; The Samaja, November 17, 2014).

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource campus project at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 3, 2014).
Several Publications Now Available under Creative Commons License (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 28, 2014).
Odia Wikisource workshop at New Delhi (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 30, 2014). The event was organized by CIS in collaboration with "The Intellects" on December 14.

News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Odia Wikipedia (Dhatri; December 1, 2014).
Odia Wikipedia (Odiapua; December 1, 2014).
Access to Rare Books Made Easy (Diana Sahu; Indian Express; December 5, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia gets some push (Hindu Businessline; December 13, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (Kannada Prabha; December 14, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (Vijaya Karnataka; December 15, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (VijayaVani; December 27, 2014).
Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web (Hans India; December 31, 2014).
Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Sakshi (Sakshi; December 31, 2014).
Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Eenadu (Eenadu; December 31, 2014).

Event Co-organized

Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014 (Co-organized by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia Community; November 28, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Participation in Events

ICT for Development (Organized by Christ University; December 3, 2014). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was a speaker at this event.
Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala (Organized by ICFOSS, Govt. of Kerala; Hotel Hycinth by Sparsa, Trivandrum; December 18 - 20, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan chaired a session on Wikimedia and Access to Knowledge in India and Rahimanuddin Shaik co-presented on Making DLI Accessible.

►Openness

Blog Entry

Department of Science and Technology & Department of Biotechnology adopt Open Access Policy (Anubha Sinha; December 29, 2014).

Participation in Events

Tech for Citizen Engagement 2014 (Organized by Omidyar Network; New Delhi; December 11, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session "Rules of Engagement: Emerging Trends in Citizen Outreach".
Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala (Organized by ICFOSS, Govt. of Kerala; Hotel Hycinth by Sparsa, Trivandrum; December 18 - 20, 2014). Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was a speaker and made a presentation on Open Science.

Internet Governance

►Privacy

As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. During the month we published the following blog entries:

White Papers

Locating Constructs of Privacy within Classical Hindu Law (Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya; December 29, 2014).
Relationship between Privacy and Confidentiality (Vipul Kharbanda; December 30, 2014).

Blog Entry

Identifying Aspects of Privacy in Islamic Law (Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya; December 14, 2014).

Upcoming Events

Security, Governments, and Data: Technology and Policy (Co-organized by CIS and the Observer Research Foundation; January 8, 2015; New Delhi).
CPDP 2015 : The eighth international conference on computers, privacy and data protection will be held in Brussels from January 21 to 23, 2015. CIS is a moral supporter of CPDP.

Event Organized

Security and Surveillance: A public discussion on Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights (CIS; December 19, 2014).

►Free Speech

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

Blog Entries

ICANN reveals hitherto undisclosed details of domain names revenues (Geetha Hariharan; December 8, 2014).
Revolving Door Analysis: IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (Lakshmi Venkataraman; December 10, 2014).
Is India's website-blocking law constitutional? - I. Law & procedure (Geetha Hariharan; December 11, 2014).

►Other

Participation in Event

National Seminar on Cyber Security & Cyber Laws - Issues and Concerns (Organized by the Advanced Centre for Research, Development & Training in Cyber Laws & Forensics; National Law School of India University, Bangalore; December 27 - 28, 2014). Sharath Chandra Ram was part of a plenary session on "Multi-Disciplinary Challenges in Ensuring Cyber Security".

Blog Entries

Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act (Pranesh Prakash; December 15, 2014).
Reply to RTI filed with BSNL regarding Network Neutrality and Throttling (Tarun Krishnakumar; December 22, 2014).

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

India sees biggest improvement in Internet freedom, says report (Moulishree Srivastava; Livemint; December 5, 2014).
Are Cab Apps safe? (IBN Live; December 8, 2014).
FrndiNeed; an app for passengers' safety (Athira A. Nair; Economic Times; December 10, 2014).
Thank You To Our 2014 Sponsors (Medianama; December 22, 2014).
Why did India fail to discover the ISIS Twitter handle? (Anita Babu; Business Standard; December 26, 2014).
Targeting surveillance (Ajai Sreevatsan; The Hindu; December 28, 2014).
Centre blocks 32 websites for security reasons, restores some later (S. Ronendra Singh; Hindu Businessline; December 31, 2014).
DoT Reportedly Orders Blocking of 32 Websites Including GitHub, Archive.org, SourceForge (NDTV; December 31, 2014).
Govt blocks 32 websites, including Vimeo and Github (Moulishree Srivastava; Livemint; December 31, 2014).
Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pastebin Among Sites Blocked In India For 'Anti-India' Content From ISIS (Jeff Stone; IB Times; December 31, 2014).
Pastebin, Dailymotion, Github blocked after DoT order: Report (Anupam Saxena; The Times of India; December 31, 2014).

Telecom

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

Newspaper Column

A Road Map for Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; December 3, 2014 and Organizing India Blogspot; December 4, 2014).

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Blog Entry

The Spaces of Digital (P.P.Sneha; December 30, 2014).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2014-bulletin

December 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-02-25T13:51:47Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2013 can be accessed below.

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2013:

-------------------------------
Highlights
-------------------------------

The National Resource Kit team has published a draft chapter highlighting the state of laws, policies and programmes for persons with disabilities in the state of Gujarat.
Government of India has passed the National Electronic Accessibility Policy. CIS had worked with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to formulate this policy. We bring you a brief analysis of the policy and provisions therein in a blog post.
Nehaa Chaudhari on behalf of CIS submitted comments on the Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations to the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
CIS-A2K team has published a report highlighting the key accomplishments about the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.
Vipul Kharbanda has provided an analysis of the laws and regulations that apply to Bitcoin in India concluding that government can regulate Bitcoin.
We released the first documentary film (DesiSec) on cyber security in India in Bangalore on December 11.
In the module on Global Histories of the Internet (part of the Knowledge Repository on Internet Access project) Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.
The second "Institute on Internet and Society" will be held in Yashada, Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014.
As part of the Making Change project, Denisse Albornoz provides an analysis of the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

-----------------------------------------------
Jobs
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge) and Program Officer (Internet Governance): http://bit.ly/1aA57K6. There are two vacancies each for these posts and these are full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

----------------------------------------------
Accessibility and Inclusion
----------------------------------------------
As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapter:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Gujarat Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/Kxbg3b.

Note: All of the chapters published so far in this project are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

►Other

# Media Coverage

An “Advocacy” Saga and the Inspiring Legacy of Rahul Cherian (by Shamnad Basheer, Spicy IP, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a5B7sU.

# Blog Entry

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility – An Analysis (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dfCW3I.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Access to Knowledge
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

# Submission

Comments on Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (by Nehaa Chaudhari, December 7, 2013). CIS submitted its comments to the Ministry of Human Resource Development: http://bit.ly/1hpWeuu.

# Events Participated In

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa (organized by University of Cape Town, December 9-13, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum (http://bit.ly/1dH1WEM). Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event: http://bit.ly/1bJArFJ.
Twenty-Sixth Session of the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights (organized by WIPO, Geneva, December 16 – 20, 2013). CIS gave its statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7) and on Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a speaker. India and the United States introduced 6 proposals on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: http://bit.ly/1edqvr3.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 workshops in the month of December, published a detailed report of key accomplishments of the work done in Konkani Wikipedia, a report on Train the Trainer Program held in the month of October and published an article in DNA.

►Wikipedia

# Article

Telugu Wikipedia completes 10 years (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, DNA, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/19OAvUV. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshané.

# Report

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/1l6ttmp. The report throws some light on the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.

# Blog Entries

First ever Train-the-Trainer Program in India (by Nitika Tandon, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1euwSXt.

The following are videos of participants from the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization project (jointly organised by CIS-A2K and Goa University) speaking on their experiences with Wikimedia projects.

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hldNM8. We are featuring this here as we didn’t carry this in the last newsletter.
Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator (by Nitika Tandon, December 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/KmxyFo.
Darshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process (by Nitika Tandon, December 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cqKyQ2.
Darshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1keWyya.
Pooja Tople on Wikimedia Projects (by Nitika Tandon, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hlbubU.

# Events Organised

You Too Can Write on Wikipedia! — Training workshop (National Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1edmx1z.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (KBN College, Vijaywada, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i8ScnL.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Alvas Vishva Nudisiri Virasat (Moodabidre, December 19 – 22, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation about Kannada Wikipedia and also conducted a workshop on Kannada Wikipedia as a parallel track. The event was covered by Prajavani (December 22), Hosadigantha (December 22), and Deccan Herald (December 22): http://bit.ly/1dGTBkw.

# Events Co-organised

Wikipedia Orientation Workshop (organised by CIS-A2K and Christ University, Bangalore, December 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lrkwEy.
Wikipedia Training Session @ Tiruvur (organised by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, Srivahini College, Tiruvur, December 19, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik conducted the workshop: http://bit.ly/1e3oQX7. It was covered by Andhraprabha (http://bit.ly/1bU5VsQ), Eenadu (http://bit.ly/19fsttf), Sakshi (http://bit.ly/1e3pQdU), and Prajasakthi (http://bit.ly/JJs7ja) on December 19, 2013.

# Event Participated In

A Wikipedia Workshop at IISC (organised by the Assamese Wikipedia community, Bangalore, December 1, 2013). CIS-A2K team and Wikipedian Shiju Alex supported this event: http://bit.ly/1dSutY2.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

A Feature on Telugu Wikipedia (Namaste Telengana Newspaper, December 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/19Yjwj6.
Odisha: Odia Wikipedia reaching 5000 article mark! (Odisha Diary Bureau, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGU2vc.

-----------------------------------------------
Internet Governance
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you an analysis on whether Bitcoin can be banned by the government and a blog post on misuse of surveillance powers in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia a film DesiSec: Episode 1was screened. We also did an interview with Pranesh Prakash on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 13 video interviews so far:

# Analysis

Can Bitcoin Be Banned by the Indian Government? (by Vipul Kharbanda, December 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJrnGF.

# Blog Entries

Misuse of Surveillance Powers in India (Case 1) (by Pranesh Prakash, December 6, 2013): http://bit.ly/1donbaJ.
Brochures from Expos on Smart Cards, e-Security, RFID & Biometrics in India (by Maria Xynou, December 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f714fN.
India’s Identity Crisis (by Malavika Jayaram, December 31, 2013 Internet Monitor Annual Report: Reflections on the Digital World, published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society): http://bit.ly/1lTRuuz.

# Upcoming Events

Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression (CIS, Bangalore, January 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/KucEU5. Michael Oghia will give a talk.
CPDP 2014 Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective (Brussels, January 22 – 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/KsgCws.
Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.

# Events Organised

Big Democracy: Big Surveillance - A talk by Maria Xynou (CIS, Bangalore, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/19YnA31.
DesiSec: Episode 1 - Film Release and Screening (CIS, December 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJt2fm.
Legal Issues pertaining to Cloud Computing (NLSIU Campus, Bangalore, December 14-15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cvcmGq.
Biometrics or Bust? Implications of the UID for Participation and Inclusion (CIS, Bangalore, January 10, 2014). Malavika Jayaram will give a talk: http://bit.ly/1lJZhuK.

# Events Participated In

Convention on Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on Democracy (organized by INSAF, December 6, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated as a speaker: http://bit.ly/1gAxmNy.
International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice (IV) (jointly organized by Microsoft Research India, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, December 6, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panellist: http://bit.ly/1eAXl5t.
Technology in Government and Topics in Privacy (organized by Data Privacy Lab, CGIS Cafe, Cambridge Street, Harvard University Campus, December 9, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker on Biometrics in Beta – India's Identity Experiment: http://bit.ly/1bJDqht.
Cyberscholars Working Group at MIT (organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, December 12, 2013): Malavika Jayaram made a presentation on Biometrics or Bust - India’s Identity Crisis: http://bit.ly/1eIpHef.
Seventh NLSIR Symposium on “Bridging the Security-Liberty Divide” (organised by National Law School, Bangalore, December 21-22). Chinmayi Arun and Bhairav Acharya were speakers at this event: http://bit.ly/1gjsxYe.

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

MongoDB startup hired by Aadhaar got funds from CIA VC arm (by Lison Joseph, Economic Times, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f77bRg.
A Three-Way Race Draws Delhi’s Young, and Everyone Else, Out to Vote (by Betwa Sharma, New York Times, December 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gAxoFf.
India for UN body to resolve internet governance issues (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/JWESqe.
Card transactions with Aadhaar validation need more time: experts (by Kirti V. Rao and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hq35UL.
Indian government wakes up to risk of Hotmail, Gmail (originally published by AFP, December 7, 2013): http://bit.ly/19LrlOS. This was also mirrored in The Times of India (http://bit.ly/1hpYEJu), Reuters (http://bit.ly/1gaHhZk), Dawn (http://bit.ly/1azuV95), NDTV (http://bit.ly/19Ys7lS), Yahoo News (http://yhoo.it/JCSreE), The Malaysian Insider (http://bit.ly/1eAPAMW) and Asia One Digital (http://bit.ly/JWuw9R). A slightly modified version was published by Silicon India on December 11: http://bit.ly/1gAtzjd.

# Announcement

Pranesh Prakash has been elected as the Asia-Pacific representative to the executive committee of the NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) (part of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which is in turn part of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which is in turn part of ICANN): http://bit.ly/KuIVeC.

--------------------------------
Telecom
-------------------------------
Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

For a Telecom Revival (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 4, 2013 and Organizing India Blogspot, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1avRDii.

--------------------------------
Digital Humanities
--------------------------------
CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

# Blog Entry

The Conflict of Konigsberg (by Anirudh Sridhar, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEXhhU.

--------------------------------
Digital Natives
--------------------------------
CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Tactical Technology: Information is Power? (by Denisse Albornoz, December 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEUrcY.
Tactical Technology: Designing Activism (by Denisse Albornoz, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a9IuzH.

►Other

# Newspaper Column

Digital Native (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f7mU2P.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
------------------------------------------------------------
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

# Upcoming Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9. Registrations are closed for this event.

# Modules

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks (by Nishant Shah, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19WRHLb.
Internet Privacy in India (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19SNk6v.

-----------------------------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------------------------
The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter:https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2013-bulletin

December 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-01-16T05:15:27Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society wish you all a great year ahead. In the December 2012 newsletter, we bring you the draft early chapters of our “National Resource Kit” project for persons with disabilities (covering four southern states); and accessibility-related comments on the Twelfth Five Year Plan; the draft research on pervasive technologies and access to knowledge that we presented at the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in Brazil; our comments on the privacy implications of including RFID tags in the proposed Rule 138A of the Motor Vehicle Rules, a report on the open access lectures delivered by Prof. Leslie Chan during his tour of India, reports of Wikipedia-related workshops conducted across three cities, and news and media coverage.

Jobs

CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge — Indic Language Initiatives), Developer (NVDA Project), Research Manager (Digital Humanities project), and Policy Associate (Access to Knowledge and Openness) and Policy Associate (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
CIS received a grant of INR 54,83,200 from the Hans Foundation for Creating a National Kit of Laws, Policies and Programs for Persons with Disabilities on August 16, 2012. Anandhi Vishwanathan from CIS and Shruti Ramakrishnan from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are the researchers presently working for this project. Early draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from the readers:

The Tamil Nadu Chapter (by Shruti Ramakrishnan, December 30, 2012).
The Karnataka Chapter (by Shruti Ramakrishnan, December 30, 2012).
The Kerala Chapter (by Anandi Vishwanathan, December 31, 2012).
The Andhra Chapter (by Anandi Vishwanathan, December 31, 2012).

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Event Organised

2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, December 15 – 17, 2012). The Second Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest was organized by Fundação Getulio Vargas, American University Washington College of Law, Columbia University, Open AIR, and ICSTD. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash participated in the event. Pranesh was one of the moderators in the Roundtable Discussion on Priority Policy Forums, Research and Analysis Needs and Commitments.

Research for the Global Congress

For the 2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and Public Interest event, CIS conducted research. Jadine Lannon (based on research by Annapoornima and Rohan George and with help from Yogesh Kumar did research on documentation of phones and their patent, Amba Kak did research on copyright and mobile licensing, Vikrant Vasudev conducted research on patent pools and valuation methods, Hans Varghese Mathews did research on mathematical models of patent pools and Nehaa Chaudhuri did research on analysis of 3Gand 4G patent pools.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Event Report

Random Hacks of Kindness Global December 2012 — A Report (by Yogesh Londhe, December 10, 2012). Event was hosted at CIS office in Bangalore. CIS, Amnesty International India Office, Greenpeace India Office, HasGeek, Yahoo Research & Development and SimpleTechLife sponsored the event held in CIS office in Bangalore on December 1 and 2, 2012.

Events Participated

‘Information & Networks’ Partners’ Meeting (organised by International Development Research Centre, Canada in Rio de Janeiro, December 11 – 12, 2013). Sunil Abraham spoke in session on Open Business and IP.

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India (Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR, Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala, Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library and SDM Institute for Management Development, December 17 – 20, 2012).

Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia Project)
Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of three members based in Delhi: Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

Events Organised

Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (NMAIT, Karkala Taluk, December 21, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute).
Wikipedia Workshop at SRM (SRM University, Chennai, December 17, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute).
Marathi Wiki Workshop at TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, December 8, 2012).

Blog Entries

Non Unicode ISCII Text Can be Converted to Unicode Now! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 19, 2012).
New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups (by Noopur Raval, December 28, 2012).

News / Media Coverage

A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).

Videos

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller (CIS, Bangalore, November 12, 2012). Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk.
Art in the Open Source Age — A Talk by Gene Kogan (CIS, Bangalore, November 30, 2012). Gene Kogan, a programmer and digital artist gave a talk.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru.

Upcoming Event

Meta Refresh (MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bangalore, February 22 and 23, 2013).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Analysis of Central Motor Vehicle Rules

Comments on the Proposed Rule 138A of the Central Motor Vehicle Rules, 1989 Concerning Radio Frequency Identification Tags (by Bhairav Acharya, December 3, 2012).

Columns/Op-eds

Online Censorship: How Government should Approach Regulation of Speech (by Sunil Abraham, Economic Times, December 5, 2012).
The Worldwide Web of Concerns (by Pranesh Prakash, Deccan Chronicle, and Asian Age, December 10, 2012).
The Trouble with Hurried Solutions (by Chinmayi Arun, The Hindu, December 15, 2012).
Tomorrow, Today (Nishant Shah, The Indian Express, December 29, 2012).

Event Organised

Meeting of the Network of Internet & Society Centers (organised by Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, Center for Technology & Society, KEIO University SFC, the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Center for Civic Media, NEXA Center for Internet & Society and CIS, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 6 – 8, 2012).

Upcoming Events

DML Conference 2013 (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2012).

Events Participated

Second International e-Governance Conference (organized by the National Committee for Corporate Governance Electronic Iraq and the United Nations Development Programme, Rashid Hotel, Baghdad, December 2, 2012). Sunil Abraham presented on "Review of the Legal Environment in Iraq for Effective e-Governance".
Seminar/Artist Talks : "Outresourcing" with the Transmediale Collective (organised by the Berlin - Transmediale new media collective, December 3, 2012, Bangalore). Sharath Chandra Ram presented a White Paper.
World Conference on International Telecommunications (organised by ITU, December 3 – 14). Chinmayi Arun participated as a civil society representative.
Internet Driven Developments: Structural Changes and Tipping Points (organised by Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University, December 6 – 8, 2012).
Annual Conference on Human Rights 2012 (organised by Estonian Institute of Human Rights and Google). Malavika Jayaram participated as a panelist.
State Surveillance and Human Rights Camp (Sheraton Rio Hotel & Resort, Rio, Brazil, December 13 and 14, 2012). Elonnai Hickok made a presentation on MLATS and International Cooperation for Law Enforcement Purposes.
Economic Impact of Internet in India (organised by Aspen Institute India, December 21, 2012). Chinmayi Arun attended this event.

Blog Entries

Transcripts from WCIT-12 (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 3, 2012).
Section 66-A, Information Technology Act, 2000: Cases (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 3, 2012).
Internet-driven Developments — Structural Changes and Tipping Points (by Elonnai Hickok, December 28, 2012).
State Surveillance and Human Rights Camp: Summary (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2012).
Mining the Web Collective (by Sharath Chandra Ram, December 31, 2012).

Video

Technology Culture and Events in South East Asia — A Presentation by Preetam Rai (CIS, Bangalore, December 18, 2012). Preetam Rai gave a lecture.

Media Coverage

66A ‘cut & paste job’ (by GS Mudur, Telegraph, December 3, 2012). Pranesh Prakash and Snehashish Ghosh are quoted.
Ayodhya trending on Twitter sparks censorship concerns (by Surabhi Agarwal, December 6, 2012). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Debate on Section 66A rages on (Vasudha Venugopal, The Hindu, December 10, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Hacktivists deface BSNL website (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 13, 2012).
Govt likely to issue guidelines to clarify IT rules soon (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, December 16, 2012).
The freedom of expression debate: The State must mend fences with The Web (by Rahul Jayaram, India Today, December 18, 2012).
‘The IT Act is fine, but its interpretation is not’ (DNA, December 19, 2012).
No fear of losing internet freedom till Jan 15: Experts (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 22, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
UN agrees to review agencies governing Internet (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, December 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Delhi gang rape: What Facebook, Twitter expose about govt (The Times of India, December 31, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
A note of dissent on cash transfers and UID (The Hindu, December 31, 2012). Sunil Abraham was one of the signatories.
The year social media came of age in India (by Javed Anwer and Rukmini Shrinivasan, The Times of India, December 31, 2012). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Newspaper Column

Inflation Control Through Structural Reforms (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 11, 2012).

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India
Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 2,00,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The knowledge repository deals with these modules: Introduction to Telecommunications, Telecommunications Infrastructure and Technologies, Government of India Regulatory Framework for Telecom, Telecommunication and the Market, Universal Access and Accessibility, The International Telecommunications Union and other international bodies, Broadcasting, Emerging Topics and Way Forward. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers.

The following are the new outputs:

Licensing Framework for Telecom: A Historical Overview (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 31, 2012).
Market Structure in the Telecom Industry (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 31, 2012).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Book Review

Not Just Fancy Television (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 8, 2012): Nishant Shah reviews Ben Hammersley's book "64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear ", published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Media Coverage

What does it mean to be a digital native? (by Oliver Joy, CNN, December 8, 2012).

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc. CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO, and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2012-bulletin

CyFy 2018 Agenda

Admin — 2018-10-08T15:29:16Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/cyfy-2018-agenda

Cultural knowledge needs to be more open

praskrishna — 2015-03-12T16:41:05Z

Subhashish Panigrahi is an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is currently working at the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program where he builds partnership with universities, language researchers, and GLAM organizations.

The blog post by Jen Wike Huger was published on the website of OpenSource.com. It can be read here.

Their goal is to bring more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses. During his work at the Wikimedia Foundation's India Program, Subha was involved in designing community sustaining and new contributor cultivation models.

For his effort to share and spread open source far and wide, this year he was awarded a 2015 Opensource.com People's Choice Award.

His most recent articles include: Digitize any book in the public domain, on his work to with Indian poetry important to the culture. Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons, about news from the Wikimedia Foundation. Mozilla brings Indian communities together, about the Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014. And, Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language, on his work to preserve his native culture.

The Basics

Name: Subhashish Panigrahi ("Subha")
Opensource.com username: psubhashish
Location: India (Bengaluru and Odisha)
Occupation/Employer/Position: Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society
Favorite open source tool or application: Audacity
Favorite Opensource.com channel: Education

Open up to us

I was away from home for my studies and was longing to read and write more in my native language of Odia. That led me to co-found eOdissa.com, a portal to tell stories to the rest of the world about my language, history, and cultural heritage. I was a sporadic editor on Wikipedia; anonymously since 2006. Then, in 2011, I was introduced to editing for Odia Wikipedia by my mentor Shiju Alex and friend Asutosh Kar.

That was my entry point to the free software movement. And it was a trap I could never get out of!

I thankfully began a full-time job with the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 for its India Program. The program is now housed with their Indian movement partner, Centre for Internet and Society, under the Access To Knowledge program. I work in the Bengaluru office but mostly travel to work with the communities. I work on building capacity for the Indian language Wikimedia communities, building institutional partnerships for long term outreach engagement, negotiating with publishers and copyright holders to bring more content relicensed under Creative Commons licenses, and taking part in policy level discourses around open access and enforcing free software for governance.

What open tools and data help you get things done?

For my day job, I solely rely on Wikimedia Stats to collate data related to Wikimedia projects. I use some Python programming, jQery.ime, and JavaScript for other data-related work. But, I am a people's man and my interaction is mostly with humans rather than tools.

What do you wish were more open?

GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and many other cultural institutions have historically been the keepers of cultural knowledge. But I see possessiveness in not opening up their archival for public consumption. I wish more policy level negotiations and open collaborations were happening to open up cultural data.

What are the biggest challenges to openness that you encounter, either at work or in your life?

Community and its growth. Working in a developing nation with historical, cultural, economic, and political hindrances pulls volunteerism down. It's is a huge challenge for me. Tapping into many existing networks and communities, and leveraging ongoing activities for the betterment for the free and open source movement, is something I am struggling for.

Why choose the open source way?

I would like to quote a good friend and activist Michelle Thorne who says, "Human civilization has everything free and open from the beginning, but slowly the problems of restriction start beginning." Furthermore filmmaker Nina Paley says, "Knowledge is not created by us, rather shared by us."

If we are here to share knowledge, why to restrict its free flow?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-feburary-18-2015-jen-wike-huger-cultural-knowledge-needs-to-be-more-open

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

praskrishna — 2016-06-09T12:51:46Z

The OER conference was held in Edinburgh, Scotland on April 19 and 20, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi gave a talk at the event organised by the University of Edinburg.

The vision for the conference was to focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. The conference was chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna Campbell, OER Liaison at the University of Edinburgh and EDINA Digital Education Manager. The OER 16 conference primarily focused on:

The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
Hacking, making and sharing.
The reputational challenges of openwashing.
Openness and public engagement.
Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

Subhashish Panigrahi - Cultural Institution aka GLAM for More OER (OER16, 19-20.04.2016) from The Centre for Internet and Society

Resources

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

Community digest: Konkani language speakers are separated by scripts but unite by Wikipedia; news in brief

subha — 2016-08-07T03:11:06Z

Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on August 4, 2016

I reached out to a few Goan Konkani Wikipedians to learn about their experience with the project, especially after it went live in 2015. In the interview they share what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers that are currently dispersed in many states, speak in different variations of the same language, and write in different scripts.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi The Discoverer [a long time contributor to Wikipedia who is actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia], you have been actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia since 2006 even before it went live in 2014. What potential do you see in the Goan Konkani Wikipedia bringing Konkani speakers from the states of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala?
User:The Discoverer (TD): Even though my first contributions were in 2006, I have been moderately active on Wikipedia all these years.

I do agree with you that Konkani Wikipedia has the potential to bind people across borders. As you have rightly pointed out, Konkani is remarkable in that, for the small geographical area where it is a native language, it has developed a large number of dialects, in addition to being used in multiple scripts. Unfortunately, in the offline world, we see that there are disagreements over certain Konkani scripts being favored or not favored in terms of official recognition. Konkani Wikipedia can not only be a platform in bringing together Konkani speakers from many regions but can also be the unifying factor among the Konkani people.

SP: How do think Wikipedia could be a good platform to help unifying the Konkani people?
TD: For Konkani Wikipedia to succeed, it is not just a ‘good idea’ for Konkani speakers writing in various scripts to work together on one Wikipedia, but it’s also a necessity and a challenge at the same time. It’s a necessity, because as things stand, no one script has a strong enough community to run a Wikipedia by themselves. It’s a challenge because not everyone can read every script, and it’s important for all the users of a Wikipedia to be able to understand all the content on that site.

SP: Very rightly spotted. And how do you think the Wikipedia community and the CIS-A2K program should work together to tackle this challenge?
TD: We need an automatic script converter (see the script converter resource page for Konkani on Meta and task on Phabricator) that could make the lives of the editors easier. Most people cannot read more than two scripts. Most users are currently depending on an external site for transliteration when the user cannot read the script used in a Wikipedia article. That’s painful and a user might also would not know about a third party converter. An automatic script converter on Wikipedia would enable people to read any page in the script of their choice in a single click. This is where CIS-A2K can really help Konkani Wikipedia, by helping to implement the script converter. In addition to the script converter, CIS-A2K could also study various multi-script Wikipedias in existence and prepare a list of such features that are used in these Wikipedias to deal with multiple scripts, so that Indian multi-script Wikipedias can consider implementing such a feature as well.

Konkani Wikipedia is facing another challenge right now in growing the community as there are only handful of active editors. And we need contributors from varied walks of life to add more diversity to the community. The boost that was needed initially to make Konkani Wikipedia live—thanks to institutions like Goa University (GU) and Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE) and CIS-A2K for bringing in many student-editors—needs more intensity now. Students from GU and NIE were mainly from the Konkani language and teaching disciplines. If you consider other larger Wikipedias, like the English Wikipedia, they owe their success to editing by people from a diverse backgrounds, and also to the fact that the people are comfortable with the basics of markup and coding and were able to build templates, etc. Today, there is almost no one who is working on templates and other similar technical stuff for Konkani Wikipedia. Here too, CIS-A2K can help by reaching out to Konkani speakers with a background in computing—for instance, students of Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA), Master in Computer Application, Computer Science and engineering. This will help build a community that is technically adept at creating templates and dealing with more advanced types of content for the Wikipedia.

The Konkani Wikipedia can also take advantage of software extensions like VisualEditor and Flow that the knowledge of markup and other technicalities that the user needs to have, so that users who are uncomfortable with editing markup can focus on just adding content with a much more simple and user-friendly interface.

In these ways, participation of people from different regional and vocational backgrounds can form a vibrant editing community leading to the growth of the Konkani Wikipedia.

In brief

WikiConference India 2016 to be held at Chandigarh during August 5–7: The second WikiConference India (WCI) will be held on August 5-7 in Chandigarh, India. After the first WCI in 2011, this will be the largest gathering of the Wikimedians from the Indian subcontinent. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success. Over 100 scholarships have been offered to noteworthy contributors from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Various talks, meetups and workshops are planned for the three-day event, and a needs assessment survey has been put in place for ensuring any hackathon needs are addressed.
Punjab edit-a-thon: A month-long edit-a-thon has been running in 12 Indic language Wikipedias and one European language Wikipedia (the Ukrainian) to enrich the content related to Punjab, the Punjabi people, and their language and culture. So far, more than 1000 articles have been created by about 100 Wikipedians. As we have already surpassed the dream target of 1000 articles, we are planning to extend the edit-a-thon through WikiConference India so many can participate during the event.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses: A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from “all rights reserved” to a Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license. This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitized on Wikisource. “I don’t want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history” shares Kanuri Badarinadh, a historian, novelist and journalist who has donated some of his books.
Train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training program for capacity building of community leaders from Indian subcontinent: After two iterations of the Train the Trainer in 2013 and 2015, CIS-A2K organized the third program during June 15-17 at Bengaluru. The Mediawiki training was designed to help groom technical leadership skills of the technical contributors of the communities. A total of 45 participants, that were selected by a collaborative consultation with the community, took part in these events. The trainers for both the events consisted of subject experts from the Wikimedia community, the free knowledge movement, the free and open source software community and CIS-A2K program staff. A series of small Mediawiki trainings will follow soon that will be led by the trained participants.
Indian women in Science edit-a-thon: Organized by IndiaBioscience, a not-for-profit working for research and advocacy on the life sciences in India, this edit-a-thon began with an introduction to the series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons that have been running to expand Wikipedia’s reach on Indian women with contribution to Science. There was a Q&A session Professor Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan followed by introduction to Wikipedia editing, its policies and guidelines, and brief on copyright, and Creative Commons licensing. 11 new articles were created and 11 existing articles were expanded in English, Hindi and Odia-language Wikipedias.
Indigenous South-Asian language gets a new open Unicode font: A new font for the Ol chiki script (used to write the Santali language) along with input tools are getting ready to be released soon. Santali is spoken by over 6 million people in South Asia over Bangladesh and Nepal and six states in India. This project, supported by the Centre for Internet of India, will help native language speakers type in Unicode across platforms, and also using Universal Language System in all Wikimedia projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-konkani-language-speakers-are-separated-by-scripts-but-unite-by-wikipedia-news-in-brief