Centre for Internet and Society

September 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-02-06T12:51:22Z

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

Dear readers,

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

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

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

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

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

CIS in the news:

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

CIS members wrote the following articles

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

Jobs

CIS is presently seeking applications for the following positions

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

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

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Report

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

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

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entry

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

Participation in Events

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

►Wikipedia

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).

Blog Entries

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

►Openness

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

Submission

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

Participation in Event

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

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

►Privacy

Participation in Events

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

►Big Data

Participation in Event

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

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

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

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

Submission

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

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

Event Organized

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

Blog Entries

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

Participation in Event

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

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration

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

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

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

September 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-11-25T01:55:25Z

We are happy to share with you the ninth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (September 2015). It has been a significant month for public debates on the digital future of governance, citizenship, and economy in India, led by conversations around the draft National Encryption Policy, the Aadhaar number as a basis for provision of welfare services, the investigation of Google for potential abuse of market dominance by the Competition Commission of India, and the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions released by the Indian Patents Office. We were busy engaging with these issues, and more.

The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India
With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

Highlights

CIS sent an Open Letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his US visit, requesting him to urge USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty. During the month, NVDA team organized training programmes for the visually impaired at Kullu, Bangalore and Ranchi. Nehaa Chaudhari in a blog post laid out a series of research questions, potentially seeking to apply actor-network theory as a research methodology. Recently, the Indian Patents Office released the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (“2015 Guidelines/ Guidelines”) in an attempt to clarify examination of software related patents in India. Anubha Sinha analysed the 2015 Guidelines. Read on to understand how the new guidelines will potentially lead to an increase in software patenting activity by expanding the scope of patentable subject matter – in negation of the legislative intent of section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970. As a part of its content donation initiative, CIS has brought Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence. CIS-A2K has received 74 issues as of now from the Telugu Jaati foundation. Sunil Abraham’s article titled Hits and Misses with the Draft Encryption Policy was published in The Wire on September 26, 2015. Vidushi Marda in a blog post titled Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India analysed the data flow within the UID scheme and highlighted the vulnerabilities at each stage. Vanya Rakesh in a blog post titled Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill has analysed the Human DNA Profiling Bill introduced in 2012 with the provisions of the 2015 Bill. CIS sought information from ICANN on their revenue streams by sending them a second request under their Documentary Information Disclosure Policy. This request and their response have been described in a blog post by Aditya Garg. CIS has submitted a joint proposal with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing the development of "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." CIS made its submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations to ICANN's CCWG-Accountability. Pranesh Prakash, on behalf of CIS, submitted comments to the Department of Telecom Panel’s report on net neutrality via MyGov. Prakash states that the report displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides. Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column titled More on Those Dropped Calls was published by Business Standard.

Accessibility and Inclusion

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

September 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; September 30, 2015).

Event Reports

Training in the use of eSpeak Hindi with NVDA (Organized by CIS and Lakshay for the Differently Abled; September 29 – 30, 2015; Ranchi). The event was conducted online by Dr. Homiyar over skype, with local support from Mritunjay Kumar and Zainab.
5 day TOT for Training in Use of eSpeak Kannada with NVDA (Organized by CIS, Mithra Jyoti, Enable India and NFB, Bangalore; September 21 – 25, 2015; Bangalore).
eSpeak Training in Hindi Language (Organized by CIS and National Association for the Blind; Kullu; September 3 – 4, 2015).
Training in eSpeak Marathi (Organized by CIS; Atmadepam Society; August 22 – 23, 2015). The report was published in the month of September.

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

Blog Entries

Pervasive Technologies: Working Document Series - Research Questions and a Literature Review on the Actor-Network Theory (Nehaa Chaudhari; September 5, 2015).
FAQ: CIS Proposal for Compulsory Licensing of Critical Mobile Technologies (Rohini Lakshané; September 25, 2015).

Other (Copyright and Patent)

Submission

Comments on the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs) (Anubha Sinha; September 21, 2015).

Blog Entries

Open Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September 2015 (Pranesh Prakash and Nehaa Chaudhari; September 23, 2015).

Participation in Events

National Conference: WTO, FTAs and Investment Treaties: Implications for development policy space (Organized by Focus on the Global South, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Madhyam, MSF Access Campaign, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO (NWGPL), Public Services International (PSI) – South Asia, South Solidarity Initiative – ActionAid, Third Word Network (TWN), and Forum against FTAs; September 22 – 23, 2015; Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari made a presentation on Copyright: Access to Knowledge in Free Trade Agreements?
IPEX 2015 (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.

Media Coverage

Open letter from CIS to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on his Visit to US (Apoorva Mandhani; LiveLaw; September 23, 2015).

Wikipedia

Blog Entries

CIS brings Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence (Tanveer Hasan; September 2, 2015).
OCR and OER – update (Subhashish Panigrahi; Open Education Working Group; September 25, 2015).
As Odia Wikipedia turns 13, what happens next? (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015). This was originally published on the Wikimedia Blog on August 21. The post was shared on Wikipedia's official Facebook page, and on Twitter handles [1 and 2].
Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015).
Wikimedia contributor shares his Linux story (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 27, 2015). This article is part of a series called My Linux Story. To participate and share your Linux story, contact us at: open@opensource.com. Read the original published by Opensource.com on September 3, 2015.

Events Co-organized

Annamaya Library edit-a-thon (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada).
International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 – 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

Unable to read Odia on your android device? Don’t fret! (Ruby Nanda; Odisha Sun Times; September 28, 2015).

Openness

The advent of the Internet has radically redefined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Open Data

Submission

As one of the general stewards of the process, CIS was invited to take part in the final drafting meeting of the International Open Data Charter held before Con Datos 2015 in Santiago, Chile, but we could not take part in it. Apart from organising two public consultations on the draft Charter in Bengaluru and Delhi, we also submitted our detailed comments on the document. The final version of the Charter document has been launched at the United Nation General Assembly meeting, on September 27.

Free Software

Blog Entry

Software Freedom Pledge (Pranesh Prakash; September 25, 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.

Privacy

Article

Hits and Misses With the Draft Encryption Policy (Sunil Abraham; The Wire; September 26, 2015).

Blog Entries

Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India (Vidushi Marda; September 3, 2015).
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill (Vanya Rakesh; September 6, 2015).
Open Governance and Privacy in a Post-Snowden World: Webinar (Vanya Rakesh; September 26, 2015).

Participation in Event

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend the Young Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.

Free Speech and Expression

Submission

CIS Submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations (Pranesh Prakash; September 13, 2015).

Blog Entries

DIDP Request #11: NETmundial Principles (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
DIDP Request #12: Revenues (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
Peering behind the veil of ICANN’s DIDP (Padmini Baruah; September 21, 2015).

Participation in Event

Asian Regional Consultation on the WSIS+10 Review (Organized by The Internet Democracy Project, Bytes for All, APNIC, the Association for Progressive Communications, ISOC, Global Partners Digital and ICT Watch; September 3 – 5, 2015). Jyoti Panday attended the event.

IGF

The tenth annual IGF meeting will be held in João Pessoa, Brazil, on November 10 - 13, 2015. IGF's MAG has decided to retain the title “Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development” as the overarching theme. Sunil Abraham will be a panelist for the following workshops:

Understanding and Mitigating Online Hate Speech and Youth Radicalisation (Organized by Council of Europe, Oxford University, OHCHR, Google and ISOC; November 2015).
Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in Multi-stakeholder Cooperation (Organized by the United Nations; November 2015).

Cyber Security

Event Organized

Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham gave a talk at this event.

Miscellaneous

Sustainable Smart Cities India Conference 2015, Bangalore (Vanya Rakesh; September 21, 2015).

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:

Submission

Comments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov (Pranesh Prakash; September 26, 2015).

Op-ed

More on those Dropped Calls (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; September 2, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; September 3, 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:

Submission

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 30, 2015). The text of the proposal was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Blog Entries

The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (Divij Joshi; September 9, 2015).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; September 21, 2015).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Does this click with you? (Parshathy J. Nath; The Hindu; September 1, 2015).
Government may tieup with global police, Interpol to fight child pornography (Surabhi Agarwal; September 3, 2015).
Hiding behind rules on naming sites it banned, govt reveals fears (Harjeet Inder Singh Sahi; September 3, 2015).
Outrage before sharing (Nikhil Verma; The Hindu; September 9, 2015).
Faking a stand (Shweta T. Nanda; The Week; September 20, 2015).
Some Key Words Are Missing (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; September 21, 2015).
Open sesame (The Hindu; September 22, 2015).
India encryption policy draft faces backlash (Moulishree Srivastava; September 22, 2015)
Online outcry forces government to withdraw draft encryption policy (Naina Khedekar; First Post; September 23, 2015).
Encryption policy would have affected emails, operating systems, WiFi (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; September 23, 2015).
Govt presses 'undo' button on draft encryption policy (Business Standard; September 23; 2015).
Huge outcry forces India to backtrack on social media data proposal (Today; September 24, 2015).
Facebook’s Free Internet Access Program in Developing Countries Provokes Backlash (Newley Purnell and Resty Woro Uniar; The Wall Street Journal; September 24, 2015).
Ahead of hosting Modi, Facebook rebrands internet.org as Free Basics (Business Standard; September 26, 2015).
‘By weakening our security, govt is putting us at risk of espionage’ (S. Raghotham and Mayukh Mukherjee; Asian Age; September 27, 2015).
ভারতে পাঁচশোরও বেশি স্টেশনে ফ্রি ওয়াই-ফাই চালু হবে (BBC; September 28, 2015).
Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes (Kieren McCarthy; The Register; September 29, 2015).
Indian PM Narendra Modi’s digital dream gets bad reception (Amanda Hodge; September 29, 2015).
What Bengaluru Thinks of the Big Tech Announcements in Silicon Valley (Maya Sharma; NDTV; September 29, 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 mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

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September 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-01-02T01:26:03Z

Welcome you to the ninth issue of the newsletter (September 2014).

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the ninth issue of the newsletter (September 2014). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters

Highlights

Nishant Shah was part of a working group writing a white paper on big data and social change, over the last six months. This white paper produced by a group of activists, researchers and data experts was published by Oxford.
As part of the Pervasive Technologies project Maggie Huang interviewed Semiconductor Industry Professionals in Taiwan on the trends and changes in technology and understanding mobile chip manufacturing.

CIS entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Loyola College for a period of 5 years to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license.
CIS-A2K signed a memorandum of understanding with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.
Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan wrote a report on the workshop Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages for which CIS-A2K was one of the organizers.

CIS joined the Dynamic Coalition for Platform Responsibility towards creating due diligence recommendations for online platforms.
CIS organized a workshop on an evidence-based framework for intermediary liability at the IGF held in Istanbul on September 3, 2014. Jyoti Panday coordinated the workshop in collaboration with Stanford Centre for Internet & Society.
Elonnai Hickok contributed a thematic chapter on Intermediary Liability and Surveillance in the GISWatch Report.
The Supreme Court of India revised the law on electronic evidence in the case of Anvar v. P. K. Basheer. Bhairav Acharya has done an analysis on this. It was published by Law and Policy in India and subsequently mirrored on our website.

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 updated draft is being reviewed by the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities. 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

Work Report for September (Suman Dogra; August 31, 2014).

Blog Entry

Study on Budget Allocation and Expenditure by States on Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (Anandhi Viswanathan; September 29, 2014).

Access to Knowledge

Pervasive Technologies

Interviews with Semiconductor Industry Professionals in Taiwan: Trends and Changes in Technology (Maggie Huang; September 26, 2014).
Interviews with Semiconductor Industry Professionals in Taiwan: Understanding Mobile Chip Manufacturing (Maggie Huang; September 30, 2014).

Wikipedia

Event Report

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages (Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan; September 30, 2014). The workshop was organized by Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre, University of Pune (KSPWSC), Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and CIS-A2K.

Blog Entries

NIE Steps in to Grow Konkani Wikipedia (T. Vishnu Vardhan; September 6, 2014).
Expanding the World of Telugu Wikipedia - CIS-A2K and ALC join hands (T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik; September 17, 2014).

The following were published in August and mirrored on our website in September:

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014 (Subhashish Panigrahi; OpenGLAM; August 27, 2014).
We are Wikipedia (By Subhashish Panigrahi; Wikimedia Deutschland; August 25, 2014). Wikimedia Deutchland has included a paragraph about WeAreWikipedia on their blog.

Event Organized

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop for Students (Tumkur University; Tumkur; September 27, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop. Fifty people participated in the event.

Event Co-organized

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (Organized by Basaveshwara Science College and CIS-A2K; September 20, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop.

News and Media Coverage

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

Implementation of IT in Kannada (Prajavani; September 21, 2014).
105 Kannada books released under Creative Commons (Shyam Prasad S; Bangalore Mirror; September 29, 2014).

Participation in Events

State Level Seminar on "Odia alphabet and order teaching in primary education" (Co-organized by Institute of Odia Studies and Research and Odia Bhasa Pratisthan, Bhubaneswar; September 14, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event and discussed about the applied aspects of Odia language in the context of primary education and need for reforms in the total number and order in the character-set citing problems with computer and internet.
Publishing Next (Organized by CinnamonTeal Publishing; Goa; September 19 - 20, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan was a panelist at the 5th edition of Publishing Next the annual conference on the future of publishing. He spoke on Open Access, Copyright and Copyleft.

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. We have produced the following outputs during the month:

Note: The White Paper below is not a part of the SAFEGUARD project .

White Paper

Big Data and Positive Social Change in the Developing World: A White Paper for Practitioners and Researchers (Nishant Shah; Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute; September 30, 2014). Nishant Shah was part of a group of activists, researchers and data experts in producing this white paper.

Analysis

Anvar v. Basheer and the New (Old) Law of Electronic Evidence (Bhairav Acharya; September 30, 2014).

Announcement

CIS joins the Dynamic Coalition for Platform Responsibility (Jyoti Panday; September 23, 2014).

Blog Entries

The Aadhaar Case (Vipul Kharbanda; September 5, 2014).
UID: A Data Subject's Registration Tale (Mukta Batra; September 11, 2014).
Biometrics: An 'Angootha Chaap' nation? (Mukta Batra; September 19, 2014).
UID and NPR: Towards Common Ground (September 19, 2014): This is an anonymous post.

CIS @ IGF

The ninth Internet Governance Forum ("IGF2014") was hosted by Turkey in Istanbul from September 2 to 5, 2014. A BestBits pre-event, which saw robust discussions on renewal of the IGF mandate, the NETmundial Initiative and other live Internet governance processes, flagged off a week of many meetings and sessions. CIS participated in multiple workshops and panels:

WS112: Implications of post-Snowden Internet localization proposals (Organized by Center for Democracy and Technology, Istanbul, September 2, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker at this IGF workshop.
WS63: Preserving a universal Internet: Costs of fragmentation (Organized by OECD and Centre for International Governance Innovation; September 3, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker at this IGF workshop.
WS2 Mobile, Trust and Privacy (Organized by GSM Association; September 4, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.
Transparency reporting as a tool for Internet governance (Organized by Global Network Initiative; September 3, 2014). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
WS149: Aligning ICANN policy with the privacy rights of users (Organized by Yale ISP; September 5, 2014). Pranesh Prakash was a moderator.

Other Participation

Launch of the GISWatch Report (Association for Progressive Communications and the Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries (Hivos). Elonnai Hickok contributed a thematic chapter on Intermediary Liability and Surveillance to this report.

Participation in Events

Re-Wiring Women's Rights Debates in the Digital Age (Organized by IT for Change in partnership with Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan and ANANDI; September 13 - 14, 2014). Rohini Lakshane was a speaker.
Workshop on Enabling Information Systems for Local Governance (Organized by Jamia Milla Islamia, Tagore Hall; New Delhi; September 18, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a participant.
National Consultation on Media Law (Organized by Law Commission of India and the National University, Delhi; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; September 27 - 28, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari, Jyoti Panday and Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Upcoming Event

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.

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Fighting battles online (Nikhil Varma; The Hindu; September 2, 2014).
Colonial yoke or bureaucratic insouciance? (Vidya Venkat with additional reporting by K.T. Sangameswaran in Chennai; The Hindu; September 7, 2014).
Social Media Aids Rescue Efforts in Flood-Hit Kashmir (Anjana Pasricha, September 10, 2014).
Google aims to win 40% of India with Android One (Varun Aggarwal; Economic Times; September 11, 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:

Event Organized

Consultation on New Figures of Learning in the Digital Context (CIS, Bangalore, September 22, 2014). P.P. Sneha wrote a report on the event.

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, atsunil@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.

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

September 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-10-24T06:48:33Z

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

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the ninth issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. During this month we signed an MoU with the Goa University to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language, submitted a report on Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for persons with disabilities to the National Disaster Management Authority, published an updated version of the Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 based on feedback collected from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24, and published an analysis of the Crucifixion Protests in Paraguay. Further, updates on our upcoming events and media coverage are brought in this newsletter.

Our policies on Ethical Research Guidelines, Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunities, Privacy, Terms of Website Use, and Travel can be accessed here.

Accessibility

As part of our project on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India with the Hans Foundation, we bring you a new draft chapter on the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 21 states and 4 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for this chapter:

National Resource Kit Chapter

The Andaman and Nicobar Chapter (by CLPR, September 30, 2013).

Reports

Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for Persons with Disabilities (by Deepti Samant Raja and Nirmita Narasimhan, September 17, 2013). It was submitted to the National Disaster Management Authority of India (NDMA) on September 17 for their action.
The ICT Opportunity for a Disability-Inclusive Development Framework (by leading international organisations such as G3ict, ITU, Microsoft, UNESCO, et.al.) was released on September 24. CIS gave its inputs to this report.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Access to Knowledge team at CIS is working on expanding the Indic language Wikipedia in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation . As part this project, we held seven Wikipedia workshops. Our project on Pervasive Technologies examines the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property and we have produced a column in EuroScientist as part of our efforts of promoting openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software:

Open Access
Column

Open Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe (by Subbiah Arunachalam, Euro Scientist, September 25, 2013).

Blog Entries

e - DIRAP Google+ Hangout: Open Government (by Christine Apikul, September 18, 2013).
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research Adopts an Open Access Policy (by Nehaa Chaudhari, September 30, 2013).

Wikipedia
Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programmes, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications here.

Announcements

CIS Signs MoU with Goa University: The A2K team at CIS has signed an MoU with the Goa University to digitize the “Konkani Vishwakosh” under the Creative Commons license and build a digital knowledge partnership to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language. See here for more details.

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project: The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the University of Goa invites you to a two-month project on digitization of Konkani Vishwakosh. Please send in your applications by October 5, 2013.

Video

Wikipedians Speak: Piotr Konieczny: This episode brings you a conversation with Piotr Konieczny, a veteran Wikipedian from Poland. He has contributed to over 514 DYK articles on Wikipedia.

Columns and Blog Entries

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Startup Goa Blog, September 9, 2013).
ଅବସର ପରର ଦ୍ବିତୀୟ ଜୀବନ, ଅବସର ପରେ ସକ୍ରିୟ ଭାବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖାଲେଖି ଜାରୀ ରଖିଥିବା ଜଣେ ଡାକ୍ତରଙ୍କ ସ‌ହ ଭାବାଲୋଚନା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odiapua, September 10, 2013).
Selection of Programme Officer — Pilot Projects, CIS-A2K (by Nitika Tandon, September 10, 2013).
Wikipedia reaches Classrooms in Hyderabad (by Syed Muzammiluddin, September 20, 2013).

Events Organised

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mysore (University of Mysore, August 6, 2013): This is a report of the workshop conducted last month. Dr. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Goa, September 28, 2013). Nitika Tandon conducted this workshop. The details will be posted soon.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Training Workshop in Bangalore (organised by CIS-A2K, Bangalore, October 3 – 6, 2013).

Events Co-organised

Digital Resources in Telugu: A Workshop for Research Scholars (co-organised by CIS-A2K and the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, September 13, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan participated in this event.
Re-releasing Konkani Vishwakosh & Building Konkani Wikipedia (organised by CIS-A2K and the University of Goa, Conference Hall, Goa University, Taleigao, September 26, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (co-organised by CIS-A2K and wikipedians John Noronha and Supriya Kankumbikar, September 27, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop.
Odisha: Wikipedia workshop at IIMC, Dhenkanal (co-organised by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia community, September 30, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi coordinated the entire event along with members of Odia Wikipedia, Dr Subas Chandra Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar and Sasanka Sekhar Das. This was covered by Odisha Diary (http://bit.ly/1bna9zd), and eOdisha Samachar (http://bit.ly/1aNJvv4).

Events Participated In

Workshop on e-Content Development (organised by Centre for Staff Training and Development, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad, September 4 – 6, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan gave a guest lecture on Open Source to Open Knowledge, Building Knowledge Bases and Platforms via Mass Collaboration on the Internet, e-Content in Indian languages – History, Challenges and Opportunities, Wikipedia Users to Wikipedia Authors – Exploring Wikipedia as an OER Tool, and e-Content, e-Student, e-Faculty – Reimagining classroom in the digital Age.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, SDM College, Ujire, September 15, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in this workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (organised by St. Aloysius College, AIMIT, St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Beeri, Mangalore, September 13, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in this.

Media Coverage

'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation' (Deccan Herald, September 13, 2013): The article talks about the relative lack of content in Konkani Wikipedia. “To get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for Wikipedia,” Dr. Pavanaja was quoted as having said.
Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow (The Hindu, September 26, 2013). A coverage of the re-release of the Konkani encyclopaedia under Creative Commons license.
Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26 (The Times of India, September 24, 2013): Goa University and CIS-A2K re-released the four volume 3632 page Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopaedia) in Goa.
Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia (Navhind Times, September 27, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months (The Times of India, September 27, 2013): Goa University becomes the first varsity in India to allow data produced and copyrighted by an Indian university to be used by internet users. Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help with the project for which training will be provided, says Vishnu Vardhan.
Konkani Wikipedia in the making (by Prakash Kamat, The Hindu, September 29, 2013): Goa University re-launched a four-volume Konkani encyclopaedia and will upload it on Wikipedia. The process will be completed in six months times, says Vishnu Vardhan.
For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, September 29, 2013): Konkani has 24 lakh speakers as per the Census Department of India 2001 but online documentation is limited. CIS-A2K wants to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia, says Nitika Tandon.
Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months (by Jagran Josh, September 30, 2013).
Goa University Partners CIS India to Build Konkani Wikipedia (by Apurva Chaudhary, Medianama, September 30, 2013).

Access to Knowledge (Copyright and Pervasive Technologies)

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 Participated In

The Law and Economics of Copyright Users Rights (organised by the American University Washington College of Law, Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC, September 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham presented the Pervasive Technologies project.

Internet Governance

We are doing a project on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS) with Privacy International and IDRC. So far we have organised six privacy round tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you the latest version of the Privacy (Protection) Bill and an analysis of the six privacy round tables. We are also doing a project on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and IDRC. We did an interview with Lawrence Liang on privacy and free speech:

SAFEGUARDS Project
Bill

Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013: Updated Third Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): CIS has been researching privacy in India since 2010 with the objective of raising public awareness around privacy, completing in depth research, and driving a privacy legislation in India. As part of this work, we drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013. This is the latest version with changes based on feedback from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24.

Event Reports

A Privacy Meeting with the Federal Trade Commission (co-organised by CIS and the Federal Trade Commission, Imperial Hotel, Janpath, New Delhi, September 20, 2013). Elonnai Hickok participated in this meeting.
The National Privacy Roundtable Meetings (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013). Bhairav provides an analysis of the six round table meetings held in the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Interview

An Interview with Suresh Ramasubramanian (by Elonnai Hickok, September 6, 2013): Suresh Ramasubramanian from IBM speaks about cyber security and issues in the cloud.

Articles and Blog Entries

India: Privacy in Peril (by Bhairav Acharya, Frontline, July 12, 2013). The article was published in Frontline in July but was mirrored only recently on our website.
Privacy Law Must Fit the Bill (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 9, 2013).
Transparency Reports — A Glance on What Google and Facebook Tell about Government Data Requests (by Prachi Arya, September 12, 2013).
The National Cyber Security Policy: Not a Real Policy (by Bhairav Acharya, Observer Research Foundation's Cyber Security Monitor Vol. I, Issue.1, August 2013).
The Central Monitoring System: Some Questions to be Raised in Parliament (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013).
CIS and International Coalition Calls upon Governments to Protect Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, September 25, 2013).
An Analysis of the Cases Filed under Section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 for Adjudication in the State of Maharashtra (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): This is a brief review of some of the cases related to privacy filed under section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 seeking adjudication for alleged contraventions of the Act in the State of Maharashtra.

Media Coverage

Gmail ban looms for Indian gov't workers (by Beatrice Thomas, Arabian Business.com, September 1, 2013): The article says that government would ban Gmail for official communication in light of cyber spying by the US. Sunil Abraham agrees with the ban.
Indien: Regierung will Nutzung von US-Mailprovidern in Verwaltungen verbieten (Netzpolitik, September 3, 2013). Sunil Abraham was quoted in this German newspaper.
A dangerous trend: social media adds fire to Muzaffarnagar clashes (by Zia Haq, The Hindustan Times, September 9, 2013). The article speaks about censorship in wake of publication of malicious content. In such cases the government has a legitimate reason to censor speech, says Sunil Abraham.
Three Years Later, IPaidABribe.com Pays Off (by Jessica McKenzie, TechPresident, September 23, 2013): The article talks about IPaidABribe.com, an online portal focusing on civic engagement and improving governance. But the real problem in India is “high ticket bribes...at the top of the pyramid,” Sunil Abraham was quoted as having said.
Indian biometric ID plan faces court hurdle (by John Ribeiro, Computer World, September 25, 2013): The article talks about Aadhar (India’s biometric system). The Aadhaar number now allows different agencies including private organizations to collect and exchange data between them, says Pranesh Prakash.

Upcoming Event

Privacy Round Table, New Delhi (co-organised by FICCI, DSCI and CIS, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, October 19, 2013).

Event Organised

Public Law and Jurisprudential Issues of Privacy (CIS, Bangalore, September 27, 2013): Abhayraj Naik, a graduate from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and the Yale Law School gave a talk on public law and jurisprudential issues related to privacy.

Events Participated In

Young Scholar Tutorials (organised by Communication Policy Research South, September 3-4, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event.
Privacy and Surveillance in India (organised by the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, September 18, 2013). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.
Syllabus: “Policy and regulation conducive to rapid ICT sector growth in Myanmar: An introductory course” (organised by LIRNEasia in collaboration with Myanmar ICT Development Organization, and with support from the Open Society Foundation and the International Development Research Centre of Canada, September 28 – October 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is supporting Prof. Samarajiva on the last optional day of this course in Yangon.
Congress on Privacy and Surveillance (organised by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, September 30, 2013). Maria Xynou participated in this event.

Cyber Security Project
Video Interview

Part 10: Interview with Lawrence Liang (September 10, 2013): In the ecology of online communication it is crucial for us to look at right to privacy and right to free speech as inseparable.

Forthcoming Events

11th India Knowledge Summit 2013 (organised by ASSOCHAM India, Hotel Shangri-La, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). CIS is one of the organisations supporting this event.
CYFY 2013: India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance (organised by Observer Research Foundation and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). Sunil Abraham will participate in this event as a speaker.

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 www.internet-institute.in.

Modules

International Telecommunication Union (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).

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

Regrouping for Growth - Interest Rates – III (originally published in the Business Standard on September 4, 2013 and mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot on September 6, 2013).

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:
Event Report

Bangalore + Sustainability Summit (organized by Ashoka India, Green Lungi and IDEX, September 21, 2013, CIS, Bangalore): Denisse Albornoz has summarised the happenings in this report.

Media Coverage

Youths brainstorm at social summit (The Times of India, September 21, 2013): A coverage of the Bangalore + Sustainability Summit hosted at CIS.

Blog Entry + Video

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay (by Denisse Albornoz, September 20, 2013): Denisse provides an analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway?.

Digital Humanities

Interview

Thinking Digital Beyond Tools: Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah (by Noopur Raval, HASTAC, September 10, 2013): Nishant speaks about his interest in digital studies, the future of humanities, and his HASTAC experience.

Event Participated In

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium (organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine, September 26-27, 2013): Nishant Shah participated in this event as a panelist.

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/september-2013-bulletin

September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T06:48:33Z

Welcome to the newsletter of September 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a second analysis by Snehashish Ghosh on the latest list of sites blocked by the Indian government from August 18, 2012 to August 21, 2012, a research on the issues of internet governance by Smarika Kumar, publication of a report on Accessibility of Government websites in India by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, the Access to Knowledge programme plan and updates from the Wikipedia community in India on Indic languages, updates from the Habits of Living workshop organised in Bengaluru, the events connected to the visits of international DNA experts, Helen Wallace and Jeremy Gruber in India, and introduce you to our Access to Knowledge team members.

Announcements

Office in Delhi
CIS now has an office with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge programme in Delhi at G 15, top floor, behind Hauz Khas G Block Market, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, Ph: + 91 11 26536425.

New Team Members

Nitika Tandon: Nitika Tandon is a Program Officer with CIS. She has an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands and is a recipient of Dean's Fund Scholarship Program, Erasmus University.
Shiju Alex: Shiju Alex is a Consultant. His background is technical writing and he is interested in Indic language computing and community building for Indic language Wiki projects. Presently he works out of CIS office in Bengaluru.
Subhashish Panigrahi: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Programme Officer to CIS's Access to Knowledge programme and works out of CIS's Delhi office. His background is Business Development in Corporate Communications. He works on designing and implementing programs to provide on-wiki and off-wiki support for new editors.
Noopur Raval: Noopur Raval is working as Consultant - Communications for the Access to Knowledge team at CIS. Having previously worked in the media, she is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Cinema Studies from JNU, New Delhi.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the posts of Research Manager, Researcher/Editor, and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply for these posts send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) with three references. Archives of our bulletins can be found here. Click to read the newsletter on our website.

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:
Featured Research

Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report (by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, September 26, 2012): This is a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. It was published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The report consists of an executive summary, introduction, methodology, findings and recommendations and interpretation and recommendations. Examples of errors are given as appendices.

Project

Creating a National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities: An Introduction (by Anandhi Viswanathan, September 28, 2012): CIS is engaged in a two-and-a-half year project starting from August 2012 to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. This project is supported by the Hans Foundation. The Resource Kit will be brought out in both English and Hindi and disseminated to policy makers from panchayat to ministry levels throughout India. Anandhi gives an introduction to the project in this blog entry.

Blog Entries

WIPO Treaty for the Visually Impaired — Moving from a Treaty on Paper to a Treaty that is Workable on the Ground (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): After many years of hard lobbying by the World Blind Union, it appears that the WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities (TVI) could become a reality next year.
Breaking News on Electronic Accessibility (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): The Parliamentary Standing Committee constituted to study the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill has in its report explicitly recognized the concept of electronic accessibility and reasonable accommodation. This is the first time in the country that these two concepts have been reflected at the level of a Parliamentary Standing Committee in relation to a non-disability specific law.

Access to Knowledge

Submission

Feedback to Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 (by Pranesh Prakash, September 29, 2012): submitted its written comments on the Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 to Mr. G.R. Raghavender, Registrar of Copyrights & Director (BP&CR), Ministry of Human Resource Development. Pranesh does a detailed analysis and provides recommendations on Rules 8,9,10, 29(6), 34(2), 37, 71(3), 72, 74(1), 74(6), 75, and 79 (3) and (4).

Projects

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan: Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 of a 22 months ‘grant’ (beginning from September 1, 2012 to July 31, 2014) of upto INR 26,000,000 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of CIS. The prime objective is to support 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 and supporting India-focused efforts to improve the quality of India-relevant content on Indic languages and English Wikimedia projects.
Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace (by Jadine Lannon, September 25, 2012): Jadine Lannon gives an introduction to the new A2K research initiative. Pervasive technologies have flooded the Indian market and are changing the ways in which the average Indian accesses knowledge but very little is understood about these technologies, particularly when it comes to their legality. CIS hopes to do a research that aims to understand how pervasive technologies interact with Intellectual Property laws and what can be done to protect these technologies from being labelled “illegal” and eradicated from the Asian market.

Event Participated

Meeting of the Global Network on Flexible Limitations and Exceptions (organised by American University Washington College of Law, Washington D.C., September 12 to 15, 2012).

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:

Featured Research

An Introduction to the Issues in Internet Governance (by Smarika Kumar, September 23, 2012): Smarika provides a detailed analysis to the issues that we face in Internet Governance today. She tries to canvass the controversies in the areas of internet governance that broadly focus around the institutional structures to govern the internet, discusses the evolution of these models against the historical background of internet governance and then proceeds to present the criticisms of each of these models with an emphasis on the interests of the regular internet user.
Analyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II (by Snehashish Ghosh, September 25, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”). This analysis was re-posted by Medianama on September 26, 2012.

Columns

The Five Monkeys & Ice-cold Water (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 16, 2012): “The Indian government provides leadership, both domestically and internationally, when it comes to access to knowledge.”
SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech (by Chinmayi Arun, Hindu Business Line, September 1, 2012): If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.

Media Coverage

Censorship makes India fall two places on global internet freedom chart (by Dilnaz Boga, Daily News & Analysis, September 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Pitroda seeks to put govt information in public domain (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 25, 2012): “One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media…they (government) should be available all the time.” — Sunil Abraham.

Govt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 19, 2012): ““The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process...We have to see what coordination results out of the body.” — Sunil Abraham.

Mind of the millennium teen (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, September 16, 2012): “We live in accelerated times...The breathlessness of our times is evident in everything — from the kind of movies we make to the ways in which our news and information travel. At the end of the day, our younger generations are also products of our times.”— Nishant Shah.

China outranks India in world’s first ever web index (First Post, September 6, 2012): ““The Internet today doesn’t work according to the idealistic principles of openness, and democracy of information that Berners-Lee envisioned for it, and in India in particular, although the Internet has helped us rethink what the government can do, the attitude is that that Internet can only be used in ways that the government sees fit.” — Nishant Shah.

Need a standard strategy to deal with Web issues: Chandrasekhar (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Political war on the web (by Kunal Majumder, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “The fact remains none of the blockings were politically motivated.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Government to hold talks with stakeholders on Internet censorship (by Shalini Singh, The Hindu, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

The state. And the rage of the cyber demon (by Shougat Dasgupta, Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “While some people may see Twitter as akin to friends talking in the pub, others use the service as a bulletin board.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Watch out for fettered speech (by Rohit Pradhan, Business Standard, September 1, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Events Organised

DNA Profiling Bill
International DNA experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States visited Bengaluru and Delhi and shared their experience in DNA sampling and gave feedback to the DNA Profiling Bill. Meetings were conducted with lawyers and the plaintiff in the Pascal Mazurier's rape case and with VR Sudarshan and Hormis Tharakan. There was a coverage of the event in Kannada media. Public lectures were organised in Bengaluru and Delhi:

UK DNA Database and the European Court of Human Rights: Lessons that India can Learn from Its Mistakes (organised by CIS and Alternative Law Forum, September 24, 2012): Helen Wallace from GeneWatch, UK and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics in the United States gave a public lecture.
The DNA Profiling Bill: Developing Best Practices (India International Centre, New Delhi, September 27, 2012): International experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States gave a public lecture. Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.

Blog Entry

A Public Meeting on DNA Profiling Bill in Delhi (by Elonnai Hickok, September 29, 2012): Elonnai has blogged about the public lecture delivered by Dr. Helen Wallace, Jeremy Gruber and Dr. Anupuma Raina.

Upcoming IGF Events
At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop:

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m.

Sunil Abraham will be a panelist in the following workshop:

New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m).

CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops:

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.).
Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.).

Events Participated

Second Freedom Online Conference (organised by the Ministry of Information and Communications, Republic of Kenya in partnership with the government of Netherlands at UN complex in Gigiri, Nairobi, September 6 and 7, 2012). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on Access to Internet: Challenges and Opportunities.
Multi-stakeholder Discussion on India’s Position in UN for Internet Governance UN Committee for Internet Related Policies (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, New Delhi, September 19, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
Seventh Meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting. This was the final meeting of the series.

Talk

Talk at Yale University (New Haven, September 19, 2012): Pranesh Prakash gave a talk on censorship, intermediary liability, and the way forward.

Video

Internet Governance Plenary (August 28, Tokyo, Japan): Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Ang Peng Hwa, Paul Wilson, Duangthip Chomprang and Raul Echeberria at this event organised by APNIC on August 28, 2012. Kuo Wei Wu, CEO, National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NIIEPA) was the moderator.

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:
Featured Research

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012): Shiju Alex provides a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. He provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

Workshop Reports
Although most of the following workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the report for all of these was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring these.

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): This post is about the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop held in Ludhiana, Punjab on July 28, 2012. Surinder Wadhawan, a Mumbai based Wikipedian played an important role in designing this workshop and introducing Punjabi Wikipedia to the Punjabi speakers. Long-term Punjabi wikipedian G.S.Guglani also joined this workshop. The event was covered in the Tribune, Hindustan Times, Punjab Infoline, and YesPunjab.com.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012. Veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani came forward to spread the message of Punjabi Wikipedia among Punjabi speakers.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012): The workshop was held at the Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar on August 17, 2012. Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop. One of the active and long-time Punjabi Wikipedian Guglani Gurdip Singh led the workshop with the active support from Shiju and Subhasish.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized in Chandigarh by the British Library over two days on August 24 and 25, 2012. Bipin Kumar, Head of British Library and Christina, Deputy Manager had pivotal roles in designing this workshop with support from Piyush, a wikipedian. The session on Day 1 was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi and the session on Day 2 was conducted by Subhashish and Piyush.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012): This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur. Prof. Ashwin Kumar from the Department of English, Tumkur University and Kannada wikipedians, Om Shiva Prakash, Hareesh, Tejus and Pavithra played vital roles in organising this workshop. Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.

Blog Entries

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012): Nitika Tandon tells us about the Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telegu Wikipedia, how it will run, its necessity and the future steps.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012): A series of Wikipedia meetings were organized in Hyderabad on September 29 and 30, 2012. These workshops were a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community. There was coverage about this event in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Event Organised

Thinking with Data@CIS (CIS, Bengaluru, September 16 – 18, 2012): The course offered at the National Institute of Advanced Studies was screened in CIS office.

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. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of September: Cartonama Conference (TERI Complex, Bengaluru, September 22, 2012). The event was organised by HasGeek with support from CIS.

Digital Natives

Newspaper Column

One. Zero. (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, September 16, 2012): “The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak.”

Pathways to Higher Education

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and CIS. The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India. Training workshops were organised in the month of September at Xaviers in Mumbai on September 6, 2012 and in Newman College, Thodupuzha from September 17 to 20, 2012. Each workshop had 25-30 undergraduate students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They were trained to use digital technologies in order to think through problems of social justice.

Researchers at Work

From 2012 to 2015, the RAW series will build research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects is a global collaborative project to renew the conceptual power of networks. It concentrates on changing the habits of living. The Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University is an important locus.

CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Jadine Lannon and Alok Vaid-Menon live blogged about the event:

Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s) (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Radhika Gajjala Lectures on e-Philanthropy (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space
(by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Namita Malhotra on Amateur Pornography (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).

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:

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:

Associations Regulating Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): Broadcast regulation in India is currently an intricate web, with multiple agencies involved in formulating and implementing policy, drafting and enforcing legislation.
Optical Fibre (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): This unit tells us what is optical fibre, the types of optical fibres, how does an optical fibre work, fibre-optic relay system, and why are optical fibres uses in telecommunication systems.
Direct to Home (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit tells us about Direct to home television, its history, how it works, the programming, its advantages and disadvantages are discussed in this module.
Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit brings you the history and evolution of cable television in India, talks about other cable based services, cable television digitization rule and the end consumer in India.
Private FMs (Commercial, Campus and Community Radios) (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 24, 2012): This unit introduces us to AM and FM, tells us the role of private FMs including what is a community radio and what is a campus radio.
Types of Radio Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 28, 2012): This unit tells us what is radio broadcasting, takes us through the history of radio broadcasting in India, explains what is AM and FM in the Indian context.
A History of All India Radio and Its Operations (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 29, 2012): This module gives us a picture of the history of All India Radio and its operations.

Newspaper Column

Changing Our Game (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, September 5, 2012): “Adopting 'co-ordination models' like the Stag Hunt could reduce contention and improve outcomes.” This was re-posted in Organizing India blogspot.

Event Participated

Insights India 2012 (organised by MACH, Bangalore, September 26 – 28, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh and Srividya Vaidyanathan participated in this event.

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. Over the last four years our 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. With the Government of India we have done policy research for 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 an accredited NGO 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.

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

Seminar on Odia Language in New Delhi by the Intellects

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T15:04:41Z

Recently the Odia Language has been accorded classical status by the Government of India. It has increased the responsibility of all Odias to protect, promote and propagate the Odia literature at this digital age while the next gen Odias are moving away from their mother tongue.

The event report was published in Odisha Samachar on April 24, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

It is now important for all the scholars, writers, intellectuals and students of Odia literature to shoulder the responsibility to carry forward the legacy of the language while confronting the challenges. On this issue a brain storming seminar has organized by a New Delhi based progressive forum of intellectual Odia people; THE INTELLECTS at Tyagaraj Nagar Jaggnath Mandir, New Delhi. Odia Intellectuals stresses on need for revival of Bhagabat Tungi in Odisha villages as knowledge hub. It should be noted that The Intellects a Delhi based organization of Odia intellectuals and Shree Jagannath Mandir & Odisha Art And Cultural Center have come together to organize aseminar on the subject “Relevance Of Bhagabat Tungi In The Evolution Of Odia LanguageFrom Budha Era To Digital Age” on the occasion of one year celebration its mission ASA SIKHIBA AMARI BHASHA which is an initiative to teach Odia language in New Delhi.

The conference was about the discussion over creative platform for future development of Odia language and literature. Delegates were drawn from diverse areas to provide more interdisciplinary insight in to issues and challenges that are in from of Odia language to march ahead in the new age of computer.

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- Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, Kamdev Biswal of Tyagraj Nagar Jaggnath Temple and The Intellects chairman Shri Debendra Nath Rout. Sh. Subrat Prusty was felicitated with The Intellects Award-2014 for his contribution to Odia language. Sh. Ramachandra Nath has felicitated for his pallibani mission in New Delhi. Students of ASA SIKHIBA AMARI BHASHA were felicitated for their performance in learning process of Odia in national capital. The program was attended by who is who of Delhi Odias like Dr. Anita Panda, Prof. Saudamini Barik, Jayaram Samal, Indubhushan Lenka, OdiaRadio 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, Tarun Samantray, and others.

This program was attended by nearly 600 Odias living across the national capital region. The Intellects also organsing 7-days BHAGABAT SANDHYA will also be organized at the premises of Shree Jagannath Mandir, Tyagraj Nagar, New Delhi from 21st April to 27 April 2014 in an effort to spread the noble principles of the SHREEMAD BHAGABAT .

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/eodishasamacharseminar-on-odia-language-in-new-delhi-by-the-intellects

Report from India: Relicensing books under CC

subha — 2014-05-05T09:13:15Z

My name is Subhashish Panigrahi. I am an educator currently working in the community and communication front at The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), an India-based catalyst program to grow Indic language communities for Wikipedia and its sister projects. Prior to my work at CIS, I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program, a predecessor to the current CIS-A2K project.

Read the original published on Creative Commons Blog on April 18, 2014 here.

While building ties with higher education and research organizations, I also try to get educational and encyclopedic resources licensed under Creative Commons licenses so that communities can use them to enrich Wikimedia projects. Currently, there is a low level of content available across all the Indic languages and the need for Unicode-based content is extremely crucial.

	While negotiating with authors for relicensing their books in Creative Commons license, I started identifying certain motivation areas for any author for such free content donation. Some of the authors, publishers, and copyright holders have started learning about open access to scholarly publications. However, the readers who are likely to buy a hard copy of a book are likely to buy it even when a free, virtual version is available – that’s the idea authors who are skeptical about CC licenses need to understand.

While negotiating with authors for relicensing their books in Creative Commons license, I started identifying certain motivation areas for any author for such free content donation. Some of the authors, publishers, and copyright holders have started learning about open access to scholarly publications. However, the readers who are likely to buy a hard copy of a book are likely to buy it even when a free, virtual version is available – that’s the idea authors who are skeptical about CC licenses need to understand.

Open source book publishing in India has gained much interest and focus, primarily because of the lack of foresight of the possibilities that are tied to the release of books. It was Pratham Books that first came up with the brilliant idea of “One book book in every child’s hand.” The subsequent release of multilingual books under free licenses was the beginning of a new era in Indian publication.

Book publishers should also think of the target readers of print and web media. Releasing content in free licenses doesn’t affect the mainstream print publications. When it comes to books, there is always a scope for reprinting and making money. After negotiations with two authors and getting 13 books about children’s literature, travelogues, popular science, and linguistic and historical research, I am sure the publishing community has not been educated in the right way about providing free access to content.

It generally takes a long time and effort to negotiate with the copyright holders to get the books out with a CC-BY-SA tag. But it is a permanent and a significant value addition for the open knowledge movement. I believe with more online readers and reviewers getting complete access to books, authors gain more respect in the society and popularity which in turn helps them to sell more of the reprints. Two prime fears are keeping many publishers away from releasing their books online for free: the fear of going out of business and the fear of losing ownership of content. But at the same time, some of the publishers are becoming aware of the mass media outreach and winning hearts of many readers by releasing content for free without copyright restrictions.

Case studies:

Release of a four-volume encyclopedia in Konkani

In 2013, Goa University released Konkani Vishwakosh, a Konkani-language encyclopedia in CC-BY-SA 3.0 license that they had published. This is the largest encyclopedia compiled in the language. The book is being digitized on Konkani WikiSource and content from it is being used to enrich the Konkani version of Wikipedia. The project additionally brought about 20 active contributors for digitization.

Release of 11 Odia language books

11 books from Odia author and academic Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were re-released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license by the “Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa,” a trust founded by Dr. Mohanty for literary discussions and upbringing new writers. His wife and trust’s current chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to release and digitize these books. The Odia Wikimedia community is planning to involve undergraduate students of an indigenous educational institution, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, to digitize these books. The trust is also reaching out to publishers who published more than 150 of the author’s books to give permission for re-releasing them under a CC license.

Relicensing “Classical Odia” under a free license

The book is heavy and expensive for any normal reader. Enormous copies were sold after Odia was declared as the sixth Indian classical language; however, this did not stop the authors Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty from changing the license term from All Rights Reserved to CC-BY-SA 3.0. 600-plus pages full of historical documents and manuscripts along with many undiscovered areas of Odia language’s literary heritage of more than 2500 years are now going to go on WikiSource and enrich Wikipedia articles apart from being great resource for language researchers.

Relicensing books and conversion of ISCII to Unicode font

Two Odia language books by linguist Subrat Prusty, “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and “Bhasa O Jatiyata,” have been relicensed. These are few of those thousand books in those the text are typed with fonts with ISCII standard and not Unicode. ISCII standard fonts have glyphs with Indic characters that are actually replacements of the Latin characters by Indic characters. So, a computer with one particular font not installed will display absurd characters. The publication and printing industries still use these fonts as the desktop publishing software package they use for typeset do not have Unicode engine to render the fonts properly. The conversion from these ISCII fonts to Unicode is a way that is going to be used for digitizaing these books to convert the entire book with searchable Unicode content.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-subhashish-panigrahi-april-18-2014-report-from-india-relicensing-books-under-creative-commons

Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T07:09:41Z

The Intellects, a Delhi based organisation of Odia intellectuals, and Shree Jagannath Mandir and Odisha Art and Cultural Center co-organized an event in New Delhi on April 20, 2014.

Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event and gave a talk about "Re-modelling Bhagabata Tungi in the present context of a digital society". About 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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/relevance-of-bhagabat-tungi-in-evolution-of-odia-language

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop

subha — 2013-09-12T10:22:44Z

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

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

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

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

Day 1: Building the Blocks

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

Introduce Yourself

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

Editing time

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


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

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

Rat and frog game

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

Day 2: Climbing Up the Ladder

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

Day 3: Fresh Batch, New Start


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

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

Day 4: No Need to Say Good Bye!

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

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

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

Read Bengali, Malayalam classics online as free Wiki libraries grow

praskrishna — 2016-01-29T15:51:09Z

Content Includes Classics In Malayalam, Bengali.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students Pitch In

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

Tech Hurdle

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

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

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language

subha — 2014-01-31T06:20:11Z

CIS-A2K team interviewed Priyadarshini Tadkodkar about Konkani language. She speaks how editing/contributing to Konkani Wikipedia would help students.

Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team was there in Goa University to conduct a four day long Konkani Wikipedia workshop for the MA Konkani students. During these days Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS-A2K caught up with Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar, Head, Konkani department of Goa University and asked about the brief history of Konkani language. In this video Dr. Tadkodkar shares the origin and movements that has affected Konkani, influence of other languages on it and the documentation process of the language. The Census Department of India, 2001 figures put the number of Konkani speakers in India as 2,489,015. Out of these, around 6 lakh were in Goa, 7 lakh in Karnataka, 3 lakh in Maharashtra, 6 lakh in Kerala and rest live outside of India, either as expatriates or citizens of other countries (NRIs).

Video


Above: Video of Priyadarshini Tadkodkar speaking on Konkani language

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/priyadarshini-tadkodkar-konkani-language

Otago Southland are the Coolest

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:06:13Z

LIANZA Otago Southland are delighted to announce our speaker, Subhashish Panigrahi (@subhapa), from the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge programme, will be tuning in via the interwebs from India to share his vision of Guerilla GLAM, describe case studies of these initiatives in India, as well as touching on the creation of documentaries, learning resources and promotional material from acquired content.

This was published by Library and Information Association of New Zealand. The submission was accepted for Wikimania 2015.

Subha believes “this presentation will be useful for those who can mobilize a small team of volunteers equipped with digital camera, access to local cultural institutions and some level of expertise of curating data.”

Read more about Subha and the abstract for his talk here https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/openotago/2015/10/06/how-to-do-guerilla-glam/

Please share this event with your other GLAM networks!

Event Details

How to do Guerilla GLAM / Subhashish Panigrahi @subhapa <https://twitter.com/subhapa>Tuesday 20 October, 3.00pm NZDT In Dunedin: Conference Room 3, 1st floor University of Otago Central Library, 65 Albany Street, Dunedin<http://www.otago.ac.nz/library/locations/#central>

Online: via Adobe Connect<https://connect.otago.ac.nz/sarah/?launcher=false>. [No software required, just click the link and sign in as a guest. Please ensure you are logged in before 3pm and have read the participant notes on screen] The session will be recorded.

Pre - presentation preparation - entirely optional

If you’re planning on attending Subhashish’s webinar and want to know more about using Wikipedia in your GLAM, you might be interested in watching this first.

This blog post from Alex Stinson<https://twitter.com/sadads> from the Wikimedia Foundation<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home>, entitled "Librarian as Teacher: ways to use Wikipedia"<http://interlibnet.org/2015/10/07/librarian-as-teacher-ways-to-use-wikipedia/>, specifically regarding her discussion about GLAM-wiki
A recording of the September webcast by Phoebe Ayers<http://if%20you%E2%80%99re%20planning%20on%20attending%20subhashish%E2%80%99s%20webinar%20and%20want%20to%20know%20more%20about%20using%20wikipedia%20in%20your%20glam%2C%20you%20might%20be%20interested%20in%20watching%20this%20first./>, a librarian at MIT and former member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees about the basics of editing Wikipedia especially for Librarians.https://join.onstreammedia.com/play/sparc/7087-edit-a-thon-training-09.30

How to do Guerilla GLAM

Open Access Week (19-25 October) is fast approaching and we have a number of events in store – one I’m keen to tell you about now is a webinar we have planned entitled, “How to do Guerilla GLAM”.

Our speaker, Subhashish Panigrahi @subhapa, from the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge programme will be tuning in via the interwebs from India to share his vision, case studies of Guerilla GLAM initiatives in India, as well as touching on the creation of documentaries, learning resources and promotional material from acquired content.

GLAM = Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums
Guerilla Glam = “getting the most out from cultural institutions where collaboration and long term engagement has high cost and time implications.”

Details of the event

How to do Guerilla GLAM / Subhashish Panigrahi @subhapa
Tuesday 20 October, 3.00pm NZDT
Conference Room 3, 1st floor University of Otago Central Library, 65 Albany Street, Dunedin
Or join us via Adobe Connect. [Please ensure you are logged in before 3pm and have read the participant notes on screen]

We will be recording this session and Subha has given permission for us to make the recording and his slides available here on the blog. We encourage participants to ask questions via the chat facility in Adobe Connect, or to tweet questions using #OAWeek #AOASG.

Abstract
Building partnership with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (collectively known as GLAM institutions) is a great way of funneling the cultural content acquisition and bringing open access to such valuable data. But it is not that easy given the complications each country has in terms of formal agreement, organizational framework, etc. This presentation will detail about the learning curve of institutional partnership building, leveraging personal contacts in small scale GLAM projects and bringing in several indie-projects to cut implication cost, and execute low-cost models.

During this presentation I will present two case studies of contrasting nature: India’s first GLAM project at the National Crafts Museum, New Delhi, and various small-scale collaborative projects. Where the first one would have learning from the six months long project, the second one will draw inspirations from many initiatives that have really no cost or low cost implication and less implementation time involved.

At times, institutional collaborations become liabilities and labor intensive with low Return on Investment. Training staff and implementing GLAM projects are not always easy and retaining contributors is a challenge. Alternatively Guerrilla GLAM could be thought of when having a Wikimedian-in-Residence is not feasible. This presentation will be useful for those who can mobilize a small team of volunteers equipped with digital camera, access to local cultural institutions and some level of expertise of curating data.

Making documentaries and building narratives based on acquired content to creating learning resources and promotional materials will be another aspect of this presentation. Building partnerships with many federal or private institutions also needs sustained long-term engagement and volunteer time is not always enough to devote for a long term GLAM project. This presentation will detail about going the guerrilla way to acquire data from GLAM institutions. This will involve low cost models, leveraging various factors, and getting the most out from cultural institutions where collaboration and long term engagement has high cost and time implications.

About Subhashish

Subhashish Panigrahi is an India based educator, author, blogger, Wikimedian, language activist and free knowledge evangelist. Earlier with Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program and currently at the Centre for Internet and Society‘s Access To Knowledge program, Panigrahi works on building partnership with universities, language research and GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive and Museums) organizations for bringing more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses, designing outreach programs for South Asian language Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects and communities.

The other hats he wears are as the Editor for Global Voices Odia, Community Moderator of Opensource.com, and Ambassador for India in OpenGLAM Local, Juror of 2015 American Alliance of Museum Muse Awards, and member of OER 2016 Standing Committee. He has presented in various Indian and international conferences on the free knowledge, GLAM and Open Access movement. Panigrahi has authored of “Rising Voices: Indigenous language Digital Activism” in Digital Activism in Asia Reader and was winner of the 2015 Opensource.com People’s Choice Award. Subhashish is available on Twitter at @subhapa and over email at psubhashishatgmaildotcom for more discussion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/guerilla-glam

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014

subha — 2014-10-06T05:09:19Z

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

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

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

Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperation

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

Have you heard?

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

Video

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

Open Source Project Brings 11th Century Kannada Verses Online

subha — 2014-04-06T06:00:47Z

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash H L

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

Working system

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

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

Public response

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

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

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

Plans for the future

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

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

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

Open Source India 2015

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:46:46Z

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

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

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

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

Centre for Internet and Society

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September 2015 Bulletin

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NVDA and eSpeak

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Other (Copyright and Patent)

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IGF

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Seminar on Odia Language in New Delhi by the Intellects

Report from India: Relicensing books under CC

Case studies:

Release of 11 Odia language books

Relicensing books and conversion of ISCII to Unicode font

Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop

Day 1: Building the Blocks

Introduce Yourself

Editing time

More Editing Post Lunch

Rat and frog game

Day 2: Climbing Up the Ladder

Day 3: Fresh Batch, New Start

Day 4: No Need to Say Good Bye!

Read Bengali, Malayalam classics online as free Wiki libraries grow

Students Pitch In

Tech Hurdle

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language

Video

Otago Southland are the Coolest

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Pre - presentation preparation - entirely optional

How to do Guerilla GLAM

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014

Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperation

Have you heard?

Video

Open Source Project Brings 11th Century Kannada Verses Online

Working system

Public response

Plans for the future

Open Source India 2015