Centre for Internet and Society

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

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

subha — 2016-10-27T01:07:06Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface

subha — 2016-08-03T02:00:36Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Knowledge Festival 2014

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T10:17:38Z

Subhashish Panigrahi represented India as the India Ambassador of OpenGLAM local in Berlin. The event was organized by Google, Omidyar, et.al., in Berlin from July 15 to 17, 2014.

Click to read the details on the website here. See the official programme here. Download Subhashish's presentation at this page.

Subhashish presented on the following:

Situation in India

Wikimedia India chapter and WMF's India program working on first India GLAM project
Good traction of image contribution through Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest
Mass communication and other media institutes slowly taking interest in open audio library
Digitization is a priority across government departments, with funding available
Majority of GLAMs lack knowledge about open culture, need for outreach
Relicensing and book digitization have gained public interest
Goals of the survey
Data
Mapping the sector
Encourage institutions to think beyond their digital strategy
Show institutions what is there for them

What we have done so far

Started filing Right to Information (RT) asking state government departments for lists of institutions
Reached out to WMIN (Wikimedia India chapter) for help in creating a list
Difficulty with getting people and contact details

Collaborative Presentation

OKFest2014 glam-survey_workshop_20140717 from Beat Estermann

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ok-festival-2014

Open Education Week: Interview with Subhashish Panigrahi

noopur — 2014-04-04T09:20:49Z

Noopur Raval interviewed Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team about sharing information resources and attribution in academia.

Subhashish Panigrahi works as a Programme Officer for Community and Program Support, Access To Knowledge (A2K) for Centre for Internet and Society. Supported by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Access to Knowledge program promotes participation in Indian language Wikipedia projects. As a part of his role, Subhashish interacts with school and university students from different parts of India regularly. In this interview, he reflects on how students are aware (or not) of attribution.

Read the original published on Commons Machinery website here.

What is the general trend around sharing information resources and attribution among students and teachers?
It is funny to know most students I have spoken to rely on photocopied notes provided by their teachers and try to keep the writing style and sentence structure same as the notes. They don’t know that copying answers or quotes amounts to plagiarism. It is the same for many teachers who teach them to keep the beauty of the author’s writing without modifying it. Also, when I visit universities and interact with professors and students, most consider Google and Wikipedia their best friends, primarily for the quick access to information and imagery. I get a lot of questions about the proper procedure of inserting images that appear in Google search in Wikipedia entries. Many student projects are focused on getting the best pictures available on the internet which means they may download copyrighted images (with watermarks) and modify them. With music and video, it is even worse.

Does the current situation become problematic when you encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia?
It often does. For instance, when we initiated the India Education Program (IEP), as a part of Wikipedia Education Program (WEP), to include editing Wikipedia articles as part of academic curricula. Started in 2011 as a pilot program in the city of Pune, IEP engaged with over 1000 students on English Wikipedia. But the lack of education about copyright violation, and a habit of copying notes from books and other sources affected the program outcome. Many articles were copied from books and internet portals without even paraphrasing, which is completely against Wikipedia policies.

What could be the possible reasons for the lack of basic awareness about how to share information among these students?
Self-taught knowledge about the Internet and the idea of the Internet as a place with few restrictions could be a few of the reasons for these problems. Frequently, social media platforms do not have barriers to downloading and sharing content produced by people in your network. With mobile devices, all incoming content is downloaded and stored on your phone. Often, people crop incoming images or modify them and share them in small networks. Although they do it in good faith, information keeps getting reused very rapidly without any credits or metadata.For a new media educator like me, it is easy to explain why and how to contribute to Open Knowledge projects like Wikipedia…but attribution, and why appropriate attribution is crucial to information sharing, are very difficult things to teach. Most students feel like it is not really important to attribute correctly as long as you are not using it for profit or with bad intentions.

How do you deal with it individually and as a part of the A2K team?

It is crucial for educators, academics and everyone else to include education about Copyright and Copyleft in their syllabus so that students and faculty alike can know how not to violate copyright. At the same time, I think schools and universities are a great place to educate students about Open Access journals and the entire culture of knowledge producing/sharing beyond commercial gains.I often cite the example of one of my pictures that got featured in many international magazines and newspapers including The Conservation magazine and The Huffington post, which would not have happened if I hadn’t let the copyright go. I tell students that the biggest perk of contributing works in Creative Commons licenses is having a wide audience, especially young people. People release published information in free licensing when they hear about the opportunity to get enormously popular.

Similarly, BBC and Al-Jazeera have set great examples of mass donating imagery and video footage under CC. In one of our recent collaborations at the A2K program, the Goa University, on our request, changed terms of their licenses for a Konkani language Encyclopedia to Creative Commons license that has brought many volunteers to digitize and enrich the Konkani Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/commons-machinery-march-14-2014-noopur-raval-open-education-week-interview-with-subhashish-panigrahi

Open Data in Cultural Heritage – OpenGLAM in Germany

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T09:49:50Z

Subhashish Panigrahi took part in this event as a member of the OpenGLAM Working Group.

Read the details on the OpenGLAM website here. Images from the event can be seen at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OpenGLAM_2014

Are you working in a cultural heritage institution, or interested in opening up cultural heritage data for wider reuse? On the morning prior to the start of the Open Knowledge Festival, the OpenGLAM initiative, DM2E project, Open Knowledge Germany and Wikimedia Deutschland are organising a half day workshop on open cultural data, with a special focus on German cultural heritage institutions.

During the OpenGLAM workshop, we will investigate and discuss the possibilities and obstacles of opening up your cultural data as an institution. After a round of inspiring presentation from initiatives like Europeana, Wikidata, the German Digital Library and Coding da Vinci we will continue the discussion how to overcome the barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector.

Finally, we will hear from the successful local OpenGLAM groups currently active in Switzerland and Finland, and kickstart a local OpenGLAM network for German memory institutions interested in open cultural content and open access. We invite everyone to join and help think about the focus points for such a German OpenGLAM group for the future, and look forward to start up a fruitful collaboration!

Programme

9.30: Welcome & introduction to OpenGLAM – Lieke Ploeger, Open Knowledge

9.40: Lightning talks on the value of open data for cultural heritage institutions

We opened up – now what? An analysis of the open data policy of the Rijksmuseum – Joris Pekel, Europeana
1 year in digital cultural heritage – what were the walls I ran into most often & how to tear them down – Stephan Bartholmei, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
Wikidata – Making your data available and useful for everyone – Lydia Pintscher, Wikimedia Deutschland
How to use cultural heritage data: Coding Da Vinci results – Helene Hahn, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
Experiences from German GLAM projects / GLAM-Wiki-Kollaborationen in der Wissenschaft - Daniel Mietchen, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

10.30: Coffee Break

10.45: Debate on the current situation around openness in Germany

11.30: Forming a local German OpenGLAM group

With inspiring presentations of the OpenGLAM local groups from Switzerland & Finland

13.00: End

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-data-in-cultural-heritage

Open Access Week Round-Up

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:21:01Z

Here is a round-up of events held at the University of Otago over Open Access Week. Subhashish Panigrahi made a presentation for the staff members of libraries across New Zealand. The event was organised by the University of Otago.

From 3-4pm Subhashish Panigrahi [@subhapa], based in Bangalore, described the concept of How to do Guerrilla GLAM. Given the emergence of Wikipedian in Residence projects overseas and at particular institutions in NZ (see a recent panel at NDF 2015), we were intrigued by what he had to say.

It was an interesting session which generated much discussion. For those of us in NZ where we are fortunate to have institutions where there is a relatively high rate of access to collections – I’m thinking even at the library catalogue level – the thought that guerrilla activity may be necessary to surface collection items without the intervention of institution staffers may be surprising and possibly confronting! Subhashish did stress this guerrilla activity in no way violates copyright or licencing agreements, but seeks to make cultural items in GLAMs openly available to the public, where possible by partnering with institutions. The fact that many institutions do not have the resources to digitize cultural items, he posits, leaves the door open for guerrilla activity by skilled volunteers.

One participant in the session succinctly described Guerrilla GLAM as being self-authorizing activity vs institutional authorizing activity. I understand this to mean that rather than institutions engaging their own staff or volunteers, or crowd sourcing new volunteers to digitise their content, the Guerilla GLAMers come to them. There may well be communities in NZ or small GLAMs that have no digital record of their collections. Communities and institutions in this situation may well find it helpful to engage some interested Guerrilla GLAMers to help them out.

The webinar links and chat are available here connect.otago.ac.nz/p4j21g554ny/
The slides are also available separately here http://slides.com/psubhashish/how-to-do-guerrilla-glam/fullscreen#/

Click to read the blog post published by the University of Otago.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/open-otago-october-27-2015-open-access-week-round-up

Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language

subha — 2014-10-24T15:32:40Z

In February 2014, the Government of India declared the South Asian language Odia as the 6th classical language of India which is one among 22 scheduled languages of India and has a literary heritage of more than 5,000 years. There are documents for more than 3,500 years, and the rest are undocumented oral histories.

The article was published by Opensource.com on October 22, 2014.

The native Odia speakers became hopeful of getting a lot of language related projects implemented to grow the lineage of this long literary heritage and see the language used and spoken globally, not just in literature but in computer and mobile games, interactive computer applications and in other digital media—and to reach the masses as a communicative language.

So far, not many federal initiatives have been put into place, nor a single policy level change has been made, to implement a standard as simple as like Unicode for easy access of information. And, there are very few mobile apps that offer concise and easy to digest content. Overall, there is not much content online that is available in a standard format that is easy to search, access, and reproduce,

Wikisource is here to change that and is working to open up a whole new world of online resources for readers.

With more than 40 million native Odia speakers living in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states and the diaspora in rest of the world—primarily living in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and many of the South and East Asian counties—far less content in the Odia language has been made available on the Internet. The highest is Odia Wikipedia, with 8441 articles created by October 2014. A bigger problem is that though there are a few websites with Unicode content, government portals do not have content in Unicode to make them searchable and reusable. A non-profit Srujanika, with support from two other institutions, has digitized around 740 books under the scope of the project: Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB), most of which were published between 1850 and 1950. This remains the largest digital archive so far for the Odia language, yet all of the books are scanned PDFs, restricting searchability of the content.

Odia Wikisource is a project that aims for the digitization of rare books that are out of copyright. The project is even allowing authors and publishers to donate their copyrighted work by re-licensing under CC0 or CC BY-SA licenses. The goal is to bring about access to large volumes of books and manuscripts and create more Open Educational Resources (OERs). The single biggest advantage of the Wikisource project at-large is that it makes text for books available in Unicode standard, making it searchable on the web and allows readers to copy and use it elsewhere. Most other conventional archival systems lack this important feature.

Wikisource is run by a volunteers and communities who often retype or prepare the books by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a technique that converts scanned images of books into text. Participate and contribute to Odia Wikisource by visiting or.wikisource.org, the project is open to all who want to help!

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource went through a thorough and long approval process for about 1 year and 9 months, as an active incubator project—first by the Language Committee and then by the Wikimedia Foundation's Board. During this incubation phase, the project has digitized three books completely and one partially—thanks to the individual contributors. An educational institution Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in collaboration with the Wikimedia funded Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) are in the process of digitizing 9 books by the author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were re-licensed to CC BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

Four new Wikisource contributors joined the project in response to a tweet and a Facebook post by the author to digitize The Odia Bhagabata, classic literature compiled in 14th century. "Content that has already been typed in fonts of various non-Unicode based encoding, now they can be converted by (this) like it was done for The Odia Bhagabata, that was typed and available on the community hosted website Odia.org. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping,” says Manoj Sahukar, who along with the author designed a converter for reading text and transforming into Unicode for The Odia Bhagabata.

Questions for early contributors to Odia Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): You have been with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time Wikimedian who proofreads the books on Odia Wikisource: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

SP: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
Nasim Ali, the oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age, Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

SP: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata? How do you want to get involved in future?
Nihar Kumar Dalai, a Wikisource writer: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

SP: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
Pankajmala Sarangi, a Wikisource writer: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-october-22-2014-open-access-platform-to-save-the-odia-indian-language

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books

Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule — 2016-01-03T11:26:49Z

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.

This was published in Wikimedia Blog on December 3, 2015.

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.^[1]

MGS is a non-profit organization working for the preservation of Maharashtra’s linguistic and cultural heritage. It was founded in Pune, India in 1894. Being an important archive for the preservation of many hundreds of years old manuscripts and historical artifacts from the Peshwa era, the institution is open to public for study and research.

During the four-day anniversary celebration, the Centre for Internet Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K)—an organization that supports the Wikimedia movement in India—opened a Wikipedia stall there where Marathi Wikimedians were present. Around 600 people visited the stall and learned about the news of MGS’s book donation.

Many active and new Marathi Wikimedians were present at the exhibition stall along with Abhinav Garule from the CIS-A2K program to share the incredible work Marathi Wikipedia and Wikimedia community at large are doing. Autographs of eighteen notable writers who received awards from Sanstha for different genres of writings were collected for uploading to the Wikipedia pages about them. While meeting the authors, Wikimedians also approached them to relicense some of their works under Creative Commons licenses so that they could be digitized on Wikisource and/or enrich Wikipedia—and some of the authors expressed a good deal of interest in opening up their books for Wikisource.

Some of the major books donated are Peshwa Rojnishi (diary of Peshwa), Benjamin Franklin Charitra (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Kekavali, S M Paranjape Charitra (autobiography), Letters Exchanged between the Sanstha and the British Government, Shinde Gharanyacha Padmamay Itihas (manuscript), and Marathwadyatil Arvachin Marathi Vangmay (modern Marathi literature from Marathwada, a region in Maharashtra) are some of the popular books read by Marathi speakers that are going to be part of the books donated by the organization.

We reached out to Avinash Chaphekar, the joint secretary of the organization, to know more about the state of book publication and readership.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Could you share your ideas of opening these invaluable books for Wikisource? How they are going to be useful for the online readers to learn about the Peshwas?

Avinash Chaphekar (AC): These books are of historical importance and contain information that needs to reach more people; they cover topics that are rarely covered well anywhere else. Right after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as it contains a lot of messages for a common person, a lady walked up to and asked if she could read it in Marathi. Be it such autobiographies or a poetry book like “Kekavali”, such books that were published by the MGS should not be kept closed—many readers are searching for them. We donated 800 of these old books to the Marathi Wikisource because we don’t have large presence in the media or the Internet, so how would any reader who does not know us buy a book? If these books are available online, they can at least find and read them.

SP: Where do you think there is gap between publishers and readers today? Many Marathi books get published every year and if you search on the Internet, which many people today do, you would hardly find much.

AC: Online readership is increasing every day, but when you look at Marathi readers, the majority of them are still buying books. During the exhibitions here (even this year!), there is always quite a rush to buy books. Only the youth and tech-savvy people read online. But most people we meet say that they feel more comfortable holding and reading physical books. Moreover, there is no concrete research validating that most of the youngsters here are accessing information only online. I still feel reading books in a conventional way by holding books in your hands will continue to exist as there is some kind of satisfaction that lies in it.

SP: Did you know that we are going to get these books retyped, meaning that readers will not just be able to read them in their smartphones or computers but they could use the text for republishing the same books in the future? How do you think such a model will be useful for publishers?

AC: At the MGS, we don’t have funds to republish these books, and publishers are not ready to do it no matter how historically valuable the books are—even an incredibly valuable reference book called Marathi Grantha Nirmiti Watchal (the history of creation of Marathi books in Marathi), authored by SG Tulpule and published by us in 1973. This book has detailed information about Marathi publications, even those that existed before printing technology existed. As many such books are not being reprinted, we cannot leave the remaining few copies to perish. Let them go online and reach millions of people.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-december-3-open-access-in-marathi-language-expands-by-thousand-books

Online space for Odia

praskrishna — 2016-06-12T15:39:21Z

From a few hundred articles in 2002 to over 10,600 articles on various aspects of Odisha today, Odia Wikipedia has certainly made a mark as far as promotion of the language is concerned. Wikipedia, the volunteer driven web-based multilingual encyclopedia project, is an important reference source on the Internet for all kinds of information.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in New Indian Express on June 10, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

Recently, Odia Wikipedia (https://or.wikipedia.org) celebrated its 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar where the focus was on capacity building of Wikipedia contributors, volunteers and enhancing the content.

While the event brought all the active contributors under one roof, it also provided a platform to new users to learn the basics of Wikipedia editing, technical aspects, uploading and adding images to articles and dealing with copyright issues on Wikipedia.

Odia Wikipedia is free for anyone to create articles on notable topics related to Odisha, edit and enhance them. Topics covered so far are varied, from elaborate rituals in Jagannath temple of Puri to medical science.

Sister Projects

Currently, there are two sister projects of Odia Wikipedia - Odia Wikisource (an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text) and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over one lakh entries in the language.

With these two projects, the community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and many language tools. Odia Wikipedia, the flagship project was started as one of the first four Indian language Wikipedias along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia in 2002, a year after the English Wikipedia went live.

The project remained dormant for more than nine years till a group of youths revived it in 2011. Subsequently, the project became popular among Odias and they joined in writing and editing articles on different subject areas in the language.

"Odia Wikipedia is part of the 292 language Wikipedia family and a larger global family of hundreds of other free knowledge projects that are collectively known as Wikimedia projects," said Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project, during the event.

Tools for Writers

Apart from writing and editing articles, the Wikipedia contributors have created several tools and resource manuals over the years. The script encoding converters that they have built is helping online users to share their Odia writings.

"Before these converters were built, people were stuck with outdated encoding systems like Shreelipi and Akruti," says Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikipedian, and Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

New Projects

"The next big goal is to enhance the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information," said a contributor, Shitikantha Dash. Dash, who is also an administrator of Odia Wiktionary said, "It is important that more people contribute to the Odia Wiktionary so that words of all genres, especially the technical and burrowed words, make their way into this free multilingual dictionary. A 10-day campaign will be organised soon to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary. "This time, our focus will be that every Wikipedia editor adds at least one word to the Odia Wiktionary. We are also using these words to create a spell check facility in Odia Wikipedia that will be freely available for everyone to use," he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/new-indian-express-june-10-2016-diana-sahu-online-space-for-odia

Online edit-a-thon on incidents in Telugu

Subhashish Panigrahi and Pavan Santhosh — 2016-07-11T16:23:12Z

A week-long online edit-a-thon was organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community to cover popular social, political and other events on the Telugu Wikipedia.

Long time Telugu Wikipedians Venkata Ramana, Ravi Chandra, Dr. Rajasekhar, Kodihalli Muralikrishna and Pranay Raj organised an online edit-a-thon during May 1-May 7 to chronicle events of all kinds—from social to political and everything old and new—that are notable. I (Pavan Santosh) also joined them all in organising this event. 25 articles were created during the event and over the campaign week. The articles were enhanced with more citations and information.

We reached out to two of the organisers to learn about this project and below are what they had to say.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Can you please share how you came up with the idea of organising this event? What are the future plans to take this project to the larger Telugu Wikimedia community?
Ravi Chandra (RC): The idea of organizing an edit-a-thon for events on Telugu wikipedia came up when I was chatting with Pavan Santhosh about the progress of Telugu Wikipedia. He had also heard similar comments from other Wikipedians. We knew that we were concentrating more on people, places and movies in general. We wanted to pick up a topic which we have not focused much in the past. That's how it was born.

SP: Did you see anything in particular lacking in Telugu Wikipedia that helped start this project?
RC: I think the biggest challenge in our community is the lack of editors. The kind of articles we created during this event could have been written better by history scholars from different universities of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. I feel that we should reach out to more people from diverse background so that we get more contributors.

Pavan Santhosh (PS): Why did you participate in this edit-a-thon?
Venkata Ramana (VR): I joined in this event to improve articles in Telugu WIkipedia especially related to incidents.

PS: Where do you see one such initiative adding value to Telugu Wikipedia?
VR: There are several articles related to incidents in English Wikipedia, that too related to India. But there is a gap in Telugu Wikipedia. For example, Karamchedu massacre is one of the very important incidents in the Dalit history and there was no article in Telugu Wikipedia until this edit-a-thon happened. Similarly, this event kickstarted chronicling of several such important incidents in Telugu Wikipedia.Within a short span of one week we have covered some of the very significant incidents.

PS: What was your collective learning? Can you please share some of your future plans?
VR: Edit-a-thons like this help community recognise some major gaps in content. And community members feel encouraged to work together to fill the gaps. I have seen the impact of edit-a-thons based on incidents, movies and now Punjab. Going forward, we are planning to conduct a few thematic edit-a-thons as this edit-a-thon and a few ones in the past have proved to be very effective on community building.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/online-edit-a-thon-on-incidents-in-telugu

Centre for Internet and Society

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language

Video

Otago Southland are the Coolest

Event Details

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

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

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

Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface

Open Knowledge Festival 2014

Situation in India

What we have done so far

Collaborative Presentation

Open Education Week: Interview with Subhashish Panigrahi

Open Data in Cultural Heritage – OpenGLAM in Germany

Programme

Open Access Week Round-Up

Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language

Questions for early contributors to Odia Wikisource

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books

Online space for Odia

Sister Projects

Tools for Writers

New Projects

Online edit-a-thon on incidents in Telugu

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