Centre for Internet and Society

India's 23rd Regional Language Wikipedia Goes Live in Tulu

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:02:16Z

The Tulu Wikipedia has just gone live, giving another boost to yet another ancient Indian language otherwise struggling to keep up with the times and speedily changing technology.

Originally published by Indo Asian News Service, the blog post was mirrored by NDTV on August 8, 2016.

The news was announced by two key community organisers on Saturday who helped to make an eight-year-dream come true. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a PhD in Kannada literature in Mangalore (Karnataka) and Bharathesha, a mechanical engineer based in Muscat, announced this while attending Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade being held in Chandigarh this weekend.

Tulu is a language spoken by around two million native speakers mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages. Some scholars suggest Tulu is among the earliest Dravidian languages with its roots going back some 2000 years.

Wikipedia itself is available in 22 Indian languages, with Tulu becoming the 23rd. There are another one-and-half dozen Indian language Wikipedias in the incubator stage at present. Not all languages have an active wiki community.

Located at tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wikipedia has been in "incubation" since 2008. This term is used to describe such online collaborately-crafted encyclopedias which are still waiting to to go "live" or active and come online.

Around 2014, it was reactivated. Following some meetings and workshops, the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December of that year.

After much work, some 1,100 articles (or 1,050 if one could ignore those which are not redirects) went live. There are currently about 100 editors who have made over 10 edits each.

"Dr Vishwanatha and Bharathesha are the number one and number two contributors," said Dr UB Panavaja, a former scientist and techie and long-term supporter of Kannada computing. Pavanaja currently looks after the CMR (Creating Movement Resources) of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society which works with some language groups to promote their Wikipedia presence.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates," said Pavanaja, describing the tools that any new Wikipedia needs to set up.

Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language "peculiar and very interesting". According to him, "Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages of the Dravidian family. It looks as if it had been cultivated for its own sake."

The language has a lot of written literature and a rich oral literature such as the Epic of Siri, according to the Wikipedia itself.

In coastal Karnataka, both the Mangalore and Udupi areas today allow the language as an optional third-language in local schools.

This role in schooling makes it all the more mandatory to create encyclopaedic texts in the language, say its Wikipedia promoters. Mangalore University also has a Tulu language chair while St Aloysius's Radio Sarang community radio station broadcasts daily in this tiny language and the local All India Radio also broadcasts in the language.

Some five Kannada language representatives and one from Tulu are presently in Mohali-Chandigarh attending Wikiconference India 2016.

Indian Wikipedias include Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, besides, now, Tulu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-8-india-23-regional-language-wikipedia-goes-live-in-tulu

India Public Libraries Conference

praskrishna — 2015-01-07T02:02:57Z

The India Public Libraries Conference is being held from March 17 to 19, 2015 at the India International Centre in New Delhi. It is being organized by DELNET and Digital Empowerment Foundation. The Centre for Internet & Society is a Knowledge Partner for this conference.

IPLC 2015 : Invitation of Best Practices

Applications are invited from public libraries run by the government, communities, civil society and others in India that are doing good works innovatively in public library management in areas of – content and services, better management of resources, citizen engagement, library staff development, new methods, applications and strategies, use of technology including digital library initiatives, partnership development and in other ways that have served the citizens, communities, local agencies and others better.

For more see India Public Libraries Conference website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-public-libraries-conference

India at Leisure: Media, Culture and Consumption in the New Economy

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T15:34:30Z

Maggie Huang attended the event and presented a paper titled “The Future of Music Streaming: Business Practices and Copyright Management in India”. The paper was co-authored by Maggie and Amba Kak.

A striking feature of India's ongoing transformations is the runaway success of one sector of its economy. This is India’s leisure economy, often overlapping with the media economy, which entails a range of pursuits from sports to movies, from texting to TV---all of which forming a significant constituent of the country’s social and economic social life. While various activities within this sector were almost entirely neglected by India’s early planners, fuelled by narrow conceptions of media as an instrument of the state, today they remain little understood by national scholars and international analysts. With this background, a bi-national working group of scholars from India and New Zealand emerged in 2013 to reflect on the dynamics of India’s media economy. To build on this, an international conference is being organized, under the inaugural round of the India New Zealand Education Council programme, to broaden reflections on the dynamics of media industries and practices of media-culture constituting India’s leisure economy.

For more see the original published by Jamia Milla Islamia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-at-leisure

India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements

praskrishna — 2016-07-30T12:59:56Z

Anubha Sinha was invited by the Observer Research Foundation for a panel discussion on "India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements" with Ambassador Robert Holleyman, Deputy US Trade Representative and Ambassador Shyam Saran, Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries on July 25, 2016 at ORF Conference Hall in New Delhi.

The discussion comes at a critical time for digital trade in Asia, with the recent conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the continent's emergence as a major contributor the global digital economy.

The growth of the digital economy has spurred new concerns about global tax regimes, and the negotiation of trade terms - including non-tariff barriers and the alignment of policies - even as intellectual property rights are redefined and e-commerce changes industry practices. The backdrop to these developments is the rapid and unpredictable advance of technology, which has prompted the need for adaptive policies. The Digital 2 Dozen, the US tenets for unrestricted commerce and an open internet, is attached for your reference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-and-regional-mega-trade-agreements

India and France to Digitise Manuscripts, Artworks & Archives

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:15:15Z

The Indian and French governments have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) which will assist in technical knowledge sharing, competency, skill building and cultural exchange between the two countries, as per a PIB release.

This was published by Medianama on October 29, 2015. CIS memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Goa University was mentioned.

The MoU will assist a program on digitisation of old manuscripts and documents, which began in France 7 years ago. The Ministry of Culture will benefit from this and build a national virtual library in India, which will store and share manuscripts, archives and artworks. This library will also link and share all knowledge resources from various Indian and French government institutes and organisations.

The French government is also keen on sorting and deciphering its collection of thousands of Indian documents in Sanskrit, Tamil and other Indian languages with the help of the Indian government, which also incidentally includes correspondence between Rabindranath Tagore and French scholar Sylvan Levin.

NMM digitised over 30 lakh manuscripts last year
In March, we reported that the 12 year old government body National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) had digitised over thirty lakh manuscripts and 18,588,390 pages in all as of 31 December 2014. Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister of State for Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation said that the National Archives of India (NAI) was set to digitise another 1,100,000 historic records.

Previous digitisation initiatives:

In November 2014, around 55 books written by the Indian author and activist Niranjana in Kannada would be digitized and made available on Kannada Wikisource, allowing Kannada speakers to access these books easily.
In October 2014, the Ministry of Culture launched a national portal for museums. Collections in all museums under its control and those under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will be digitized and presented on this portal.
In July 2014, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology released the draft of Open Access Policy under the Ministry of Science and Technology.
In September 2013, Goa University entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society for building the Konkani Wikipedia.
In June 2013, Tata Communications Media Services planned to digitize documents of historical and cultural significance such as films and documentaries from the archives of Doordarshan and Films Division of India which go back to 1947 including speeches of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.
In May 2013, Punjabi Sahitya Akademi Reference Lab scanned and saved around 1,000 manuscripts, stone-printed scripts, poetry books on computer hard discs, adding that the digitized editions will be available across the globe through the internet.

Check out our digitisation and government coverage.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/medianama-sneha-johari-october-29-2015-india-and-france-to-digitise-manuscripts-artworks-and-archives

India Access To Knowledge/Draft Work plan July 2014 - June 2015

vishnu — 2014-04-08T09:51:27Z

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the open knowledge movement in South-Asia and in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008 when Jimmy Wales visited Bangalore. From September 2012 it has been actively involved in growing the movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Based on the 18-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed its Work Plan for July 2014 to June 2015.

This was originally published on Wikimedia blog

This work plan consists of 21 plans across 6 verticals. These are:

7 Language Area Plans: CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of its goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic language Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which can be seen here.
3 Community Strengthening Initiatives: We propose community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program. A detailed plan for each of these initiatives is available here.
8 Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects: These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language. All the stand-alone projects are more fully described here.
Creating Movement Resources: Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike in English there were not many Wikimedia-related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel there is an urgent need to create movement resources in Indic languages like a Creative Commons (CC) handbook; a Copyright handbook; training manuals; video tutorials, etc. See our plans for concerted efforts to create resources for strengthening the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages here.
Publicity, Research and Documentation: Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Also, the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit from more systematic research and documentation. CIS-A2K will put in more intensive efforts into Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.
General Support and Service to the Movement: CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work so far. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. This page gives more details about the proposed work.

The work plan includes details of aims, objectives, programme activities and expected outcomes. Most of the language area plans were put together in active consultation with the respective Wikimedia language communities. Various inputs and ideas contributed, opportunities provided, and challenges thrown at the CIS-A2K program during the last year by the Wikimedia communities in India, our institutional partners, Executive Committee (EC) of Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking Team have significantly informed our work plans.

Introduction

Background to CIS-A2K Program

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to CIS in Bangalore, India to expand their A2K programme in India. The grant was released over a three phase period - first in September 2012 (₹ 11,000,000), second in June 2013 (₹ 7,500,000) and third in December 2014(₹ 7,500,000). The purpose of the grant was to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand the Indic Wikimedia projects and associated communities. In addition, the grant was aimed at generating improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

CIS-A2K created an Annual Work Plan (2013-2014) that is being successfully implemented. Most of the projected outcomes against the plans have already been met. There have also been many unplanned outcomes. CIS-A2K has periodically been sharing its work openly with the Wikimedia community in India, WMIN and WMF's Grantmaking team. See all our reports and newsletters here.

Objective

The objective of the CIS-A2K is to catalyse the growth of open knowledge movement in South Asia and in Indic languages. Within the Wikimedia universe CIS-A2K specifically strives to further grow the Indic and English Wikimedia projects and communities by a) supporting and serving the Wikimedia communities; b) building institutional partnerships; c) bringing more content under free license; d) designing and executing projects with community participation; e) strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers; and f) fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem.

Context

It is important to understand the two broader contexts in which CIS-A2K program operates, which underpins the implementation of this work plan.

Linguistic Diversity of India: India is known for its linguistic diversity. India is home to several dominant languages and also several small languages which are facing extinction. Due to the large number of languages that exist in India, the country has more than 20 different language Wikipedias. Each Indic Wikimedia language project is different from the others in terms of community structure, speaker base, literacy level, technical knowledge, existing documentation, language corpora and challenges in the cyberspace, etc. Hence, each Indian language has its own strengths and challenges which are quite different from each other.

Since each Indian language is so distinct, we cannot apply a ‘one-size fits all’ approach; hence CIS-A2K early on adopted the strategy of creating a detailed plan for each language. During 2013-14 we chose five (of which only four could be executed) Indic languages for focussed intervention and developed [plans]. This strategy did pay off and we have now decided to work on seven languages. It is important to note that we are cautious about not massively scaling up this strategy and our choice to work on seven language areas is well informed. However, we have planned to execute some stand-alone projects in other Indic languages and will provide need based support to other Indic Wikimedia communities.
Institutional Context: The A2K program is housed at CIS Bangalore. CIS is an almost 6 year old non-profit organisation [with offices in Bengaluru and New Delhi] focussing on interdisciplinary policy and academic research. CIS conducts policy research in the following areas - accessibility, access for knowledge [including free/open source software, open content, open standards, open access and open data], internet governance [including privacy and freedom of speech and expression], telecom [limited to shared backhaul and shared spectrum]. CIS produces academic research focusing on digital natives and digital humanities.

CIS shares the same values as Wikimedia and the free and open source software community. CIS believes Wikimedia's objectives of disseminating free knowledge to each and every individual. There are certain advantages the A2K program has because of its location within CIS. Some of these include: a) opportunity to leverage the strong network CIS has developed with various free culture / openness movement stakeholders in the past 6 years of its existence; b) the advantage of having an office space in a city which is the hub of the openness movement in India; c) readily available administrative and support staff and systems that saves a lot of A2K staff's time; d) cross-pollination of ideas and work done in other CIS programs and vice-versa; e) organisational principles like subsidiarity, war on meta-work, post-facto accountability, and amorphous institutional boundaries give the A2K team members amazing programmatic agility; and f) the right kind of ecosystem for free knowledge work[1] There are also some disadvantages: a) CIS being a non-chapter or Wikimedia volunteer-driven entity faces very valid questions about legitimacy, representation and "voluntary sector" vs. "volunteer" dichotomy; b) a section of the community view CIS-A2K as a competitor to WMIN for financial resources which undermines trust-building and consequently threatens synergies between WMIN and A2K c) CIS has to be conservative about attributing Wikimedia growth and community growth to A2K initiatives as it can be misconstrued as credit-grabbing.[2]

Methodology

Process

This work plan is put together based on an extensive engagement with various stakeholders of Wikimedia movement in India. These include a) some Wikimedia volunteers across Indic Wikimedia projects; b) WMIN Executive Committee; d) Institutional Partners of CIS-A2K; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) A2K Program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Some of the language area plans were shared with that particular language Wikimedia community for feedback over the Wikipedia village pumps, mailing lists and social media groups. Each plan document has a list of contributors who have contributed in developing the plan.

Structure

There are 21 diverse plans within this plan. During the work planning exercise we realized that this diversity is both a good feature and a potential bug. We were concerned about making these plans intelligible. So we have worked very hard to come up with a standard template for all plans. Thus a cursory glance may give the impression that some plans look similar, but they are not. However, you may see repetitions in strategies across plans. Also in some plans we had to deviate from the template. Moreover, it is less productive to compare one sub-plan with another sub-plan as each plan was developed taking into consideration a) specific strengths and opportunities that CIS-A2K program could build on; b) particular needs for support to which we could respond; and c) specific challenges that require localized solutions.

Granularity

This plan is not set in stone and will be periodically (right now quarterly) reviewed and revised if required. The intention of this work plan is to continually ensure better design and better engagement. Thus this "plans within the plan" structure was essential to evolve a sense of granularity of the CIS-A2K team’s work along with micro-level outcome and impact metrics. This will give us the flexibility to amputate a plan, if it fails, without affecting the rest of the plans. We also believe that this granularity in plans will give a focussed direction for the CIS-A2K team and the volunteers who will collaborate with us in the implementation.

Mapping Plan to Budget/Mission Level Transparency

Each plan has an independent budget and is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. An attempt is made to correlate why we are spending a certain amount on a certain activity. Thus all these budgets are very optimally planned and the overall budget is an assimilation. CIS-A2K believes that this will give mission level transparency to our work and provide a clear structure of accountability to the movement.

Annual Work Plan July 2014-June 2015

Language Area Work Plans

CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of the proposed goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which is given below.

Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas have included:

Deepening the work. We have decided to continue our work in the language areas chosen last year as we believe that we need to deepen our work to ensure that the momentum we have built will be sustained even after our exit.
Networking of institutions and groups. The A2K team has put together a list of knowledge institutions, groups and individuals with whom it has some connections and believes that it can bring them into the Wikimedia movement. These collaborations will not only result in significant quality-content contributions, but will lead to the diversification and expansion of that particular language Wikimedia community.
Willingness of that particular language community to interact and engage with the A2K team. Though we tried approaching other language communities informally, we were given to understand that they would like to consider engaging with us at a later stage. We respect the community's decision and express our willingness to work with newer language areas in a subsequent phase.
Familiarity of the A2K team members with the language. Each of us are editors/can edit or at least read the discussions in most of the above language Wikipedias. This will give us an insider's perspective of what is happening in that particular language community and the Wikimedia projects.

Community Strengthening Initiatives

CIS-A2K proposes to undertake three community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program.

Nurturing Mediawiki and Tech Talent in Indic Communities: Through this initiative CIS-A2K aims to make the Indic Wikimedia communities relatively more self-reliant in addressing minor technical issues through nurturing and building community level technical leadership. This could go a long way in reducing excessive dependency on the Engineering resources and will help the Indic communities in building strong technical liaison with the Media Wiki global community and the WMF Engineer team. The detailed plan is available here.
Wikimedia Train the Trainer Program, CIS-A2K: The program will help build capacity and enable community members to conduct outreach sessions independently or with minimal support to introduce Wikipedia to prospective editors in their respective Indian languages. See here for a detailed design of this initiative.
Wiki-Data India Marathon: Wikidata India Marathon will be a month long travelling event (or a set of events) across India. The primary objective of this marathon will be to introduce Wikidata to various Indic Wikimedia communities and show how it can be used and what benefits it has. For more details see here.

Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects

Many project ideas came up as potential opportunities and as unplanned outcomes of our work during the last year. Based on an internal evaluation and thorough due-diligence we have short-listed some projects that could have high rate of success and learning. We propose to take up 8 such projects as stand-alone Wikimedia projects during this work plan period. These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language.

Med GLAM Project at Calicut Medical College: The main objective of this project is to create, curate and make openly available images from the Department of Pathology, Calicut Medical College (CMC) for the benefit of medical and para-medical students and staff of CMC specifically and for the larger medical fraternity across the world, using free/open knowledge database Wikimedia Commons.
Wiki Loves Public Art (India): This is a photography competition that seeks to get photographs of works of public art on Wikipedia. The competition is modelled on Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) which has been running successfully since 2010. We plan to execute this in active collaboration with WMIN GLAM SIG.
100 Books on Gujarati Wikisource: The main objective of this project is to add significant content to Gujarati Wikisource using OCR. This project will be executed in collaboration with Gujarati Wikimedia community, WMIN Chapter, Forbes Gujarati Sabha (which will provide access to copyright free Gujarati content to be put up on Gujarati Wikisource) and The Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda.
Urdu Wikipedia Education Program at MANUU: This project aims to roll out Wikipedia Educational Programme aimed at the students of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.
Odia Wikisource as OER: This project aims to make Odia Wikisource a live project. Towards this three things will be done by CIS-A2K. First, to get a major Odia author's (Dr. Jagannath Mohanty) content re-released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and to host it on Odia Wikisource. Second, with the help of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences undertake a project whereby the students will type and proof read the books on Odia Wikisource, which could be used as OER across various educational institutions. Third, the digitized children's literature in Odia will be freely distributed across the government schools in an offline form. This project is inspired by the Malayalam Wikimedia community's efforts of introducing Wikisource in schools as part of the IT at Schools program in Kerala.
Making the Tulu Wikipedia Live
Making the Santali Wikipedia Live
Telugu Wiki Bus: This pilot project aims to create massive awareness about Indic Wikimedia projects in smaller cities and towns. This is modelled on the Google bus program and will be implemented in the Telugu speaking region of Andhra Pradesh.

Creating Movement Resources

Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike English there are not many Wikimedia related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources, which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel that there is an urgent need for concerted efforts to create resources to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages. We strongly believe that creating these movement resources will go a long way in growing and strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers beyond the limits of CIS-A2K program. Some of the activities in this plan have a larger fit with the larger institutional work of CIS in the domain of Intellectual Property Rights and Openness.[3] We will collaborate with the legal expertise within CIS in executing some of these activities. A detailed plan of activities under this initiative along with a budget can be seen here.

Publicity, Research and Documentation

Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Many of the long time Indic Wikimedia volunteers have, during our interactions, expressed the need to increase the publicity about the Indic Wikimedia projects so that there is increased public awareness. CIS-A2K has left no stone unturned to get print and electronic media publicity for Indic Wikimedia projects and communities duirng 2013-14. Because of our efforts there were about 100 news items the print media[4] and about 10 programs on electronic media[5] in the last year.

Also the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit with more systematic research and documentation. It should be noted that CIS has been doing research about the Wikimedia movement way before the Access to Knowledge program got a grant from Wikimedia Foundation. Researching on various elements of the Wikimedia movement is not something new for CIS and the team will continue its efforts in this direction. In addition to action research, we undertook systematic documentation of the movement during the last year. More intensive efforts will be put in Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.

General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. Most of these requests are listed here and here. CIS-A2K also receives requests over e-mail and some community members do reach out to us over mobile phones to place requests. In general the quick response time of CIS-A2K to these requests has been appreciated by many of the community members. We would like to continue with our efforts in supporting and serving the Wikimedia community in India and maintain the quick response time. CIS-A2K has actively consulted with the Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) before supporting most of the community requests, especially when it involved allocating funds for large community events like Tamil Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations. We also ensure that supporting community events is done in a transparent manner. However, we would need to review our methods and further streamline systems of support, which will be worked up on during this year. This page will give more details about the proposed work.

Learning and Evaluation

Based on discussions with the Wikimedia India Chapter EC and with some members of the Wikimeda community, the A2K programme had put together some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work during the last year. We have included some more metrics for evaluation this year.

Evaluation Tools

Quarterly growth of no. of articles
Quarterly growth of no. of total editors
Quarterly growth of no. of new editors
Quarterly growth of no. of active editors
Quarterly growth of no. of very active editors
No. of page views
No. of articles < 2 KB < 5 KB
No. of new tools/gadgets made available during a time-slice
No. of mentoring interactions
No. of bugs filed and resolved
No. of edits (Article, Other mainspace edits)
Print and electronic media mentions

Reports

We will undertake quarterly and annually review of its work using the above evaluation tools. The team will also report the successes and learnings to the Wikimedia India & the global community. In addition to this the A2K team will actively review progress of each language area plan in collaboration with the respective Wikimedia community. Based on this feedback we will undertake mid-course corrections, should there be a need. This will be openly shared on the respective plan discussion pages on Meta. In addition to this, A2K will continue to publish monthly newsletter informing the larger community of the various activities A2K has undertaken in a certain month and is planning to undertake in the upcoming month. Towards the the end of the grant, A2K will share an impact report encompassing analysis of all year long work done by A2K. To summarize following reports will be published in the year of 2014 - 2015:

Quarterly Report 1 (July 2014 - October 2014)
Quarterly Report 2 (November 2014 - February 2015)
Quarterly Report 3 (March 2015 - June 2015)
Impact Report (July 2014 - June 2015)
Monthly Newsletters

Monthly Review and Learning Sessions

CIS-A2K conducted many weekly learning sessions to critically reflect on the successes and failures of our work internally. We had also used these weekly sessions to learn about new developments (tools, policies, etc) in the Wikimedia universe. However, this could not be sustained for a long period. We will take measures to revive this and make it a monthly exercise, which we will try to record or screen cast on CIS website. Simultaneously we will use this to do a monthly review of the progress of the various plans and discuss about the upcoming month's events.

Budget

As stated above in the methodology section, each of the 21 plans have an independent budget, which is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. Below we have give a concise picture of the budget requirements against the 6 verticals. As part of the WMF's grant to CIS, we have received Rs. 15,000,000.00 or US$ 242,178.00 during the last year. The proposed budget of Rs. 18,406,454.00 or US$ 297.831.00 is about 23 per cent more than the previous year's grant.

Sl. No.	Budget Item	FDC (INR)	FDC (US$)	Other Sources and in kind support (INR)	Other Sources and in kind support (US$)
1	Language Area Plans	Rs. 7,466,440.00	120,813.05338	Rs. 2,100,000.00	33,979.70279
2	Community Strengthening Initiatives	Rs. 2,610,400.00	42,238.3886	Rs. 200,000.00	3,236.16217
3	Stand Alone Wikimedia Projects	Rs. 2,584,300.00	41,816.06949	Rs. 2,495,000.00	40,371.12308
4	Creating Movement Resources	Rs. 1,188,000.00	19,222.80329	Rs. 2,400,000.00	38,833.94605
5	Publicity, Research & Documentation	Rs. 780,000.00	12,621.03247	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
6	General Support and Service to the Movement	Rs. 636,000.00	10,290.99570	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
7	Other Expenses	Rs. 1,468,000.00	23,753.43033	Rs. 2,964,000.00	47,959.92337
	Total before Institutional Development	Rs. 16,733,140.00	270,755.77331	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745
8	Institutional Development (10%)	Rs. 1,673,314.00	27,075.57733	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
	TOTAL BUDGET	Rs. 18,406,454.00	297,831.35064	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745

Other than item no. 7 and 8 the entire budget will go towards the programmatic implementation of the plans. The staff costs are not separately listed here as we see the CIS-A2K team as a programmatic investment and each of the team member's time is budgeted against a specific activity or plan. We propose to raise Rs. 10,159,000.00 or US$ 163,380.00 other sources and in-kind support towards executing this work plan. A detailed budget analysis is available here. Please See this google spreadsheet which gives a micro level picture of the Budget against each of the planned activity.

Giving Feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here.
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.

For Bangla plan here.
For Hindi plan here.
For Kannada plan here.
For Konkani plan here.
For Marathi plan here.
For Odia plan here.
For Telugu plan here.

For feedback on Community Strengthening initiatives, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Creating Movement Resources, please write here.
For feedback on Publicity, Research and Documentation, please write here.
For feedback on General Support and Service to the Movement, please write here.
Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at vishnu at cis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please write to us and we can set up a telephone/Skype call.

Notes

[1]. CIS supports the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University through a fellowship and participation on the advisory board; CIS supports the open data community through support for the founders of Data Meet; CIS is supporting venue costs for some of Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation's outreach programmes; CIS has supported the last edition of the Goa Project; CIS allows various groups to use its Bangalore and Delhi offices for meetings such as Null Con Bangalore, Bitcoin Delhi, Arduino, Dojo, Crypto Party and Maker Party communities. In the past, CIS has hosted Inclusive Planet India and Has Geek at its Bangalore office.

[2]. See the discussion in this TechCrunch article. Also see this blog which inspired TechCrunch to do a feature about the growth of Indic Wikipedia projects.

[3]. Openness initiative at CIS

[4]. All the four foucs language areas during the last year's plan received significant print media coverage because of CIS-A2K's efforts. In addition, even the mainstream English print media did stories on indic Wikimedia projects, which was unprecedented.

[5].There were 6 television programs and 1 radio program on Telugu Wikipedia and 2 television programs and 1 radio interview on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/india-access-to-knowledge-draft-work-plan-july-2014-june-2015

India – the last telecom licensing frontier

Admin — 2018-01-02T15:36:47Z

Rohini Lakshané was quoted in the article.

The Pervasive Technologies project paper "Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey" [PDF] was cited in the article along with Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India.

Link to the article: https://the-ken.com/india-last-telecom-licensing-frontier/

Note: The Ken website is paywalled but this article is free to read by registering for a basic access account.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-2013-the-last-telecom-licensing-frontier

India - Europe Conference on Building a Sustainable IPR - ICT Ecosystem for Promoting Innovation

praskrishna — 2015-12-22T02:48:04Z

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune organized a one-day conference in Bangalore on November 20, 2015. Rohini Lakshané attended this event.

Intellectual property is at the core of business ventures and critical to successfully compete internationally. However, skills to commercialize technological innovations remain a crucial impediment to innovative entrepreneurs and innovators aspiring to become world leaders in global ICTE markets. A robust IPR-ICT ecosystem can help capitalize on the growth-enhancing effects of innovation vis-à-vis ICTE. In order to fulfill the aspiration of its stakeholders, the IPR-ICT ecosystem has to be global in geographic scope, spearhead shaping appropriate framework conditions for innovation and assist in charting out policy roadmaps for sustainable and inclusive growth.

With this in mind Deity and EPO is working together in developing a close cooperation to promote IPR in ICTE domain, especially with respect to sharing of best practices and procedures for filing and processing ICTE patents in India and Europe by Indian and European firms.

The one day conference on “India-Europe Conference on Building a Sustainable IPR-ICT Ecosystem for Promoting Innovation” organised by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a premier R&D organisation, aims to address the challenges in building a sustainable global IPR-ICT ecosystem, discuss IP policy issues relevant to Indian and European ICTE industries and concord on various nuances of patenting technology and activities with an ICTE perspective.

Sessions

Parallel 1

11.00 - 13.00: Challenges and Opportunities in Building a Sustainable Global IPR Ecosystem for Promotion of Innovation in ICTE Sector
14.00 - 15.30: IPR Policy Perspective for Promoting Innovation -India and Europe

Parallel 2

14.00 - 15.30: Standard Essential Patent Issues and Perspective with regard to ICTE
15.45 - 17.15: Patent Information and Analysis: A Tool for Building Business Strategies

For more information and brochure of the event, visit this website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-europe-conference-on-building-a-sustainable-ipr-ict-ecosystem-for-promoting-innovation

In Tulu, India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Goes Live

praskrishna — 2016-08-08T01:27:58Z

In a major boost to ancient Indian languages, Tulu wikipedia has finally gone live.

The article by Naina Chaturvedi was published in Huffington Post on August 7, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

According to a report in The Hindu, eight years after its launch, Tulu Wikipedia has gone live with over 1,000 articles.

The announcement was made by Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foundation, USA, at the Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade, held in Chandigarh on Friday.

"There are about 200 registered users (editors), out of which around 100 have more than 10 edits. On an average, there are about 8 to 10 active editors," Dr. U.B. Pavanaja from the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia, told The Hindu.

He further added that, "Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, an engineer, are the highest contributors."

The language is spoken by around two million native speakers, mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala, The Indian Express reported.

Pavanaja, further explained how this achievement would help create pressure on the government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates,"IANS quoted Pavanaja saying.

Wikipedia which is available in 22 Indian languages include, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, now, including Tulu making the count 23.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/huffington-post-august-7-2016-naina-chaturvedi-in-tulu-indias-23-regional-wikipedia-goes-live

In a first, Indian Singers Rights' Association distributes royalty

praskrishna — 2018-04-17T14:21:27Z

While singers say this benefits out of job artistes, the transparency in distribution remains questionable.

This info was published by the News Minute on April 14, 2018.

In a first, the Indian Singers Rights’ Association (ISRA) distributed Rs 51 lakh in royalties to singers on Friday. The beneficiaries included popular playback singers KS Chitra, P Susheela, KJ Yesudas, SP Balasubrahmanyam and Srinivas.

Speaking to The Hindu, ISRA CEO Sanjay Tandon said, “This ₹51 lakh royalty money will grow 10 fold if and when radio channels, television channels and mobile companies start paying us. Right now, only IPL teams, amusement parks and few other establishments have paid the royalty money.”

Speaking to media persons at the event, singer SP Balasubrahmanyam said, "The government has given a rule saying that royalty should reach the singers as well. This programme is organised to give a part of the shares to singers in South India. This is a good thing to be welcomed.”

In March last year, SPB and others were slapped with legal notices by renowned music director Ilaiyaraaja over performing his compositions without his explicit permission and a payment of royalty to him. While this took the singers by surprise, experts had clarified that Ilaiyaraaja was right in asking for royalty as long as he owned the copyright to the music.

Speaking to Puthiya Thalaimurai channel, singer Chitra said, "Everyone knows a singer doesn't have pension or anything. After they sing, if the song is a hit, they will get a few shows here and there. We know a lot of people who are struggling to live. This will definitely help them, especially when they are aged and cannot go to work. This royalty will really be useful. We welcome this."

Singer Srinivas added, "This is not the case where you give money to someone who already has money. This is for a singer who has disappeared after singing 4- 5 songs. He's probably struggling in a village. When the money reaches him, it is a big thing. If we meet that social responsibility, it would be a success."

However, if royalty would go to singers of all ranks remains unclear.

In a transparency review conducted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, that compares the publicly available information on the websites of music collective management organisations(CMOs), ISRA did not detail the “distribution of percentages, nor the administrative cut it seeks to take” as per the Copyright Amendment Act 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-news-minute-april-14-2018-first-indian-singers-rights-association-distributes-royalty

Improving Telugu Village Articles

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-11-26T02:27:39Z

Telugu wikipedians on 6 October 2016 held a discussion on improving the quality of Telugu articles. The event was organized by IIIT, Hyderabad, CIS-A2K and OpenGeo.

A possible collaboration between Wikipedia and free and open source enthusiasts and environmental groups was explored at the meeting. Subodh Kulkarni and Pavan Santhosh made a presentation about Wikipedia. The participants were from different groups such as SOUL (Save Our Urban Lakes), OpenGeo.org (organization that works for open source mapping) and Sweccha (organization working to expand free software movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh).

Prof. Madhav Gadgil moderated a discussion on how these organizations could collaborate for different Wikimedia projects. The discussion primarily revolved around improving ongoing Telugu village articles.

Prof. Gadgil stressed on compiling articles using reliable and verifiable sources. He also urged the participants to upload geo-tagged photos to Commons especially photos of lakes of which the authorities have denied existence. The discussion also focused on the synergy between OpenGeo and Wikipedia.

Post-lunch, Prof. Gadgil delivered a lecture on “Human Knowledge: An Evolutionary Perspective in IIT”. Prof. Gadgil explained that the next big leap in evolution of human knowledge is free knowledge in which everyone can contribute and utilize which was Wikipedia. He urged the scholars and students to contribute to Wikipedia which is the future for knowledge society.

Telugu and English wikipedians including Vinay, Lubna Sarwath, Undavalli Ravikumar, Raju and many more participated in the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/improving-telugu-village-articles

Imperial College Orientation Program, Bargarh

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-16T19:51:29Z

An Odia Wikipedia workshop was conducted at Imperial College, Bargarh on 12 February, 2017.

An Odia Wikipedia orientation workshop was conducted at Imperial College, an affiliate of Sambalpur University, on 12 February 2017 for 60 undergraduate students of the College. The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Odia Wikipedia while also giving them a broad overview of the global free knowledge movement. This workshop was conducted as part of CIS-A2K's ongoing efforts to expand the reach of Odia Wikipedia in Western Odisha in conjunction with the Odia Wikipedia community members.

The students were also introduced to the process of digitisation and how digitisation was fundamental to the preservation of language and local knowledge. The students also showed an interest in the digitisation sprint for the Dadhivamana Temple's Pothi digitisation project, an ongoing effort to digitise 250 ancient palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhivamana Temple in Bargarh.

The meta page for this event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/imperial-college-orientation-program-bargarh

Images and links matter quality

rahim — 2016-06-08T09:54:21Z

Wikipedia articles are considered of a higher quality when they have illustrations. An article without images is considered dull. Wikipedia is all about references. Any information on Wikipedia is encouraged to have verifiable citations. Hence images and external links form a criterion for quality of articles on Wikipedias. This blog post tries to analyse the current scenario of CIS-A2K's Focus language areas with respect to images and links.

If we read through the page on English Wikipedia that talks about why adding images improves the quality of Wikipedia, we realise that writing an article is a very difficult task on Wikipedia as it involves one to generate content in their own words, Wikipedia cannot be a copy paste of some content taken from somewhere. Wikipedia has its own style of writing articles, and when we look at the five basic pillars of Wikipedia and the core content policies, they structure the knowledge that we have to a form that best fits Wikipedia and is proven to be effective to larger masses. At the same time, illustrating an article further improves the comprehensibility of an article on Wikipedia.

This takes us to the next question - If only free licensed images are allowed on Wikipedia, how can we illustrate articles where no image is available under a free license, say you are writing about Doraemon or Godrej and want to add the sketch of the character or logo of the company - they are not allowed on commons. What is the way out then?

Some Wikipedias such as English Wikipedia have allowed Wikipedians to upload images locally on the wiki under fair usage policy. This allows Wikipedians to upload low resolution images or audio or video with a pre-defined small length. IT not only helps enrich the Wikipedia content, it also helps in understanding the copyright implications to larger masses editing Wikipedia.

Animation of the act of unrolling a circle's circumference, illustrating the ratio π. Author : John Reid

There are more than 31 million images/videos/audios/documents on commons, which is the central media repository for all Wikipedias. Commons has a policy to keep only free licensed images.

Why references/citations are so important?

Adding references to articles is important to make Wikipedia's content more accurate and reliable. One of the three core content policies on English Wikipedia which is adopted by most Indian languages is to have "Verifiable" content on Wikipedia. This essentially means, whatever content is added to Wikipedia has to have proper links to citations given. If its a book, an ISBN number is desired. In case of newspapers and websites, URLs with access dates are encouraged to be added. If the newspaper does not have a proper archive, Wayback machine from archive.org can be used to create a permanent accessible URL that in turn can be added to the article.

In order to prove NPOV, one can add the same issue opinionated in 3 or more newspapers or books. Here too, an external link is used to provide the verifiable reference.

So, its safe to say that all articles that have an external link in them may have been properly referenced. A list of such articles is generated and the count of such articles that do not have external links is provided below.

Language	Articles without images	Articles without external links	Deadend Pages
Kannada	6,993	10,839	97
Konkani	1,876	1,351	836
Marathi	12,678	29,064	861
Odia	1,227	3,080	11
Telugu	35,701	19,359	585

The numbers in the above table throw the areas of improvement for the focus language area Wikipedias of CIS-A2K. Especially with respect to adding references to articles where in every Wikipedia, almost as much as 50% of the articles do not have proper references.

Deadend pages are those articles on Wikipedia which do not link to any other page on Wikipedia. In recently changed convention, zero namespace pages on Wikipedia that are not redirect pages are not counted as articles if the fall under Deadend pages. A count of deadend pages is also given in the above table for reference. So, effectively total number of articles in any Wiki = total article count shown on home page + deadend pages.

If these three criterion are improved upon, quality of Wikipedia may also go up.

Of course quality of articles depend upon language, spellings, grammar and several other things. But these are broad methods of improving quality.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/images-and-links-matter-quality

ICT for Development

praskrishna — 2014-12-28T03:26:03Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was a speaker at this event organized by Christ University on December 3, 2014 in Bangalore.

Download the presentation on ICT4D.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/ict-for-development

ICOMM2012: International Communications and Electronics Fair

jdine — 2012-12-04T06:37:05Z

The seventh India International Communications and Electronics Fair (ICOMM2012) organized by CMAI Association of India was held at the NSIC Expo Grounds in New Delhi from September 14 to 15, 2012. Jadine Lannon attended the event, and shares us with some interesting and exciting new developments in ICT.

For the last seven years, the ICOMM event has been conducted by the Communication Multimedia Applications Infrastructure (CMAI) Association of India.[1] Since its first installment in 2006, ICOMM has grown to be a significant international tradeshow that showcases the latest products and technologies from a wide array of Asian mobile, tablets and consumer electronics manufacturers. Over the years, the event has also grown to include various participants from related industries, like service providers, application and software designers, and producers of equipment, components, parts and accessories.

While past ICOMM events had a strict B2B (business to business) structure, ICOMM2012 was the first year that the tradeshow was open to the public, making it India’s first consumer mobile and tablet exhibition. This B2B/C2B strategy appeared to be largely successful—the event received a high amount of traffic, especially from young people, and plans for the 8th ICOMM in 2013 involve an increase in event scale through integration with the India Telecom 2013 tradeshow.[2]

The main themes of ICOMM2012 were mobiles, tablets, and consumer electronics, though applications, accessories, and various related technologies and industries were also featured. The event hosted a large diversity of participants, from leading Indian brands like Micromax, Lava International, Karbonn and Maxx Mobile to smaller Indian and international brands such as GlobyTalky, Skymobiles, Gionee, Ivio, Belphone and Signal. A huge array of devices and innovations were featured at ICOMM2012, many of which are still prototypes. Here are some of the innovations and booths that caught my eye:

	Datawind Ltd. occupied a popular booth with the release of four new 7-inch UbiSlate tablets[3] UbiSlate 7Ci, 7C+, 7Ri and 7R+. These sophisticated Android devices function as both tablets and smartphones, support WiFi and GPRS connections, and are the only Android devices on the Indian market to feature Datawind’sUbiSurfer browser. The UbiSlate 7+ devices can now be pre-ordered for between Rs. 3,499 and Rs. 4,799. I was able to interview Mr. Jasjit Singh, the Executive Vice President of Datawind, on the UbiSlate tablets. A link to this interview will be provided in the near future. ICOMM2012 actually saw the launch of fair number of new devices onto the Indian market. One of the most prominent launches was SMSInfosys’[4] new product line of mobile, tablet, and computer devices under the brand GlobyTalky.[5] This “GlobyTalky” brand originally began as a mobile application called “GlobyTalky – Connected Life”, a multi-platform RCSe application that boasts multiple communication and sharing features. The application, brand and devices are the brainchildren of Imtiaz Ahmed, the founder of SMSInfosys.

Datawind Ltd. occupied a popular booth with the release of four new 7-inch UbiSlate tablets[3] UbiSlate 7Ci, 7C+, 7Ri and 7R+. These sophisticated Android devices function as both tablets and smartphones, support WiFi and GPRS connections, and are the only Android devices on the Indian market to feature Datawind’sUbiSurfer browser. The UbiSlate 7+ devices can now be pre-ordered for between Rs. 3,499 and Rs. 4,799.

I was able to interview Mr. Jasjit Singh, the Executive Vice President of Datawind, on the UbiSlate tablets. A link to this interview will be provided in the near future.

ICOMM2012 actually saw the launch of fair number of new devices onto the Indian market. One of the most prominent launches was SMSInfosys’[4] new product line of mobile, tablet, and computer devices under the brand GlobyTalky.[5] This “GlobyTalky” brand originally began as a mobile application called “GlobyTalky – Connected Life”, a multi-platform RCSe application that boasts multiple communication and sharing features. The application, brand and devices are the brainchildren of Imtiaz Ahmed, the founder of SMSInfosys.

The GlobyTalky launch was distinguished by the wide array of devices that were released. The brand features a good selection of feature phones, smartphones and tablets, as well as two laptops (I was unable to get a picture of the laptops). Each of the GlobyTalky mobile and tablet devices feature the GlobyTalky – Connected Life application. Two phones are of particular interest in the photo below—the thin light blue phone with the long blue strap and the dark blue candy bar-style phone on the right.


The light blue phone is about the size of a credit card and 5.6 mm thick. It was advertised as a “back-up” phone that one could keep in their wallet and use when their main phone failed, and was priced at Rs. 1000-1200. The dark blue phone, called the G-Aqua, is completely waterproof—it can function perfectly while submerged in water, and can survive submersion of up to 1.5 meters without taking any damage. It can even receive calls, play music, and take pictures while underwater. It can be seen again in white in the picture below.


According to Mr. Ahmed, 60 per cent of the mobile devices that are brought into services centers in India have water damage, which is what motivated him to create a completely waterproof phone for the Indian market. He estimates that it will be priced between Rs. 4,200 and Rs. 4,500.

GlobyTalky was not the only participant that showcased a waterproof phone, though. IVIO, a mobile brand owned by the Indonesian company PT. Intersys, was also giving demonstrations on their waterproof smartphone, the DG68. With its sleek design, 4.1-inch high-resolution screen, 3G and Wifi capabilities, capacitate touch and Android 4.0 OS, the DG68 is a much more sophisticated phone than the G-Aqua. However, IVIO has yet to release any of its devices onto the Indian market, and the DG68 is still a prototype.

The ShenZhen BLEPHONE Technology Co., Ltd., the company that owns the popular mobile brands Lesun and Lephone (the latter of which is available on the Indian market), also had a popular booth. Aside from their large presentation of feature phones and smartphones, BLEPHONE also showcased some interesting innovations and accessories. In particular, I was quite impressed by their Lephone mobile USB charging devices, called the CooMax, and their Lesun digital recorder-cum-mobile phone, the Gift I.

ICOMM2012 was a hugely successful exhibition. Aside from showcasing many of the most interesting and significant innovations and actors in the Asian ICT sectors, and possibly the wider world, the event was able to attract more than 21,500 delegates over a two-day period.[6] Further, according to NK Goyal, the president of the CMAI Association of India, the fair was able to generate business leads worth USD 154 million.[7] I highly encourage anyone interested in the exciting and ever-changing world of ICT to attend ICOMM2013, as it is sure to continue to grow and attract more and more exciting and fascinating technologies and devices.

Given below is a gallery of the photos taken at the event and of various other booths and devices.

[1]. The CMAI Association of India is a prominent trade association that works to promote growth in the Indian IT and telecom sector domestically and internationally through activities such as investing in industry services and promotion, education, training and market research. Through consultation, events, advocacy, research and promotion, the CMAI now boasts a substantial amount of members and international partners, as well as multiple international offices. More information can be found on the CMAI Association of India at http://www.cmai.asia/association.php
[2]. See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.
[3]. The UbiSlate tablet is the commercial version of Datawind Ltd.’s Aakask tablet, a high-functioning low-cost tablet device that was developed in collaboration with the Indian government as part of the country’s endeavor to supply Indian college and university students with a low-cost computer device. This project was part of the government’s aim to provide an e-learning service to 25,000 colleges and 500 universities across India (this figure was retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10740817). More data on this device can be found at: http://www.akashtablet.com/
[4]. SMSInfosys is a mobile phone testing company with offices in India, Hong Kong and China. They perform quality assurance/quality control inspection, certification verification and IMEI services to mobile phone producers. More information about the company can be found here: http://smsinfosys.com/
[5]. More information on this brand and product line can be found here: http://globytalky.com/
[6].See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.
[7]. See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/icomm-2012-report