Centre for Internet and Society

Institute for Internet & Society 2014, Pune

samantha — 2014-04-07T11:31:23Z

Last month, activists, journalists, researchers, and members of civil society came together at the 2014 Institute for Internet & Society in Pune, which was hosted by CIS and funded by the Ford Foundation. The Institute was a week long, in which participants heard from speakers from various backgrounds on issues arising out of the intersection of internet and society, such as intellectual property, freedom of expression, and accessibility, to name a few. Below is an official reporting summarizing sessions that took place.

Day One

February 11, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 9.40 a.m.	Introduction: Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Centre for Internet and Society
10.00 a.m. – 10.15 a.m.	Introduction of Participants
10.15 a.m. – 12.00 p.m.	Internet Governance and Privacy: Sunil Abraham
12.00 p.m. – 12.30 p.m.	Tea-break
12.30 p.m. – 1.00 p.m.	Keynote: Bishakha Datta, Filmmaker and Activist, and Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
1.00 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Participant Presentations
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea Break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Histories, Bodies and Debates around the Internet: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, CIS

This year’s Internet Institute, hosted by the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), kicked off in Pune to put a start to a week of learnings and discussions surrounding internet usage and its implications on individuals of society. Twenty two attendees from all over India attended this year, from backgrounds of activism, journalism, research and advocacy work.

Attendees were welcomed by Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Program Officer for Media Rights & Access at the Ford Foundation, the event’s sponsor, who started off the day by introducing the Foundation’s initiatives in pursuit of bridging the digital divide by addressing issues of internet connectivity.

Internet Governance & Privacy, Sunil Abraham
The Institute’s first session was led by Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of CIS, and engaged with issues of internet governance and privacy with reference to four stories: 1) a dispute between tweeters from the US and those in South Africa over the use of hashtag #thingsdarkiesays, which is said not to be as racially derogatory as it is in the US; 2) Facebook’s contested policies on photos featuring users breastfeeding, 3) a lawsuit between Tata and Greenpeace over the organization’s use of Tata’s logo in a video game created for public criticism of their environmentally-degrading practices, and lastly, 4) the case of Savita Bhabhi, an Indian pornographic cartoon character which had been banned by India’s High Court and which had served as a landmark case in expanding the statutory laws for what is considered to be pornographic.

Each of these stories has one major thing in common: due to their nature of taking place over the internet, they are not confined to one geographic location and in turn, are addressed at the international level. The way by which an issue as such is to be addressed cuts across State policies and internet intermediary bodies to create quite a messy case in trying to determine who is at fault. Such complexity illustrates how challenging internet governance can be within today’s society that is no longer restricted to national or geographic boundaries.

Sunil also goes on in explaining the relationship between privacy, transparency, and power, summing it up in a simple formula; privacy protection should have a reverse relationship to power—the more the power, the less the privacy one should be entitled to. On the contrary, a direct correlation goes for power and transparency—the more the power, the more transparent a body should be. Instead of thinking about these concepts as a dichotomy, Sunil suggests to see them as absolute rights in themselves—instrumental in policies and necessary to address power imbalances.

The Web We Want, Bishakha Datta
The Institute’s kickoff was also joined by Indian filmmaker and activist, Bishakha Datta, who had delivered the keynote address. Bishakha bridged together notions of freedom of speech, surveillance, and accessibility, while introducing campaigns that work to create an open and universally accessible web, such as the Web We Want and Sexuality and Disability. Bishakha stresses how the internet as a space has altered how we experience societal constructs, which can be easily exhibited in how individuals experience Facebook in the occurrence of a death, for example. Bishakha initiated discussion among participants by posing questions such as, “what is our expectation of privacy in this brave new world?” and “what is the society we want?” to encompass the need to think of privacy in a new way with the coming of the endless possibilities the internet brings with it.

Histories, Bodies and Debates around the Internet, Nishant Shah
CIS Research Director, Nishant Shah, led a session examining internet as a technology more broadly, and our understandings of it in relation to the human body. Nishant proposes the idea that history is a form of technology, as well as time, itself, for which our understanding only comes into being with the aid of technologies of measurement. Although we are inclined to separate technology from the self, Nishant challenges this notion while suggesting that technology is very integral to being human, and defines a “cyborg” as someone who is very intimate with technology. In this way, we are all cyborgs. While making reference to several literary pieces, including Haraway’s Cyborg: Human, Animus, Technology; Kevin Warwick’s Living Cyborg; and Watt’s small world theory, Nishant challenges participants’ previous notions of how one is to understand technology in relation to oneself, as well as the networks we find ourselves implicated within.

Also brought forth by Nishant, was the fact that the internet as a technology has become integral to our identities, making us accessible (rather than us solely making the technology accessible) through online forms of documentation. This digital phenomenon in which we tend to document what we know and experience as a means of legitimizing it can be summed in the modern version of an old fable: “If a tree falls in a lonely forest, and nobody tweets it, has it fallen?”

Nishant refers to several case studies in which the use of online technologies has created a sense of an extension of the self and one’s personal space; which can then be subject to violation as one can be in the physical form, and to the same emotional and psychological effect—as illustrated within the 1993 occurrence referred to as “A Rape in Cyberspace.”

Attendee Participation
Participants remained engaged and enthusiastic for the duration of the day, bringing forth their personal expertise and experiences. Several participants presented their own research initiatives, which looked at issues women face as journalists and as portrayed by the media; amateur pornography without the consent of the woman; study findings on the understandings of symptoms of internet addiction; as well as studies looking at how students engage with college confession pages on Facebook.

Day Two

February 12, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Wireless Technology: Ravikiran Annaswamy, CEO and Co-founder at Teritree Technologies
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Wired Technology: Ravikiran Annaswamy
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Network, Threats and Securing Yourself: Kingsley John, Independent Consultant
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea Break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Practical Lab: Kingsley John
4.45 p.m. – 5.00 p.m.	Wrap-up: Sunil Abraham

Day Two of the Institute entailed a more technical orientation to “internet & society” across sessions. Participants listened to speakers introduce concepts related to wired and wireless internet connectivity devices and their networks, along with the network of internet users and how one may secure him or herself while “online.”

Wireless & Wired Technology, Ravikiran Annaswamy
Senior industry practitioner, Ravikiran Annaswamy had aimed to enable the Institute’s participants to “understand the depth and omnipresent of telecom networks” that we find ourselves implicated within. Ravikiran went through the basics of these networks—including fixed line-, mobile-, IP-, and Next Generation IP-networks—as well as the technical structuring of wired and wireless broadband. Many participants found this session to be particularly enriching as their projects aimed to provide increased access to internet connectivity to marginalized areas in India, and had been without the know-how to go about it.

Network, Threats and Securing Yourself, Kinglsey John
An instructional session on how to protect oneself was given by Kingsley John, beginning with a lesson on IP Addresses—what they are and the different generations of such, and how IP addresses fit into a broader internet network. Following, Kingsley demonstrated and explained email encryption through the use of software, Kleopatra, and how it may be used to generate keys to encrypt emails through Thunderbird mail client.

Evening Discussion

A handful of participants voluntarily partook in an evening discussion, looking at the role of big players in the global internet network, such as Google and Facebook, how they collect and utilize users’ data, and what sorts of measures can be taken to minimize the collecting of such. Due to the widely varying backgrounds of interest among participants, those coming from this technical orientation towards the internet were able to inform their peers on relevant information and types of software that may be found useful related to minimizing one’s online presence.

Day Three

February 13, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Free Software: Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Chairperson, Free Software Foundation
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Open Data: Nisha Thompson, Independent Consultant
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Freedom of Expression: Bhairav Acharya, Advocate and Adviser, Centre for Internet and Society
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Copyright: Nehaa Chaudhari, Program Officer, Centre for Internet and Society

The third day of the Internet Institute incorporated themes presented by speakers ranging from free software, to freedom of expression, to copyright.

Free Software, Prof. G. Nagarjuna
Chairman on the Board of Directors for the Free Software Foundation of India, Professor G. Nagarjuna shared with the Institute’s participants his personal expertise on software freedom. Nagarjuna mapped for us the network of concepts related to software freedom, beginning with the origins of the copyleft movement, and also touching upon the art of hacking, the open source movement, and what role software freedom plays in an interconnected world.

Nagarjuna looks at the free software movement as a political movement in the digital space highlighting the user’s freedoms associated to the use, distribution, and modification of software for the greater good for all. This is said to distinguish this movement from that of Open Source—a technical and more practical development-oriented movement. The free software movement is not set out to compromise the fundamental issues for the sake of being practical and in that sense, ubiquitous. Instead, its objective is “not to make everybody use the software, but to have them understand why they are using the software,” so that they may become “authentic citizens that can also resonate why they’re doing what they’re doing. We want them to understand the ethical and political aspects of doing so,” Nagarjuna says.

Open Data, Nisha Thompson
Participants learned from Nisha Thompson on Open Data; what it is, its benefits, and how it is involved in central government initiatives and policy, as well as civil society groups—generally for uses such as serving as evidence for decision making and accountability. Nisha explored challenges concerning the use of open data, such as those pertaining to privacy, legitimacy, copyright, and interoperability. The group looked at the India Water Portal as a case study, which makes accessible more than 300 water-related datasets already available in the public space for use from anything from sanitation and agriculture to climate change.

Freedom of Expression, Bhairav Acharya
Bhairav Acharya, a constitutional lawyer, traced the development of the freedom of speech and expression in India. Beginning with a conceptual understanding of censorship and the practice of censorship by the state, society, and the individual herself, Bhairav examines the limits traditionally placed by a nation-state on the right to free speech.

In India, modern free speech and censorship law was first formulated by the colonial British government, which broadly imported the common law to India. However, the colonial state also yielded to the religious and communitarian sensitivities of its subjects, resulting in a continuing close link between communalism and free speech in India today. After Independence, the post-colonial Indian state carried forward Raj censorship, but tweaked it to serve to a nation-building and developmental agenda. Nation-building and nationalism are centrifugal forces that attempt to construct a homogenous 'mainstream'; voices from the margins of this mainstream (the geographical, ethnic, and religious peripheries) and of the marginalised within the mainstream (the poor and disadvantaged), are censored.

Within this narrative, Bhairav located and explained the evolution of the law relating to press censorship, defamation, obscenity, and contempt of court. Free speech law applies equally online. Broadly, censorship on the internet must survive the same constitutional scrutiny that is applied to offline censorship; but, as technology develops, the law must innovate.

Copyright, Nehaa Chaudhari
CIS Programme Officer, Nehaa Chaudhari examined the concept of Copyright as an intellectual property right in discussing its fundamentals, purpose and origins, and Copyright’s intersection with the internet. Nehaa also explained the different exceptions to Copyright, along with its alternatives, such as opposing intellectual property protection regimes, including the Creative Commons and Copyleft. Within this session, Nehaa also introduced several cases in which Copyright came into play with the use of the internet, including Hunter Moore’s “Is Anyone Up?” website, which had showcased pornographic pictures obtained by submission bringing rise to the phenomenon of “revenge porn.” Instances as such blur the lines of what is commonly referred to as intellectual property, and what specific requirements enables one to own the rights to such.

Day Four

February 14, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	E-Accessibility and Inclusion: Prashant Naik, Union Bank
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Patents: Nehaa Chaudhari
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.	Fieldwork Assignment

Day Four of the Internet Institute introduced concepts of eAccessibilty and Inclusion on the internet for persons with disabilities, along with patents as an intellectual property right. Participants were also assigned a fieldwork exercise as a hands-on activity in which they were to employ what they’ve learned to initiate conversation with individuals in public spaces and collect primary data while doing so.

eAccessibility and Inclusion, Prashant Naik

Prashant Naik started off the day with his session on E-Accessibility and Inclusion. Prashant illustrated the importance of accessibility and what is meant by the term. Participants learned of assistive technologies for different disability types and how to create more accessible word and PDF documents, as well as web pages for users. Prashant demonstrated to participants what it is like to use a computer as a visually impaired individual, which provided for an enriching experience.

Patents, Nehaa Chaudhari
Nehaa Chaudhari led a second session at the Internet Institute on intellectual property rights—this one looking at patents particularly and their role within statutory law. Nehaa traced the historical origins of patents before examining the fundamentals of them, and addresses the questions, “Why have patents? And is the present system working for everyone?” Nehaa also introduced notions of the Commons along with the Anticommons, and perspectives within the debate around software patents, as well as different means by which the law can address the exploitation of patents or “patent thickets”—such as through patent pools or compulsory licensing.

Fieldwork Assignment, Groupwork
Participants were split into groups and required to carry out a mini fieldwork assignment in approaching individuals in varying public spaces in Pune in attempts to collect primary data. Questions asked to individuals were to be devised by the group, so long as they pertained to themes examined within the Internet Institute. Areas visited by groups included the Pune Central Mall, MG Road, and FC Road.

Day Five

February 15, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	E-Governance: Manu Srivastav, Vice President, eGovernments Foundation
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Market Concerns: Payal Malik, Economic Adviser, Competition Commission of India
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Digital Natives: Nishant Shah
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Fieldwork Presentations

Day Five of the Internet Institute brought with it sessions related to themes of e-governance, market concerns of telecommunications, and so called “Digital Natives.”

eGovernance, Manu Srivastava
Vice President of the eGovernments Foundation, Manu Srivastava led a session on eGovernance—the utilization of the internet as a means of delivering government services communicating with citizens, businesses, and members of government. Manu examined the complexities of the eGovernance and barriers to implementation of eGovernance initiatives. Within discussion, participants examined the nuanced relationship between the government and citizens with the incorporation of other governing bodies in an eGovernance system, as well as new spaces for corruption to take place.

Market Concerns, Payal Malik
Payal Malik, Advisor of the Economics Division of the Competition Commission of India shared her knowledge on market concerns of the telecommunications industry, and exclaimed the importance of competition issues in such an industry as a tool to create greater good for a greater number of people. She demonstrated this importance by stating that affordability as a product of increased access can only be possible once there is enough investment, which generally only happens in a competitive market. In this way, we must set the conditions to make competition possible, as a tool to achieve certain objectives. Payal also demonstrated the economic benefits of telecommunications by stating that for every 10% increase in broadband penetration, increase in GDP of 1.3%. She also examined the broadband ecosystem in India and touched upon future possibilities of increased broadband penetration, such as for formers and the education sector.

Digital Natives, Nishant Shah
Nishant Shah shed some light on one of the areas that the Centre for Internet & Society looks at within their research scope, this being the “Digital Native.” As referred to by Nishant, the Digital Native is not to categorize a specific type of internet user, but can be said for simply any person who is performing a digital action, while doing away with this false dichotomy of age, location, and geography.

Nishant examines varying case studies in which “the digital is empowering natives to not merely be benefactors of change, but agents of change,” from the Blank Noise Project’s “I NEVER Ask for it…” campaign in efforts to rethink sexual violence, to Matt Harding’s foolish dancing with groups of individuals from all over the world.

As occurrences in the digital realm, however, these often political expressions may be rewritten by the network when picked up as a growing phenomenon, in order to make it accessible to online consumers by the masses. In doing so, the expression is removed from its political context and is presented in the form of nothing more than a fad. For this reason, Nishant stresses the need to become aware of the potential of the internet in becoming an “echo-chamber”—in which forms of expression are amplified and mimicked, resulting in a restructuring of the dynamics surrounding the subject—whether it be videos of boys lipsyncing to Backstreet Boys in their dorm room going viral, or a strong and malicious movement to punish the Chinese girl who had taken a video of her heinously and wickedly killing a kitten after locating her using the Human Flesh Search Engine.

Fieldwork Presentations, Groupwork

To end off the day, participant groups presented findings collated from the prior evening’s fieldwork exercise, in which they were to ask strangers in various public places of Pune questions pertaining to themes looked at from within this year’s Institute. Participants were divided into four groups and visited Pune’s FC Road, Mahatma Gandhi Road, and Central Mall.

Groups found that the majority of those interviews primarily accessed the phone via the mobile. There was also a common weariness of using the internet and concern for one’s privacy while doing so, especially with uploading photos to Facebook and online financial transactions. People were also generally concerned about using cyber cafes for fear of one’s accounts being hacked. Generally people suspected that so long as conversations are “private” (i.e. in one’s Facebook inbox), so too are they secure. Just as well, those interviewed shared a sense of security with the use of a password.

Day Six

February 16, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Wikipedia: Dr. Abhijeet Safai
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Open Access: Muthu Madhan (TBC)
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Case Studies Groupwork
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Case Studies Presentations

As the Institute came closer to its end, participants got the opportunity to hear from speakers on topics pertaining the Wikipedia editing in addition to Open Access to scholarly literature. Participants also worked together in groups to examine specific case studies referenced in previous sessions, and then presented their conclusions.

Wikipedia, Dr. Abhijeet Safai
The Institute was joined by Medical Officer of Clinical Research at Pune’s Symbiosis Centre of Health Care, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, who led a session on Wikipedia. Having edited over 3700 Wikipedia articles, Dr. Abhijeet was able to bring forth his expertise and familiarity in editing Wikipedia to participants so that they would be able to do the same. Introduced within this session were Wikipedia’s different fundamental pillars and codes of conducts to be complied with by all contributors, along with different features and components of Wikipedia articles that one should be aware of when contributing, such as how to cite sources and discuss the contents of an article with other contributors.

Open Access, Muthu Madhan
Muthu Madhan joined the Internet Institute while speaking on Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature. Within his session, Muthu examined the historical context within which the scholarly journal had arisen and how the idea of Open Access began within this space. The presence of Open Access in India and other developing nations was also examined in this session, and the concept of Open Data, introduced.

Case Studies, Groupworks

Participants were split up into groups and assigned particular case studies looked at briefly in previous sessions. Case studies included #thingsdarkiessay, a once trending Twitter hashtag in South Africa which had offended many Americans for its use of “darkie” as a derogatory term; the literary novel, The Hindus, which offers an alternative narrative of Hindu history had been banned in India for obscenity; a case in which several users’ avatars had been controlled by another in a virtual community and forced to perform sexual acts, referred to as A Rape Happened in Cyber Space; and lastly, a pornographic submission website, Is Anyone Up?, for which content was largely derived from “revenge porn.” Each group then presented on the various perspectives surrounding the issue at hand.

The Cyborg, Nishant Shah
Nishant Shah led an off-agenda session in the evening looking more closely at the notion of the human cyborg. Nishant deconstructs humanity’s relationship to technology, in suggesting that we “think of the human as produced with the technologies… not who produces technology.” Nishant explores the Digital Native as an attained identity for those who, because of technology, restructure and reinvent his or her environment—offline as well as online. Among other ideas shared, Nishant refers to works by Haraway on the human cyborg in illustrating our dependency on technology and our need to care for these technologies we depend on.

Day Seven

February 17, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Internet Activism: Laura Stein, Associate Professor, University of Texas and Fulbright Fellow
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Domestic and International Bodies: Chinmayi Arun, Research Director
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Participant Presentations
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Hot Question Challenge

The last day of the week-long Internet Institute examined concepts of Internet Activism and Domestic and International Bodies. Some participants led presentations on topics of personal familiarity, before a final wrap-up exercise, calling upon individuals to share any new formulations resulting from the Institute.

Internet Activism, Laura Stein

Associate Professor from the University of Texas, Laura Stein, spoke on activism on the internet. Laura examined some grassroots organizations and movements taking place on the online and the benefits that the internet brings in facilitating their impact, such as its associated low costs, accessibility and possibility for anonymity. Despite the positive effects catalyzed by the internet, Laura stresses that the “laying field is still unequal, and movements are not simply transformed by technology.” Some of the websites exemplifying online activism that were examined within this session includes the It Gets Better Project, which aims to give hope to LGBT youth facing harassment, and the national election watch by the Association for Democratic Reforms. Additionally, Laura spoke on public communication policy, comparing that of the US and India, and how this area of policy may influence media content and practice.

Domestic and International Bodies, Chinmayi Arun
As the Internet Institute’s final speaker, Research Director for Communication Governance at National Law University , Chinmayi Arun, explores the network of factors that affect one’s behavior on the internet—these including: social norms, the law, the markets, and architecture. In referring to Lawrence Lessig’s pathetic dot theory, Chinmayi illustrates how individual’s—the pathetic dots in question—are functions of the interactions of these factors, and in this sense, regulated, and stresses the essential need to understand the system, in order to effectively change the dynamics within it. It is worth noting that not all pathetic dots are equal, and Google’s dot, for example, will be drastically bigger than a single user’s, having more leveraging power within the network of internet bodies. Also demonstrated, is the fact that we must acknowledge the need for regulation by the law to some extent, otherwise, the internet would be a black box where anything goes, putting one’s security at risk of violation.

Hot Question Challenge
The very last exercise of the Institute entailed participants asking each other questions on demand, relating back to different themes looked at within the last week. Participants had the chance, here, to bridge together concepts across sessions, as well as formulate their own opinions, while posing questions to others that they, themselves, were still curious about.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/institute-for-internet-society-2014-pune

Indic Wikisource Speak: Dr. Hrishikes Sen

jayanta — 2019-04-26T06:42:48Z

There are plenty of people engaged in digitising Bengali books. Plenty of pirated digitised books are available online. We need to tap into that catchment area. I think, if we can prepare high-grade pdf versions of our completed works and spread those to various online non-wiki reader communities, we are likely to get good contributors. -- User:Hrishikes from English and Bengali Wikisource community, share his journey.

CIS : Tell us about yourself, When did you join Wikimedia movement? And What are the projects you are involved in?

Hrishikes: Joined in March, 2007. In Wikisource since 2012.

CIS : What are the methods or workflow you follow to contribute to your language Wikisource?

Hrishikes: Method: I work slowly; try to give meticulous attention. Don't skip pages usually. Work page-by-page upto the last, even if a page is problematic. Come back to previously worked pages time and again, and correct any mistake.

CIS : How is the awareness about Wikisource in your language Wikimedia community?

Hrishikes: Awareness is present in the community, but there is disinclination to work in Wikisource, because of templates and other formatting issues.

CIS : We see there’s a growth in Indic Wikisource movement (showing Amir’s stats), what kind of help does the community need to grow?

Hrishikes: There are plenty of people engaged in digitising Bengali books. Plenty of pirated digitised books are available online. We need to tap into that catchment area. I think, if we can prepare high-grade pdf versions of our completed works and spread those to various online non-wiki reader communities, we are likely to get good contributors.

CIS : What are the challenges do you face while contributing to the project? Or social challenges while reaching out to authors or publishers.

Hrishikes: I like this project. Main issue is getting the time: extracting time from real life commitments. I have not been active in author/publisher liaison.

CIS : How would you describe the future of Wikisource? What are your personal goals for it?

Hrishikes:The main problem is: everybody wants to download books and read them offline. Hardly anyone wants to read online. That attitude is going to stay. So we need to concentrate on giving this to the customers. Books downloaded from our site (transcribed books, not scans) should be of very high quality. If we can achieve this, the future may be good.

CIS : Please share one remarkable work which is available at your domain and you had contributed.

Hrishikes: There are many more ,

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/Indic%20Wikisource%20Speak%20Dr%20Hrishikes%20Sen

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2013-04-22T13:37:08Z

In this blog post, we bring you a visualisation of the page views statistics and the project specific pages that we created last month. The page views indicate the number of unique visits the Wikipedia project concerned has received in one month.

Unlike the basic parameters that we discussed last month, we received the Page Views data only from January 2008 onwards. The project-specific pages allow the user to see all the different variables related to a Indic language Wikipedia project in one page, thus giving a general overview of the activities in that project and their inter-relationships. Instead of comparing multiple projectsn, as in the calendar charts and motion chart discussed in the last post, the project-specific pages focus on understanding one Wikipedia project in detail.

Page Views

The data came in a structure that is useful for human-readability of the data but not so much for visualisation. The first column contained the date value (01/01/2008, 01/02/2008, and so on), followed by a column for each Indic Wikipedia project (Assamese, Bhojpuri, and so on) and one for the total Page Views across projects for the month concerned. The original data file can be accessed here. We re-formatted this data to the following column structure: the first column gives the date value, the second column gives the language of the Wikipedia project, and the third column gives the Page Views value. Further, the Page Views file contained data for 2013 that are not available for any other variables (like Total Articles, Total Editors etc.). So we decided to remove the 2013 values from the Page Views file for easier comparison with other variables. The data file that we finally used for the visualisation can be accessed here.

Calendar (Heatmap) Chart

The first chart that we created was the calendar (heatmap) chart discussed in detail in the last post. For the Page View variable we only had data form 2008. We plotted it as calendar-like heatmap to allow quick cross-project comparisons of trends in readership. The chart can be accessed here.

Project Pages

So far, we have been visualising the data from an overall perspective, constantly asking the question: "How does project A compare to project B?". The Project pages sheds light from a different angle: "How did project A get to this point?". Each of the projects are visualised in isolation around the basic parameters to understand how they have changed/evolved over the years. We wanted to keep this as simple as possible and decided to use straight forward line charts. This also ensures that the patterns are clearly evident. On the right corner of the navigation bar is the project selector. You can search or pick a project and the page will load the charts specific to that project. Each project has a different page, this makes it easier for you to share the project that you are interested in. The chart employs filtering and dynamic scales. Dynamic scales are important because not all the projects have the same rate of growth.

Readership Dashboard

We were not satisfied with creating only the calendar heatmap chart for Page Views. Being a very important variable for anybody trying to understand activities on Indic Wikipedia projects, we wanted to create a more detailed visualisation for the variable. While the project-specific pages do allow for comparing Page Views for a certain Indic Wikipedia with its other variables (such as Total Articles), we wanted to make that comparison even easier. Hence we decided to make a chart combining a line graph showing the movement of Page View for a project across the years and bar graphs showing a separate variable for the same project. Thus we created the Readership Dashboard. The dashboard has two controls: project selector and the parameter selector buttons. Selecting a project from the dropdown will update the line chart showing the movement of page views. Hover over the line graph points to see the date of observation and the corresponding value. The bars behind the line represent the selected parameters. Click on the parameter buttons to load different parameters as the background bar graph. Hover over the bars to see the date and the value. The bar graph is carefully aligned to the line chart such that the visualisation reflects the relation in movement of both. However, please note that the vertical scale of the line graph and the bar graphs are not the same.

Sajjad Anwar is a programmer based in Bangalore. Sumandro Chattapadhyay is a researcher based in Delhi. They often work together.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-page-views-and-project-pages

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2013-03-26T10:04:43Z

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. In doing so, the authors look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas.

Introduction

Understanding how the Indic or the Indian language Wikipedia projects are growing is something that we have been interested in for quite sometime. We were delighted to come across this opportunity from the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Wikimedia Foundation. We divided our analyses into three focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits. The existing infographics and data visualisations that we found about Indic Wikipedias mostly engaged on the first area, and also emphasised on yearly aggregates. We thought a more granular, that is monthly, understanding and a focus on the geographic and thematic spread of the edits would be very helpful to further appreciate the activities.

We began by collecting data about the following basic parameters:

Number of Editors
Number of Articles
Page Views
Number of Active Editors
Number of New Articles
Number of New Editors
Edit Size

Acquiring the data

We explored the MediaWiki API, ToolServer and the Wikimedia Statistics Portal. These are several ways of obtaining data about Wikipedia in general. Depending on the use case, such as the quantity of data required or the need for customised/selective data scraping, any one or more of these methods of data gathering can be chosen. The API had limitations in terms of how much data you can access, and it is meant to be used to access actual Wikipedia entries. We, however, were looking for metadata about the entries/articles (such as when it was first created, when and how many times it was edited, etc.) and not the actual entries/articles, that is the actual contents of Indic Wikipedias. ToolServer is an excellent way of running custom scripts. Although, this takes for granted that user (of ToolServer) has substantial command over the back-end infrastructures and processes that Wikipedia runs on. We wrote a few scrapers to extract metadata about Indic Wikipedia projects from the ToolServer but not exactly being experts in the Wikipedia back-end systems, we found scraping from ToolServer rather time-and effort-intensive. The statistics portal is a well organised and an accessible place for collecting data for analyses. However, we came across several missing parameters and projects, that is the statistic portal did not have all the parameters and Wikipedia projects we were interested in. In our search for Indic Wikipedia datasets so far, we realised that the Wikimedia Analytics Team (WAT) puts a lot of effort in writing scripts and collecting various data at different levels. Wikimedia developer Yuvi Panda and the Access to Knowledge team at CIS, aware of our difficulty in obtaining the data, also pointed us towards the WAT. While we were already scraping data on some of the parameters, we approached the WAT whose prompt and very supportive response much accelerated our work process. The fantastic Wikimedia developers, especially Evan Rosen (a big ‘thank you’ for him) shared the needed data, which we cleaned up and archived at the Github repository for the project.

We obtained data for the period from January 2001 to December 2012. It appears that the Indic Wikipedia projects began their activities around 2005. A big part of cleaning the data involved identifying when each of the projects started and dropping data. There are 20 Indic Wikipedia projects with 4,98,964 articles, 5,689 editors and over 3,35,49,102 readers.

Deciding upon chart types

We spent quite some time discussing different methods of visualising the data. The major difficulty is that there are too many entities to be plotted. As each language must be plotted as a separate entity — point, line, circle, etc. — the chart has a tendency to become cluttered and illegible. Even if we take only one variable — say New Editors — there will still be 20 points or lines to be plotted. Hence, using any of the conventional charts becomes difficult. For example, if we chose a line chart with New Editors on the Y-axis and months on the X-axis, there will be 20 lines each of a different colour, representing different languages. Also, the five-six year monthly timeline translates into 60-72 temporal data points.

We have adopted two strategies, and related chart types, to address this difficulty.

Firstly, we used a monthly calendar-like heatmap chart that limits the temporal spread of data to one year for each section of the chart and uses a positionally uniform set of columns for each language so as to make reading the chart easier. Limiting each chart section to 12 months allow the user to focus on more granular movements of the variable concerned, say the number of New Editors per month. By representing each languages on an unique column, and not by an upwards-and-downwards moving line as in a line chart, makes it easier for the user to follow movements in each language (where movement is shown by the intensity of colour, as characteristic of heatmaps) without the need to have a separate coloured entity — point, line, circle — for each language.

Secondly, we used a motion chart, as made famous by Dr. Hans Rosling, that removes the temporal axis from X- and Y-axes of the chart and uses animated transition to represent temporal change. Motion chart has the unique ability to handle as many as five variables in an organised manner, using the following visual elements: X-axis, Y-axis, Z-axis (animated temporal transitions), size of bubbles, and colour of bubbles. It is, however, recommended that represented variables be limited to a maximum of four for easier legibility. In our case, we have used the X- and Y-axes to plot various related variables (which can be selected by the user) such as New Editors and New Articles, the Z-axis to represent time, and the colour of the bubbles to represent a third optional variable (also can be selected by the user). Since different Indian language Wikipedia projects often take a wide range of values for most variables, using the size of the bubble to represent any of those variables is avoidable. Further, the motion chart gives the user a lot of controls to explore the various projects and variables according to their interest and especially to compare particular projects and variables to each other.

Discussing the chart types with the Access to Knowledge team, we decided to use simpler line charts — emphasising upon single Indic Wikipedia projects — on the language-specific pages that we will be creating next.

Calendar charts


Calendar heatmap chart of New Editors across Indic Wikipedia projects, 2008-2011. Source: http://bit.ly/XDb3fa

We visualised three parameters using the calendar heatmap strategy: (1) New Articles, (2) New Editors, (3) Active Editors.

The New Articles Calendar shows new articles posted on every Indic Wikipedias for every month since 2004. It was interesting to note the few number of articles in 2012 for all the languages. The first language to have the most number of new articles is Bengali. Hindi picks up around same time with fewer number of articles. Except Urdu and Nepali, every other language dropped in the number of new articles. However, we should remember that a lower number of new articles does not necessarily indicate at low overall activity in the project concerned.

Like the new articles, we wanted to explore the patterns in the number of new editors across all of the Indic Wikipedia projects. As you run through the new editors calendar chart, it is evident that there is consistent growth in the editor base for few projects like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. If one takes a step back and compares this with the number of new articles chart, something is not very clear -- in some of the projects, there is a growth in the number of editors but not many new articles are posted. We are very keen to understand why this has happened.

If we look at the active editors calendar, Tamil started with 2 active editors in January 2004 and with few ups and downs grew to about 115 active editors in December 2012. Malayalam started slow in late 2004 with 2 editors and grew to 155 active editors in December 2012. We are sure the viewers should be able to find out more patterns by studying the charts closely and comparatively.

Motion chart

We developed a motion chart comparing five variables: (1) Active Editors (> 5 edits per month), (2) New Editors, (3) Total Editors, (4) New Articles, and (5) Total Articles. When the visualisation is opened, Total Editors is plotted on the X-axis, Total Articles is plotted on the Y-axis, the colour of the bubbles indicate the Active Editors (Blue is low and Red is high) and the sizes of the bubbles are kept the same for easier comparison.

The user can click on the drop down menus at the X- and Y-axes, and next to the size and colour variables, and make them represent different variables.

We chose to configure the X- and Y-axes to show the data in logarithmic scales and not in linear scales. Since most projects experience small increments over time and there exists a wide difference between the most and the least popular/active projects, the logarithmic scale is better suited to represent the changes in the given data. The user has the option to select linear scale at the end of both X- and Y-axes (click on "Log").

As evident in the visualisation, the Newari project and the Hindi-Malayalam project cluster show very interesting contrasting dynamics — while both achieve similar Total Articles numbers, the latter is much more editor-heavy. This suggests a smaller but more active editor community for the Newari project.

Please click on the image of the motion chart below to open the interactive version in a separate window. The code can be accessed at the project repository on Github.


Motion chart comparing multiple variables across Indic Wikipedia projects, 2001-2011. Source: http://bit.ly/Yw4Wzq

Sajjad Anwar is a programmer based in Bangalore. Sumandro Chattapdhyay is a researcher based in Delhi. They often work together.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-basic-parameters

Indic Language Wikipedias — Statistical Report — 2012

shiju — 2013-02-03T02:40:48Z

I have compiled the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias for the year 2012. As usual, in this report, my aim is to provide my perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias.

(The period of analysis is editor contributions between December 1, 2011 to December 31, 2012. December to December data is taken to account for the seasonal variations). Read the 2011 report here and the 2010 report here. The data for this report and analysis is based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org. A special thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this information.

Here is my executive summary after analyzing the data for 2012 and my experince with building some wiki communities:

Steady and sustainable growth is available for communities which focus on community building.
Small languages with guidance and support are making huge progress than many big languages.
Lack of support from proper channels at the much needed time had affected the community growth of some communities.
Even though many outreach programs had happened across country, that is not showing up in terms of number of active editors.
Still many language communities (especially big languages) are not open to the idea of reaching out to the speakers of the respective language.
Pageviews of Indic projects continues to increase.

This report is presented in the following sequence. This is done so because I believe that community is central to the Wikimedia movement. Community will give us content which will drive readership.

Community
Content
Readership

Community

As mentioned above, according to me, community is the backbone of Wikimedia movement. But still many communities are not understanding the importance of this. It is important that all language wiki communities give adequate importance to community building to build the free knowledge repository in their language. The following table gives information based on two important parameters about the community. The first parameter shows the highly active editors (more than 100 edits per month) in wiki. The second parameter shows the active editors (more than 5 edits per month).

Like last year, Malayalam continues to show an upward growth in terms of the number of active users. It has close to 120 active editors now. The graphical summary shows that mean number of editors is around 100. Malayalam is the biggest wiki community among Indic languages even though Malayalam is only the 11th biggest spoken language in India. The sincere efforts put by Malayalam wikipedians to build its community is the only reason for this. The programs like Malayalam Wiki conference, Education program, CD project, wiki workshops, photo events, Wikimeetups, and many other outreach events started showing its result. If the community continues with these type of efforts then I am sure that the community strength in Malayalam Wikipedia will cross 150 in 2013. Apart from Wikipedia, the importance given to Malayalam Wikisource, Wiktionary, and more recently to Wikivoyage (in incubator) will attract more Malayalam speakers to the Malayalam wiki projects.
Tamil comes second with close to 80 active editors. However, the number of active editors has gone down from last year. The graphical summary shows that number of active users was around 70-75 especially during the last two quarters.
Bengali comes third with around 60 active editors. This is a slight increase from the last year’s number of active editors. The involvement of editors from India in Bengali Wikipedia is less. That needs to be changed. Bangladeshi wikipedians are having many outreach programs to build Bengali wiki community. It will be nice if they extend their support to Indian Bengali speakers also as Indian Bengali wikipedians are not growing.
Telugu, Urdu, Gujarati, and Punjabi are the wikipedia languages that show notable increase in the number of active editors. But it will be be a mistake from my part if I am not mentioning that these numbers are not encouraging and the current number of active users is not showing justice to the number of speakers these languages have. This statement is more significant when we consider the fact that some smaller languages are showing a better progress.
We have seen that last year (2011) the success stories were Odia and Assamese wikipedias. In 2012, the shining star is Punjabi. The community has grown from one active editor from last year to almost 15 active editors now. As mentioned in my blog posts (post 1, post 2, post 3, and post 4) about building Punjabi wikipedia community, the task of building community for Punjabi was very challenging. Initiated in 2002 along with Assamese, Punjabi is one of the first Indic language wikipedia. But nothing much had happened in that wiki until deliberate efforts to build community initiated. The news is now we have an active community in Punjabi Wikipedia. From the just one person last year (Guglani – who took lots of pain to travel to multiple locations to introduce Punjabi wikipedia), now Punjabi wikipedia has close to 15 active editors. Unlike Odia and Assamese, I have faced so many issues during Punjabi wikipedia community building (mostly conflicts between editors). But I am happy to see that community is slowly coming out of all that. The technical team has fixed some of the bugs related to typing tool which was very important for Punjabi wikipedia. Punjabi wikipedians require lot support from other wikipedians to sustain the current momentum and grow the community further. My best wishes to Punjabi wikipedians.
Gujarati and Urdu are the two other communities that made considerable progress in community growth. The efforts put by Gujarati wikipedians to reach out to Gujarati speakers started showing the results. I am sure with the significant attention also given to Gujarati Wikisource (which was created last year), more Gujarati speakers will be attracted to Gujarati wiki projects. The involvement of Indians in Urdu Wikipedia is very less. But it is good to notice that Urdu wiki community slowly started growing. May be Wikipedia is one place where Indians and Pakistanis can work together.
The wikipedia languages that haven't shown significant change in number of active editors are Marathi, Odia, Assamese, and Nepali. The respective communities need to start putting efforts to build community by taking lessons from other Indic language wiki communities.
The languages that have considerable reduction in number of editors are Hindi, Kannada, and Sanskrit. Among this, except Sanskrit, all are spoken by at least five crore people. It is not good to see that speakers of these languages are not giving any attention to the wiki projects in their respective language. The case of Hindi is very strange considering the fact that it has support of the central government and many state governments of India.
The dormant language communities are Sindhi, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, and some other small languages. Considering the fact that Odia, Assamese, and Punjabi were also dormant two years before, I am sure if someone is putting effort to build communities for these now dormant communities, these language wiki communities will also grow like it happened for Odia, Assamese, and Punjabi. Now there are multiple entities to support wikimedia movement in India and I hope that someone will take care of this apart from concentrating on the bigger languages.
In short, the point I want to emphasis is, conscious efforts are required from different stakeholders to grow communities and to sustain that growth for all Indic language wikipedias.

Content

Number of articles is an important parameter, but it has misguided some wiki communities in the past. Fortunately that trend is coming down.

With more than 1,04,000 articles, Hindi continues to be the biggest Indic language wikipedia in terms of the number of articles. Almost 3500 articles were added to Hindi wikipedia in the year 2013.
Tamil and Malayalam had added around 7000 articles which is the "biggest growth" in terms of number of articles. Urdu and Nepali added close to 5000 articles.
If we consider percentage of increase then Assamese language has shown more than 100 per cent increase in the number of articles.
Some of the important milestones are, Tamil and Telugu crossing 50,000 articles, Malayalam crossing 25,000 articles, and Assamese crossing 1,000 article milestones.
The languages that have shown very slow growth in terms of number of articles are Gujarati, Telugu and Kannada. I assume at least for few of these languages the focus went into enhancing the existing articles and building the community rather than creating thousands of stub articles.
As mentioned in the past reports, communities don’t need to worry about the number of articles. Also the examples of Bishnupriya Manipuri and Newari Wikipedias shows the after effect of increasing the article count without focusing on building the community.

Readership (page views)

Unlike the number of editors, the number of page views in wiki is showing an upward trend irrespective of the language.(Please note that the information available in the below table is the total visits (page views) for a language wikipedia for a month from all the platforms combined. It includes visits by readers and editors. This is NOT the list of Number of Unique Visitors to the website).

This is the one parameter where the figures are showing relative justice to the number of speakers.
Hindi with 78 lakh page views is in the top position.
The page views for Tamil had increased by more than 50 per cent.
Assamese has more than 100 per cent growth in page views.
Since the support for Indic languages is increasing for smart phone operating systems, I am sure the page views are going to increase further.

Conclusion

I am concluding this report with the following thoughts:

Being the biggest language (or number of speakers) does not automatically build community for an Indic language wikipedia. Efforts from respective language speakers are necessary to build community.
Most Indians who have access to internet and computer still don’t know their respective language typing. This is the biggest road block to build Indic language wiki community.
Do not get obsessed by article counts or readership. These are natural outcomes of community building.
Focus on community building through community interaction (through meetups, talk pages, village pumps, and mailing lists).
Focus on community building through community collaboration (WikiProjects or planning outreach efforts or advocacy).
Focus on community building through doing more outreach, better outreach, and being supportive of newbies.
Stay away from bots and translation tools for article creation as they do more harm than good. Use bots in such a way that it is not affecting the growth of the community.

Wishing all of you a wonderful wiki year 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-2012

Indian Newspapers' Digital Transition

zeenab — 2016-12-09T07:12:53Z

This report examines the digital transition underway at three leading newspapers in India, the Dainik Jagran in Hindi, English-language Hindustan Times, and Malayala Manorama in Malayalam. Our focus is on how they are changing their newsroom organisation and journalistic work to expand their digital presence and adapt to a changing media environment. The report comes out of a collaboration between the CIS and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, and was supported by the latter. The research was undertaken by Zeenab Aneez, with contributions from Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Download: PDF.

Cross-posted from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (December 08, 2016).

Executive Summary

This report examines the digital transition underway at three leading newspapers in India, the Dainik Jagran in Hindi, English-language Hindustan Times, and Malayala Manorama in Malayalam. Our focus is on how they are changing their newsroom organisation and journalistic work to expand their digital presence and adapt to a changing media environment.

The background for the report is the rapid and continued growth in digital media use in India. Especially since 2010, internet use has grown at an explosive pace, driven by the spread of mobile web access, also outside large urban areas and the more affluent and highly educated English-language minority that have historically represented a large part of India’s internet users. Some analysts estimate more than 30% of Indians had some form of internet access by the end of 2015 (IAMAI-IMRB, 2015). With this growth has come a perceptible shift of audience attention and advertising investment away from legacy media like print and television and towards digital media. This shift has been accompanied by the launch of a number of new digital media start-ups in India and, especially, the growing role of large international technology companies investing in the Indian market.

These developments present Indian newspapers with new challenges and opportunities. Print circulation and advertising is still growing in India, but more slowly than in the past, and especially the English-language market seems saturated and ripe for the shift towards digital media that has happened elsewhere. From 2014 to 2015, the Indian advertising market grew by 13%. Print grew 8%, but English-language newspaper advertising only half of that. Digital advertising, in contrast, grew by 38%, and is projected to continue to grow for years to come as digital media become more central to India’s overall media environment (KPMG-FICCI, 2016).

If they want to secure their long-term future and continued editorial and commercial success, Indian newspapers have to adapt to these changes. The three case studies in this report represent three different examples of how major newspapers are navigating this transition.

Based on over 30 interviews conducted with senior management, editors, and rank-and-file reporters from three major newspapers, as well as other senior journalists and researchers who have wider experience in the Indian news industry, plus secondary sources including industry reports and academic research, we show the following.

All three newspapers are proactively investing in digital media technology and expertise, and adapting their editorial priorities, parts of their daily workflow, distribution strategies, and business model to the rise of digital media. Tools like Chartbeat are now commonplace; search engine optimisation, social media optimisation, and audience analytics are part of everyday work; and some are experimenting with new formats (Hindustan Times was a launch partner for Facebook Instant Articles; Manorama Online has produced both Virtual Reality and 360 videos, an Apple watch app, and is on Amazon Echo).
Given that the print newspaper industry is still growing in India, especially in Indian-language markets, these newspapers are innovating from a position of relative strength in comparison to their North American and European counterparts. However, this is done with the awareness that that print is becoming a relatively less important part of the Indian media environment, and digital media more important. Short-term, reach and profits come from print, but longer term, all have to build a strong digital presence to succeed editorially and commercially.
All three newspapers aim to do this by building on the assets they have as legacy media organisations, and trying to leverage their brand reputation, audience reach, and editorial resources to maintain an edge over digital news start-ups and international news providers. Their legacy, however, offers not only assets, but also liabilities. As successful incumbents, all of them struggle with the inertia that comes from established organisational structures and professional cultures. To change their organisation and culture, and thus more effectively combine new technologies and skills with existing core competences, each newspaper is not only investing in digital media and personnel, but also trying to change at least parts of the existing newspaper to adapt to an increasingly digital media environment.
They do this in different ways. At Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama, the focus has been on building up separate digital operations at Jagran.com and Manorama Online, apart from the printed newspaper itself. At the Hindustan Times, in contrast, the aim has been to integrate print and digital in a joint operation working across platforms and channels. Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manoroma have thus focused mostly on building up new digital assets, whereas the Hindustan Times has been transforming existing assets to work across platforms. At Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama, much of the push for change has come from management, whereas there has been a stronger editorial involvement at the Hindustan Times, and a greater attempt to engage rank-and-file reporters through training sessions and other initiative designed to demonstrate not only the commercial importance, but also the editorial potential, of digital media.
All three newspapers have found that expanding their digital operations requires investment of money in new technologies and in staff with new skills. But it is also clear that this is not enough. Investment in technology has to be accompanied by a change in organisation and culture to effectively leverage existing assets in a digital media environment. In their attempts to do this, the most significant barriers have been a perceived cultural hierarchy, deeply ingrained especially in the newsroom, that print journalism is somehow inherently superior to digital journalism, and a lack of effective synergy between editorial leaders and managers, often combined with a lack of technical know-how. Money can buy new tools and bring in new expertise, but it cannot on its own change culture, ensure synergy, or align the organisation with new priorities. This requires leadership and broad-based change. Long-term, senior editors, management, and rank-and-file reporters will have to work and change together to secure Indian newspapers’ role in an increasingly digital media environment.

Digital media thus present Indian newspapers with challenges and opportunities similar to those newspapers have faced elsewhere. Only they face these from a position of greater strength, because of the continued growth in their print business, and with the benefit of having seen how things have developed in more technologically developed markets. We hope this report will help them navigate the digital transition ahead.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-newspapers-digital-transition

Indian Language Wikipedia Statistics (September 2012 – April 2013)

T.Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2013-08-23T01:48:16Z

The Access to Knowledge team carried out a quantitative analysis to identify trends and growth patterns in Indian Language Wikipedias over the time period from September 2012 to April 2013.

It is difficult for the CIS-A2K programme to either take direct credit for the growth or direct blame for the lack of it in the Indian language Wikimedia projects. However, we believe that we have been one of the factors — and sometimes a key factor — in impacting the growth of the Wikimedia projects and communities in India since the commencement of the project.

Though the A2K programme has done some amount of work with almost all Indian language Wikipedias, the A2K team has had relatively more involvement in 10 Indic languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu.

In addition to this based on the various outreach work done by A2K we have attempted to present an analysis of direct new Wikipedia users that have emerged in languages impacted by the A2K programme, keeping in mind that community mobilisation will always be an autonomous activity to some extent.


Graph 1: Growth of Articles in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

The growth momentum in Indian languages over the eight month period from September 2012 to April 2013 looks healthy.
Some language Wikipedias have been growing at a phenomenal rate than others in terms of percentage change since September 2012.
Assamese, Punjabi, Kannada and Odia Wikipedias have a growth rate of 58 per cent, 55 per cent, 30 per cent and 26 per cent respectively. These were the top four Indian language Wikipedia projects during the eight month period.
In terms of absolute number of articles, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi Wikipedias have grown by about 4,200; 3,600; 3,300; and 2,300 articles respectively.
However, given the small size of the Wikipedia communities in Assamese, Punjabi, Kannada and Odia (as given in Graph 2 below) the growth achieved by them is much commendable and all efforts have to be put to ensure that this momentum continues by strengthening these communities and also expanding them.


Graph 2: Active Editors in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

There is a fluctuation in the number of active editors in majority of the Indian language Wikipedias, except for Punjabi Wikipedia, which has seen a consistent growth. Starting from July 2012, the Wikimedia India Programs Team began working with the Punjabi community, an activity which we have continued at the A2K programme.
The active editors on Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit Wikipedias have been consistently coming down, which is a cause of concern.
It is important to note that Kannada and Telugu Wikipedias where the number of Active Editors were in a declining trend as of September 2012 have shown a remarkable turnaround. The A2K programme has spent the last 3-4 months working closely with both the Kannada and Telugu communities.
Overall the active editors on Malayalam Wikipedia have crossed the 100 mark numerous times, making it the first Indian language Wikipedia to reach this benchmark.
Looking at the trends Tamil Wikipedia may soon reach the 100 active editor mark.
Even Bengali Wikipedia community could cross 100 active editors if concerted efforts are put in.
The Assamese Wikipedia, which received support from A2K programme until January 2013, had a consistent active editor population which was around 20 people. However, once the support from the A2K programme dwindled a declining trend (since February 2013) has set in. This is worrying as it gives rise to the possibility of building dependencies through the A2K programme. Going forward we need to address this and rectify by creating self-sustaining momentum in our outreach work that lasts beyond our involvement.


Graph 3: Monthly growth of New Editors on Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

On an average 96 new editors have joined Indian language Wikipedias every month.
Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil Wikipedias have consistently seen more than 10 new editors joining every month.
Assamese, Odia and Sanskrit Wikipedias did have many new editors joining.
A total of 673 new people have become editors for Indian language Wikipedia since September 2012.
However, the conversion rate of new editors into active editors is still a challenge across all Indian language Wikipedias.


Graph 4: Snapshot of “Page Views” of Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 & March 2013

Overall the “Page View” trends of Indian Language Wikipedias look positive.
Bengali, Odia and Punjabi Wikipedias have shown the highest percentage growth in page views since August 2012.
In absolute numbers Bengali Wikipedia has seen a spectacular growth of 14,00,000  page-views, Marathi and Tamil Wikipedias witnessed a growth of about 10,00,000 and 8,00,000 page-views respectively.
These clearly indicate the demand for knowledge and information in Indian languages on the internet.

In the below given Graph 5, we have also looked at the direct impact the A2K programme had in cultivating new editors on Indian language Wikipedias through various outreach programmes conducted during September 2012 to April 2013.

It should be noted that a total of 1,275 participants were reached out by the A2K programme. However, the username data for more than 700 participants could not be ascertained, due to inefficient data collection and input. This includes participants giving wrong usernames, trouble with the handwriting of some of the participants, etc. We have already taken note of this issue and have put in measures to efficiently capture the new user data. Hence, we have only presented an analysis of 558 participants, whose usernames are valid.

Of this it can be noted that more than 120 users have done more than 5 edits, which is 21 per cent of the participants. Further, 24 participants have done more than 100 edits on English and various Indian language Wikipedias, which constitutes 4 per cent of the total participants that the A2K programme has reached out to.


Graph 5: Snapshot of “New editors from outreach” of English & Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 and March 2013

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics

India's untapped potential: Are a billion people losing out because of spectrum?

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-12-14T10:31:43Z

As one of the world’s fastest growing economies and with over 65% of its billion-plus population under 35, India has huge potential. But according to Shyam Ponappa of the Centre for Internet & Society, its spectrum management – the electromagnetic waves that are used from home appliances like microwaves and remote controls, to radios, cell phones, and of course, the internet – could be a huge barrier to the country’s economic and social development.

Until the global economic downturn that began about two years ago, the economic model for spectrum distribution in India and many developing countries was based on the free market. But Ponappa demonstrates in a new report for APC that spectrum is worth treating as a public utility the way we do roads, electricity and other basic infrastructure, which would allow for people in rural areas to access spectrum-dependant services like mobile phones and wifi and increase quality of services for all.

Currently in India, as in most other countries, spectrum is being treated as a property, where “chunks” of spectrum are sold to the mobile phone and telecommunications operators with the highest bid. Commonly there are 3 – 4 operators in a developed country; however, in India there are up to sixteen. The extreme competition has resulted in the Indian bidders paying outrageous fees that they are never able to recuperate. So while the government makes a profit on the sale, this profit comes at a societal cost.

Ponappa proposes pooling spectrum and to have a set of network providers, who in turn serve operators for retail users. This effectively opens up the spectrum and could make costs ten or fifteen times cheaper than they are now.

“It is appropriate to push the concept of open spectrum in developed markets who underwent their development phase some 60 – 100 years ago and put in place basic infrastructure systems. But in countries like India and the Asian sub-continent, it does not make sense to do this because we are not at the same stage of economic development,” Ponappa told APCNews.

“When markets are well structured and organised,” he continues, “[government control] can be less effective and efficient for society as a whole, compared with open competition. However developing economies don’t have the integrated systems in place that advanced economies do. India does not have an adequately developed network of copper, optical fibre or microwaves covering most of its population. And we are at a stage of development at which infrastructure is a fundamental determinant of productivity, as well as of a reasonable quality of life.”

Ponappa argues that in India’s case it would be advisable for governments to work with other stakeholders – corporations, state-owned agencies, and civil society – on a collaborative solution. “It would be much more conducive to a sound economy to have either the government step in and open up the commercial spectrum, or to have two to three main operators (possibly subsidised, but not necessarily) as we do with the provision of utilities,” he says. Yet, the free market mentality continues to reign, and a surfeit of operators is trying to make a profit in the telecommunications wireless sector.

Everybody wants a piece of the pie

In India, every operator is assigned a sliver of spectrum for their exclusive use and the rest is assigned to the government, the public sector and defence.

The result is high-cost infrastructure for operators (setting up networks with multiple sets of more advanced equipment because of the limited spectrum, with the capital constraints resulting in less extensive networks in rural areas) as well as for users (who have to pay for all this equipment).

“Too many operators make for increased capital costs for each operator, and cumulatively for all operators,” Ponappa explains.

And these higher costs are increasingly difficult to recover from consumer-generated revenue, as India undergoes huge price wars. Many operators may eventually go bankrupt. While no consumers ever complain about low costs –and India has some of the world’s lowest mobile rates– they will complain about poor quality and unreliable service. Consequently, consumers may not have to pay much to use mobile services, but they may not always be able to make or receive calls when they need to, and do not have access to broadband.

While most countries have moved on to 3G networks (which has more capacity for a given spectrum band than 2G, meaning better call quality) as many as four of India’s sixteen operators have not even developed their 2G networks. Making the switch to 3G seems like a good idea, but there are substantial costs associated with deploying these more advanced techniques to both operators (for network upgrades) and for end users (in terms of new handsets).

Too much competition in this case has made operators inefficient.

Spectrum as a national common good

If spectrum were treated as if it were a public utility, posits Ponappa, each operator would have access to a bigger chunk of spectrum, and the traffic-handling capacity of each would increase at a lower cost.

“With the current model the capacity of networks is suffering because networks cannot afford to expand or make technical improvements without economic losses. Other infrastructure services such as electricity and water supply are managed by utility companies, which are typically monopolies for a product-segment, or duopolies for purposes of competition. So why not treat spectrum the same way?” suggests Ponappa.

Ponappa suggests treating networks, and spectrum as a part of networks, as we would an oil pipeline, where everyone accesses the same one, and pays a fee for its use.

This would bring more people onto the network and increase revenues, since operating costs would be shared. The more revenue it can generate, the more efficient operators will be, using the same high-capacity circuits. The more revenue the main operators have, the more they could invest in up-to-date technology to extend their networks and provide a better service to clients. The better the technology, the more people could access the internet and other now vital sources of information, as well as focus on broadband and infrastructure to the country’s isolated rural areas, which today have rudimentary communications infrastructure.

India’s rural populations, the lost resource

As a predominantly rural country, lack of basic IT infrastructure means that the largest segment of India’s population has no access to information and communications technologies.

Ponappa grew up on a farm in a rural area some 200 km from Bangalore where even fixed line phone networks were unreliable. “We have multiple telephone lines because we never know which one will work,” he says.

Given India’s massive rural population, this means that there are hundreds of millions of people that are unable to access the internet. Services like quality distance education are not even an option if basic infrastructure such as fixed telephone lines is not in place and the country itself is losing out on the incalculable potential of this untapped human resource.

Download the report here [pdf - 280 kb]

See the report in the APC website

This article was written as part of the APC’s project work on Spectrum for development, an initiative that aims to provide an understanding of spectrum regulation by examining the situation in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Photo by kiwanja. Used with permission under Creative Content licensing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/untapped-potential

India's Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty Celebrated; Accessible Books Consortium Launched

nehaa — 2014-07-01T11:09:08Z

On Day 1 of the 28th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”), the WIPO organized an event to mark India’s ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, 2013 (“Marrakesh Treaty”), and to launch the Accessible Books Consortium (“ABC”).

India Becomes the First Country to Ratify the Marrakesh Treaty

Francis Gurry, Director General, WIPO said that the Marrakesh Treaty received 79 signatures in the twelve month period that the treaty was open for signatures. He further said that India’s ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty one year from its conclusion was a “WIPO record of sorts” and a “great example from a major country” of the importance attached to the Marrakesh Treaty.

Dilip Sinha, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in Geneva handed over India’s Instrument of Accession to the Marrakesh Treaty to Francis Gurry. Ambassador Sinha in his speech stressed on the importance of the Marrakesh Treaty to India and said that it helped that India had its amendments to its Copyright Act, 1957 in place, incorporating the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty.

Maryanne Diamond, the Immediate Past President of the World Blind Union (“WBU”) congratulated India on its ratification. Calling it a country who showed “huge leadership” in negotiations of the Marrakesh Treaty, Ms. Diamond said that this ratification was extremely significant, with India being home to a large number of blind and print disabled people and a part of the Global South. Ms. Diamond urged other nations to follow India’s example and make it a priority to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty.

Jens Bammel, Secretary General, International Publishers Association (“IPA”) also congratulated India on its ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty and called on other member states to ratify it.

Accessible Books Consortium Launched

At the launch of the ABC, Mr. Gurry said that the Marrakesh Treaty was only the means to an end, where the end was books in the hands of print disabled and visually impaired persons across the world. “To make it operational,” said Mr. Gurry, “we need to have operational activities.” He said that the ABC was an operational activity which would “breathe life” into and “make operational” the legal framework provided by the Marrakesh Treaty.

What Does it Do?

Mr. Gurry said that the ABC aimed at achieving three things- first, capacity building; second, international book exchange and third, international book exchange.

Capacity Building- Mr. Gurry said that the ABC seeks to provide training on accessible book production and distribution. He thanked the Republic of Korea which has committed to providing financial assistance for training in respect of production of books in accessible formats.
International Book Exchange- Mr. Gurry said that this activity was an IT supported facility, namely, the TIGAR Service which has its origins in India. This would allow participating institutions to perform international searches of databases to find out if accessible formats of books are available.
Inclusive Publishing- Mr. Gurry said that at the end of the day, “books should be born accessible” and technology was creating the “promise of the realization of this aspiration.” Mr. Gurry said that the ABC would promote accessible publishing and to this end, had drawn up a charter of accessible publishing- Accessible Publishing Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers. Elsevier is the first publisher to have signed this charter.

India, WBU and IPA delighted

Praising the ABC, Ambassador Sinha called it an indicator of what multi-stakeholder cooperation needs to do. He said that the ABC would assist organizations such as the DAISY Forum of India in achieving the goal of access to books in accessible formats. Congratulating the WIPO for its efforts on this front, Ambassador Sinha said that this would help nations like India realize their goal of achieving the purposes of the Marrakesh Treaty. Ms. Diamond, representing the WBU congratulated Elsevier on signing the charter. Jens Bammel, on behalf of the IPA expressed concern for making books available in accessible formats for non English speakers. The ABC, he said, was a project initiated to “genuinely complement” the Marrakesh Treaty, and would create a global catalogue of accessible works, whether provided by libraries or by publishers. Expressing his delight that the ABC was being supported equally by all stakeholders, Mr. Bammel reached out to member states to support this initiative politically.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated

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

Inclusive Financial Services - Global Trends in Accessibility Requirements

nirmita — 2015-05-03T06:55:49Z

Inclusive Financial Services is a G3ict White Paper researched in cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society. The research paper comprises a Foreword and Introduction, four chapters — Barriers to Access for Persons with Disabilities and Diverse Abilities, International Framework, Integrating Accessibility into the System, and State of Practice - Impact of the Convention on Inclusive Finance and Accessibility Efforts around the Globe.

Foreword

Global demand for accessibility continues to grow, due in part to the strengthening voice worldwide of more than one billion people with disabilities, including the aging population, and important frameworks, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. From a private sector standpoint, the Convention represents a unique opportunity to ensure equal access to information while achieving global harmonization of standards and economies of scale. Understanding that technology is the great equalizer for underserved populations and having a clear roadmap towards inclusive information and communications technologies (ICT), rather than simple compliance strategies, will benefit everyone in every industry.

Specifically, the financial services sector is faced with the need to transform operations while providing truly exceptional customer experiences. Disruptive trends -- such as the aging population, influx of mobile devices and global regulations – are driving demand for more human-centric technology, and creating an opportunity for innovation that are proving to be differentiators for the institutions embracing them. Consumer demand to be in control of interactions and information is forcing those in financial services to reconsider what’s important to stay competitive. By offering an online experience through any device personalized to individual needs, preferences and abilities, organizations can ensure they are reaching the broadest base of the population, especially the “unbanked” and “underbanked,” to enhance interactions and improve sales opportunities.

Customers with lifelong disabilities or age-related impairments represent an increasingly large population among the biggest markets in the world such as OECD countries and China. Also, in many countries aging persons are the holders of a majority of the assets and highly dependent on insurance, retirement and banking services. Ensuring they can use the services they need without encountering accessibility barriers is a powerful way to earn their loyalty in a highly competitive environment.

IBM has a long tradition and culture of accessibility and understands the importance of improving the user experience, managing accessibility compliance, and creating an inclusive workplace environment. Consistent with our own experience, this report highlights the organizational and process adjustments needed to ensure everyone has equal access to timely information they need for work and life.

By creating a holistic strategy for embedding accessible technology across the entire enterprise - from processes to product development to people – organizations can reinvigorate individual channels and harmonize them across the bank. G3ict has written this timely publication for the financial services sector that provides a clear picture of the global forces at work that are transforming how employee- and client-facing applications, products and services are delivered to reach the broadest set of customers. The report also serves as a useful benchmarking source for governments and advocates based on its review of existing solutions already implemented around the world. We applaud G3ict for taking this first step on the road of advocating for greater accessibility of financial services in cooperation with stakeholders from around the world.

Ian Hurst, General Manager, Global Financial Services Sector, IBM Corporation
Frances W. West, Chief Accessibility Officer, IBM Corporation

Introduction

Financial services play a necessary and important role in societies by enabling access to products, resources, and services, enabling savings and asset creation, and facilitating economic self-sufficiency. Access to financial services for all is a necessity in today’s world not simply at the community or household level, but at an individual level, to open doors to banking services, credit services, stocks and shares, insurance, and other markets. Access to and inclusion in financial services is crucial to poverty reduction and participation in economic prosperity and growth and development.

The increasing pervasiveness of technology in the delivery of financial services and the disruption of traditional channels of delivery through ‘FinTech’ (technology for financial service delivery) have generated new enthusiasm and newer ways for reaching out to persons who remain unbanked. Similarly, the increasing nature of services now available through technology has triggered growing demand among persons who remained marginalized from traditional paper-based banking services, as well as calls to ensure that they do not in turn create new barriers to access. Accompanying this growth spurt in technology there has also been an increasing recognition of the rights of persons with disabilities and the utmost importance of providing equal access to them to all services, including financial services.

Persons with disabilities and diverse abilities have been amongst those traditionally marginalized from the financial services sector through a mix of inaccessibility, presumptions of limited need and capacity to manage finances, and mindsets that did not view them as a profitable consumer base. This paradigm is now rapidly changing with growing evidence of their demand and need for access to services as well as the increasing income base of persons with disabilities around the world. Persons with disabilities and diverse abilities are demanding better and easier access to the entire range of financial services. Access to and inclusion in financial services is important to persons across the economic spectrum. And for persons with disabilities who live under the poverty line, it is essential that they are involved in financial inclusion initiatives and programs that will empower them and enable them to become financially independent.

A range of factors are serving as drivers to enhance the inclusion of persons with disabilities and diverse abilities through accessible financial services including demographics, attaining a competitive advantage and improving market share nationally and globally, Corporate Social Responsibility, regulations, legislation and compliance, enhancing business value, ensuring and increasing an inclusive workplace for employees with disabilities, maximizing on technology advances, and ensuring diversity and inclusion for all.

This report offers an introduction and overview to the need for, and mechanisms to achieve accessibility in financial services:

Chapter 1 offers an understanding of the barriers posed by inaccessible financial services to persons with different disabilities.

Chapter 2 highlights the different international mandates and frameworks that are accelerating the promotion of financial inclusion for persons with disabilities.

Chapter 3 offers in-depth descriptions of the accessibility needs based on the type of technology in use, along with examples of effective practices and solutions to promote inclusion. It also offers a look at how different countries are striving to achieve the accessibility mandate.

Chapter 4 focuses on the state of practice of financial inclusion for persons with disabilities across countries and the implementation of the Convention’s requirements for ICT accessibility and financial inclusion. This chapter describes findings from two major studies undertaken by G3ict that paint a picture of the state of financial accessibility today and offer a glimpse into the financial sector’s commitment to incorporate accessibility into their work and services in the future.

Finally, in the Conclusions section, the report offers recommendations for relevant stakeholders to incorporate the principles of inclusion to drive accessibility through product design and delivery, policy and legal structures, and distribution channels and pathways.

Download the report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/inclusive-financial-services-global-trends-in-accessibility-requirements

IFAT and ITF - Protecting Workers in the Digital Platform Economy: Investigating Ola and Uber Drivers’ Occupational Health and Safety

2021-06-29T06:53:47Z

Between July to November 2019, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), New Delhi office, conducted 2,128 surveys across 6 major cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Jaipur, and Lucknow, to determine the occupational health and safety of app-based transport workers. CIS is proud to publish the study report and the press release. Akash Sheshadri, Ambika Tandon, and Aayush Rathi of CIS supported post-production of this report.

Report: Download (PDF)

Press Release: Download (PDF)

Press Release, August 25, 2020

Between July to November 2019, IFAT and ITF conducted 2,128 surveys across 6 major cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Jaipur, and Lucknow, to determine the occupational health and safety of app-based transport workers.

Some of the most startling findings from the survey are below:

There is a complete absence of social security and protection—a glaring 95.3% claimed to have no form of insurance, accidental, health or medical. This reflects the inability of workers to invest in their own health. This partly is a result of declining wages—after paying off their EMIs, penalties and commission to the companies and having less than Rs. 20,000 left at the end of the month.
Only 0.15% of the respondents reported to have access to accidental insurance, which is the bare minimum companies like Ola and Uber should have provided to their drivers.
Uber and Ola provide no assistance with regard to harassment and violence while drivers are on the road. Ola or Uber for the most part do not intervene if there is any intimidation from traffic police or local authorities, incidents of road rage, violent attack by customers or criminal elements that endanger drivers’ lives, accidents while driving etc.
On average drivers spend close to 16-20 hours in their cars in a day. 39.8% of the respondents spent close to 20 hours in their vehicle in a day, and 72.8% of the respondents from Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad drive for close to 20 hours a day. Due to long hours, 89.8% of the respondents claim they get less than 6 hours of sleep.
Health issues arising directly as a result of conditions of work is affecting the day-to-day lives of workers. Backache, constipation, liver issues, waist pain and neck pain are the top five health ailments that app-based transport workers suffer from due to their work. 60.7% respondents identified backache as a major health issue.

App-based drivers/driver partners work in a very toxic and isolated work environment. Drivers can’t exit their current occupational status even if they want to because they are shackled in debts and outstanding EMIs. As a result, they race every day to complete targets so that they may earn just enough to pay these liabilities.

The work these drivers are engaged in cannot be considered to be within the ambit of decent work and in reality, is representative of modern slavery. The algorithm of the companies they work for, pits them against their peers in order to maximize profit, while at the same time denying them social security or protection and essentially refusing to acknowledge them as employees.

Drivers working in various cities and working for different app-based platforms have complained about the lack of transparency in how these app-based companies determine fares, promotional cost, surge pricing, incentives, penalties and bonuses. There is little to no information on how rides are being fixed or are being allocated. There also isn't any effective grievance redressal mechanism to resolve any of the issues faced by workers.

The apathy of the state and the exploitation by app-based companies have brought the transport and delivery workers in a precipitous position across the globe. This is underlined and explained by the absence and lack of any social security or protection for the workforce, there are some other issues that the workforce is battling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hear our voices and address our demands.

- Shaik Salauddin

National General Secretary, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)
Phone: +91 96424 24799

Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers
Facebook: connectifat
Twitter: @connect_ifat
YouTube: Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/ifat-itf-protecting-workers-in-digital-platform-economy-ola-uber-occupational-health-safety

IFAT and ITF - Locking Down the Impact of Covid-19

2021-06-29T07:27:09Z

This report, by Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), New Delhi office, explores the responses to the outbreak of Covid-19 by digital platform based companies, trade unions, and governments to help out workers for digital platform based companies hereafter app based workers during the lockdown. The research work in this article is a characterization of the struggles of app based workers during the global pandemic and how it has affected and changed the world of work for them. The surveys were conducted amongst the workforce working for app based companies like Ola, Uber, Swiggy, Zomato etc. This study is partially supported by CIS as part of the Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications.

Report: Download (PDF)

Press Release: Download (PDF)

Press Release, 17 September, 2020

Between March and June 2020, IFAT and ITF conducted 4 surveys with transport and delivery workers to assess (i) their income levels during the Covid-19 pandemic, (ii) the burden of loan repayment during these months, (iii) the relief provided to them by companies, and (iv) the access to welfare schemes offered by state and central governments.

The first survey, on income levels and loans administered in March 2020, had 5964 respondents, across 55 cities, in 16 states. The second and third surveys conducted in April 2020, on financial relief from companies and governments, had 1630 respondents, across 59 cities, in 16 states. The fourth survey was conducted in June 2020 to assess income levels as the economies were slowing opening up. Some of the most startling findings from the 4 surveys are:

The average monthly EMI of the respondents in March 2020 was between Rs. 10,000 - 20,000. 51% of the respondents had taken vehicle loans from 19 national public sector banks.
30.3% of the respondents worked between 40-50 hours a week, in the week prior to the first national lockdown. Despite high hours of work, the average income of the drivers for the week commencing April 15, 2020 was less than Rs. 2500. 57% of respondents earned between 0 to Rs. 2250.
89.8% of workers did not receive any ration or food assistance, and 84.5% did not receive any financial assistance from either companies or governments.
Where companies had announced financial assistance programmes, including through donations collected by customers, there was no transparency in disbursement of funds. Other reasons for exclusion included administrative red tape (such as the requirement to produce bills that are GST compliant), and absence of clear criteria for eligibility, leading to random disbursement, among others.
Ola announced waiving off the rental amount for leased vehicles, and asked drivers to return such vehicles. However, there was no announcement of a plan to repossess vehicles once there was an easing of the lockdown, causing great anxiety among workers.
After the easing of the national lockdown, 69.7% of respondents indicated that they had no earnings, while 20% earned between Rs.500 to 1500.
2716 respondents from 19 states across gig platforms articulated their support for a peaceful demonstration against company practices.
Mandatory installation of Aarogya Setu by workers raised concerns of privacy, as this would allow companies to surveil workers and collect data on their movements after work hours.

IFAT organised several meetings and protests after each survey, to bring attention to the vulnerable conditions of workers. At these gatherings, workers raised the following key demands:

Companies must reduce commission rates to 5%, to allow workers to get back on their feet, and compensate for losses over the past few months;
Adequate protective equipment and health insurance cover to all drivers must be provided;
There must be increased transparency in disbursement process of funds, and in the criteria for selection of beneficiaries;
Compounded interest must be waived on EMIs for the 3 months of moratorium on loan repayment.

Hear our voices and address our demands.

Shaik Salauddin

National General Secretary, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)

Phone: +91 96424 24799

Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers

Facebook: www.facebook.com/watch/connectifat/

Twitter: www.twitter.com/connect_ifat

YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCA1AxGq0Fb_A_O_Ey44eiPg

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/ifat-itf-locking-down-the-impact-of-covid-19

ICANN Diversity Analysis

akriti — 2018-08-29T11:19:46Z

The by-laws of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) state that it is a non-profit public-benefit corporation which is responsible at the overall level, for the coordination of the “global internet's systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the internet's unique identifier systems”. As key stakeholders of ICANN are spread across the world, much of the communication discussing the work of ICANN takes place over email. This analysis of the diversity of participation at the ICANN processes, through a study of their mailing lists, was undertaken by Paul Kurian and Akriti Bopanna.

The by-laws of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) state that it is a non-profit public-benefit corporation which is responsible at the overall level, for the coordination of the “global internet's systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the internet's unique identifier systems”.^{^[1]}Previously, this was overseen by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) under a US Government contract but in 2016, the oversight was handed over to ICANN, as a global multi-stakeholder body.^{^[2]} Given the significance of the multistakeholder nature of ICANN, it is imperative that stakeholders continue to question and improve the inclusiveness of its processes. The current blog post seeks to focus on the diversity of participation at the ICANN process.

As stakeholders are spread across the world, much of the communication discussing the work of ICANN takes place over email. Various [or X number of ] mailing lists inform members of ICANN activities and are used for discussions between them from policy advice to organizational building matters. Many of these lists are public and hence can be subscribed to by anyone and also can be viewed by non-members through the archives.

CIS analysed the five most active mailing lists amongst the working group mailing lists from January 2016 to May 2018, namely:

Outreach & Engagement,
Technology,
At-Large Review 2015 - 2019,
IANA Transition & ICANN Accountability, and
Finance & Budget mailing lists.

We looked at the diversity among these active participants by focusing on their gender, stakeholder grouping and region. In order to arrive at the data, we referred to public records such as the Statement of Interests which members have to give to the Generic Names Supporting Organization(GNSO) Council if they want to participate in their working groups. We also used, where available, ICANN Wiki and the LinkedIn profiles of these participants. Given below are some of the observations we made subsequent to surveying the data. We acknowledge that there might be some inadvertent errors made in the categorization of these participants, but are of the opinion that our inference from the data would not be drastically affected by a few errors.

The following findings were observed:

A total of 218 participants were present on the 5 mailing lists that were looked at.
Of these,, 92 were determined to be active participants (participants who had sent more than the median number of mails in their working group) out of which 75 were non-staff members.

Among the active non-staff participants:

Out of the 75 participants, 56 (74.7%) were male and 19 (25.3%) were female.
57.3% were identified to be members of the industry and technological community and 1.3% were identified as government representatives. 8.0% were representatives from Academia, 25.3% represented civil society and the remaining 8.0% were from fields that were uncategorizable with respect to the above, but were related to law and consultancy.
Only 14.7% of the participants were from Asia while the majority belonged to Africa and then North America with 24% and 22.7% participation respectively
Within Asia, we identified only one active participant from China.

Concerns

The vast number of the people participating and as an extension, influencing ICANN work are male constituting three fourth of the participants.
The mailing list are dominated by individuals from industry.. This coupled with the relative minority presence of the other stakeholders creates an environment where concerns emanating from other sections of the society could be overshadowed.
Only 14.7% of the participants were from Asia, which is concerning since 48.7% of internet users worldwide belong to Asia.^{^[3]}
China which has the world’s largest population of internet users (700 million people)^{^[4]} had only one active participant on these mailing lists.

ICANN being a global multistakeholder organization should ideally have the number of representatives from each region be proportionate to the number of internet users in that region. In addition to this, participation of women on these mailing lists need to increase to ensure that there is inclusive contribution in the functioning of the organization. We did not come across any indication of participation of individuals of non binary genders.

^{^[1]} https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/icann

^{^[2]} https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2016-10-01-en

^{^[3]} https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

^{^[4]} https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/icann-diversity-analysis

Hyper-connected, Hyper-lonely?

Nilofar Ansher — 2015-04-24T11:57:46Z

The Digital Natives newsletter, part of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' project, invites contributions to its April-May 2012 double issue.

The April issue puts the spotlight on an emerging trope in society and media: the more connected we are to our gadgets, peer network and social media, the lonelier we feel. The debate, which traces its opening volley to Sherry Turkle's book 'Alone Together', will look at the recurrent media commentary that points to pop-surveys, anecdotes from psychologists, and conscientious academics who talk about increasing isolation among heavy gadget users. Since our gadgets are more often than not net enabled, it doesn't take a giant leap to infer that people who spend a lot of time online count themselves as part of the Lonely Hearts Club. Is loneliness a peculiarly modern phenomenon?
Editor: Shobha Vadrevu

In the May issue, we look at a technology that was considered sci-fi a decade ago, but is now the next best thing since our Smartphones: Augmented Reality. How do scientists and geeks go about augmenting our reality? How inspirational have movies (remember Minority Report) been in engaging imagination with what is commonplace and common sense? Does Google Glass excite you or scare you senseless? Would you still make distinctions between the virtual world and the real one?
Editor: Nilofar Ansher

We invite short pieces, lengthy reflections, haikus and verses, cartoons, graphics, videos, and other forms of creative expressions for both the issues. Deadline: June 21, 2012. For more information, email: nilofar.ansh@gmail.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/hyper-connected-hyper-lonely