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The Government’s Increased Focus on Regulating Non-Personal Data: A Look at the Draft National Data Governance Framework Policy
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/national-data-governance-framework-policy
<b>Digvijay Chaudhary and Anamika Kundu wrote an article on the National Data Governance Framework Policy. It was edited by Shweta Mohandas.</b>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Non Personal Data (‘NPD’) can be <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429022241-8/regulating-non-personal-data-age-big-data-bart-van-der-sloot">understood</a> as any information not relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. The origin of such data can be both human and non-human. Human NPD would be such data which has been anonymised in such a way that the person to whom the data relates cannot be re-identified. Non-human NPD would mean any such data that did not relate to a human being in the first place, for example, weather data. There has been a gradual demonstrated interest in NPD by the government in recent times. This new focus on regulating non personal data can be owed to the economic incentive it provides. In its report, the Sri Krishna committee, released in 2018 agreed that NPD holds considerable strategic or economic interest for the nation, however, it left the questions surrounding NPD to a future committee.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">History of NPD Regulation</h2>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">In 2020, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MEITY’) constituted an expert committee (‘NPD Committee’) to study various issues relating to NPD and to make suggestions on the regulation of non-personal data. The NPD Committee differentiated NPD into human and non-human NPD, based on the data’s origin. Human NPD would include all information that has been stripped of any personally identifiable information and non-human NPD meant any information that did not contain any personally identifiable information in the first place (eg. weather data). The final report of the NPD Committee is awaited but the Committee came out with a <a href="https://static.mygov.in/rest/s3fs-public/mygov_160922880751553221.pdf">revised draft</a> of its recommendations in December 2020. In its December 2020 report, the NPD Committee proposed the creation of a National Data Protection Authority (‘NPDA’) as it felt this is a new and emerging area of regulation. Thereafter, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (‘JPC’) came out with its <a href="http://164.100.47.193/lsscommittee/Joint%20Committee%20on%20the%20Personal%20Data%20Protection%20Bill,%202019/17_Joint_Committee_on_the_Personal_Data_Protection_Bill_2019_1.pdf">version of the Data Protection Bill </a>where it amended the short title of the PDP Bill 2019 to Data Protection Bill, 2021 widening the ambit of the Bill to include all types of data. The JPC report focuses only on human NPD, noting that non-personal data is essentially derived from one of the three sets of data - personal data, sensitive personal data, critical personal data - which is either anonymized or is in some way converted into non-re-identifiable data.</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">On February 21, 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MEITY’) came out with the <a href="https://www.meity.gov.in/content/draft-india-data-accessibility-use-policy-2022">Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy, 2022</a> (‘Draft Policy’). The Draft Policy was strongly criticised mainly due to its aims to monetise data through its sale and licensing to body corporates. The Draft Policy had stated that anonymised and non-personal data collected by the State that has “<a href="https://www.medianama.com/2022/06/223-new-data-governance-policy-privacy/">undergone value addition</a>” could be sold for an “appropriate price”. During the Draft Policy’s consultation process, it had been withdrawn several times and then finally removed from the website.<a href="https://www.meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/Draft%20India%20Data%20Accessibility%20and%20Use%20Policy_0.pdf"> The National Data Governance Framework Policy</a> (‘NDGF Policy’) is a successor to this Draft Policy. There is a change in the language put forth in the NDGF Policy from the Draft Policy, where the latter mainly focused on monetary growth. The new NDGF Policy aims to regulate anonymised non-personal data (‘NPD’) kept with governmental authorities and make it accessible for research and improving governance. It wishes to create an ‘India Datasets programme’ which will consist of the aforementioned datasets. While MEITY has opened the draft for public comments, is a need to spell out the procedure in some ways for stakeholders to draft recommendations for the NDGF policies in an informed manner. Through this piece, we discuss the NDGF Policy in terms of issues related to the absence of a comprehensive Data Protection Framework in India and the jurisdictional overlap of authorities under the NDGF Policy and DPB.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">What the National Data Governance Framework Policy Says</h2>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Presently in India, NPD is stored in a variety of governmental departments and bodies. It is difficult to access and use this stored data for governmental functions without modernising collection and management of governmental data. Through the NDGF Policy, the government aims to build an Indian data storehouse of anonymised non-personal datasets and make it accessible for both improving governance and encouraging research. It imagines the establishment of an Indian Data Office (‘IDO’) set up by MEITY , which shall be responsible for consolidating data access and sharing of non-personal data across the government. In addition, it also mandates a Data Management Unit for every Ministry/department that would work closely with the IDO. IDO will also be responsible for issuing protocols for sharing NPD. The policy further imagines an Indian Data Council (‘IDC’) whose function would be to define frameworks for important datasets, finalise data standards, and Metadata standards and also review the implementation of the policy. The NDGF Policy has provided a broad structure concerning the setting up of anonymisation standards, data retention policies, data quality, and data sharing toolkit. The NDGF Policy states that these standards shall be developed and notified by the IDO or MEITY or the Ministry in question and need to be adhered to by all entities.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">The Data Protection Framework in India</h2>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">The report adopted by the JPC, felt that it is simpler to enact a single law and a single regulator to oversee all the data that originates from any data principal and is in the custody of any data fiduciary. According to the JPC, the draft Bill deals with various kinds of data at various levels of security. The JPC also recommended that since the Data Protection Bill (‘DPB’) will handle both personal and non-personal data, any further policy / legal framework on non-personal data may be made a part of the same enactment instead of any separate legislation. The draft DPB states that what is to be done with the NDP shall be decided by the government from time to time according to its policy. As such, neither the DPB, 2021 nor the NDGF Policy go into details of regulating NPD but only provide a broad structure of facilitating free-flow of NPD, without taking into account the <a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-comments-revised-npd-report/view">specific concerns</a> that have been raised since the NPD committee came out with its draft report on regulating NPD dated December 2020.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Jurisdictional overlaps among authorities and other concerns</h2>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Under the NDGF policy, all guidelines and rules shall be published by a body known as the Indian Data Management Office (‘IDMO’). The IDMO is set to function under the MEITY and work with the Central government, state governments and other stakeholders to set standards. Currently, there is no sign of when the DPB will be passed as law. According to the JPC, the reason for including NPD within the DPB was because of the impossibility to differentiate between PD and NPD. There are also certain overlaps between the DPB and the NDGF which are not discussed by the NDGF. NDGF does not discuss the overlap between the IDMO and Data Protection Authority (‘DPA’) established under the DPB 2021.</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Under the DPB, the DPA is tasked with specifying codes of practice under clause 49. On the other hand, the NDGF has imagined the setting up of IDO, IDMO, and the IDC, which shall be responsible for issuing codes of practice such as data retention, and data anonymisation, and data quality standards. As such, there appears to be some overlap in the functions of the to-be-constituted DPA and the NDGF Policy.</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Furthermore, while the NDGF Policy aims to promote openness with respect to government data, there is a conflict with <a href="https://opengovdata.org/">open government data (‘OGD’) principle</a>s when there is a price attached to such data. OGD is data which is collected and processed by the government for free use, reuse and distribution. Any database created by the government must be publicly accessible to ensure compliance with the OGD principles.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion</h2>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Streamlining datasets across different authorities is a huge challenge for the government and hence the NGDF policy in its current draft requires a lot of clarification. The government can take inspiration from the European Union which in 2018, came out with a principles-based approach coupled with self-regulation on the framework of the free flow of non-personal data. The <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52019DC0250&from=EN">guidance</a> on the free-flow of non-personal data defines non-personal data based on the origin of data - data which originally did not relate to any personal data (non-human NPD) and data which originated from personal data but was subsequently anonymised (human NPD). The <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52019DC0250&from=EN">regulation</a> further realises the reality of mixed data sets and regulates only the non-personal part of such datasets and where the datasets are inextricably linked, the GDPR would apply to such datasets. Moreover, any policy that seeks to govern the free flow of NPD ought to make it clear that in case of re-identification of anonymised data, such re-identified data would be considered personal data. The DPB, 2021 and the NGDF, both fail to take into account this difference.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/national-data-governance-framework-policy'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/national-data-governance-framework-policy</a>
</p>
No publisherDigvijay Chaudhary and Anamika KunduOpen DataOpen Government DataInternet GovernancePrivacy2022-06-30T13:24:35ZBlog EntryOpen Data and Land Ownership
https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership
<b>In this chapter of the recently published volume on State of Open Data, Tim Davies and Sumandro Chattapadhyay discuss how the lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems. State of Open Data, edited by Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein, and Fernando Perini, is published by African Minds and International Development Research Centre, Canada.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>State of Open Data: <a href="https://www.stateofopendata.od4d.net/" target="_blank">Website</a> and <a href="http://www.africanminds.co.za/dd-product/state-of-open-data/" target="_blank">Book</a> (Open Access)</h4>
<h4>Chapter on Open Data and Land Ownership: <a href="https://zenodo.org/record/2677839" target="_blank">Zenodo</a> (PDF)</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Key Points</h2>
<h4>- Global availability of land ownership and land deals data is patchy, but, when available, it has been used by individual citizens, entrepreneurs, civil society, and journalists.</h4>
<h4>- Over the last decade, a number of responsible data lessons have been learned. These lessons can provide guidance on how to balance transparency and privacy and on how to draw research conclusions from partial data.</h4>
<h4>- In spite of large donor investments in land registration systems, few resources are currently made available to enable open data related to these projects. There are untapped opportunities as a result.</h4>
<h4>- Lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems.</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership'>https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataFeaturedOpenness2019-05-22T11:32:18ZBlog EntryTalks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young
https://cis-india.org/openness/events/talks-by-richard-abisla-and-kaliya-young
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society will be hosting public talks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young, who are both 2019 India-U.S. Public Interest Technology Fellows at New America at its Bangalore office on March 4, 2019.</b>
<p>The event is over. <a class="external-link" href="https://twitter.com/cis_india/status/1102863819288666112">Pictures of the speakers were posted on Twitter</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h3>Agenda</h3>
<ul>
<li>4:30 - 5:10 p.m.: "Open Data from Below: Civil Society and Open Data" by Richard Abisla</li>
<li>5:10 - 5:50 p.m.: "Exploring the Domains of Identity and Emerging Open standards for Decentralized Identity" by Kaliya Young</li>
</ul>
<h2>The Talks</h2>
<h3>"Open Data from Below: Civil Society and Open Data" by Richard Abisla</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Often NGOs and Civil Society Organizations' roles in the Open Data movement are considered to be solely last mile training with citizens. This talk will give examples from the TechSoup Global Network of how NGOs act to prioritize, organize, and create open data sets that can exist alongside official data sources, or become official government data. The talk will explore barriers to opening up data, both from within government and civil society, and possible solutions. For more info <a class="external-link" href="https://meet.techsoup.org/about-us/techsoup-global-network">click here</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">"Exploring the Domains of Identity and Emerging Open standards for Decentralized Identity" by Kaliya Young</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In this seminar she will share two significant pieces of her work firstly the Domains of Identity that provides a clear picture of all the different domains individual's data ends up in databases. This can serve as the basis of a dialogue about the proper relationship between different domains. Secondly she has been at the heart of a community developing new Decentralized Identity Technology standards and will share more about them and how they can enable a many-to-many exchange of verifiable credentials between individuals and the institutions they interact with.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">The Speakers</h2>
<h3>Richard Abisla</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Richard Abisla is a 2019 India-U.S. Fellow at New America. Abisla is currently the Portfolio Manager for the Americas at Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup. Abisla has a long history of working alongside local communities to help them access digital information and education and integrate technology into both their work and lives. He has created and directed technology education and adoption programs in Honduras, Jamaica, Chicago, and San Francisco, all the while focusing on increasing access to digital resources for those who need them most. Most recently, Abisla has focused on working with librarians and library users in Brazil to create applications and processes that help solve local problems through open data resources, as well as training librarians to integrate human-centered design principles into their work in order to plan more impactful programming.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Kaliya Young</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Kaliya Young is a 2019 India-U.S. Fellow at New America. Young is one of the world’s leading experts on decentralized or self-sovereign identity technology. She is the author of A Comprehensive Guide to Self-Sovereign Identity and currently holds the position of adjunct professor at Merritt College where she is developing a curriculum about identity. For the last 15 years, she has worked within the industry to catalyze the formation of a new layer of the internet designed to serve individuals. She began sketching out distributed social networks in 2003 and co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 with Doc Searls and Phil Windley. More details can be <a class="external-link" href="https://www.newamerica.org/our-people/kaliya-young/">found here</a>. She is also known as <a class="external-link" href="https://www.identitywoman.net/">Identity Woman</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/events/talks-by-richard-abisla-and-kaliya-young'>https://cis-india.org/openness/events/talks-by-richard-abisla-and-kaliya-young</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpen DataEventOpenness2019-03-07T23:59:25ZEventCIS Signs MoU with Odia Virtual Academy
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-signs-mou-with-odia-virtual-academy
<b>On October 26, 2018, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Odia Virtual Academy (OVA) to work on drafting an open content policy for the state, to promote use of Wikimedia projects by various user types and to ensure sustainability of Wikimedia projects, and to facilitate development of relevant free and open source software projects. This partnership between OVA and CIS will be carried out from December 2018 to November 2019, and we are sharing an overview of the activities and their objectives in this post.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The internet is increasingly significant as a knowledge repository today. Especially relevant in this context is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which contains information on almost every topic under the sun, across many languages spoken globally, and is used extensively all people to seek information and produce knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From past one year (since July 2017), The Government of Odisha has been actively participating in the open knowledge movement by publishing the content of their seven websites and eight social media accounts under Creative Commons 4.0 International license. This active collaboration with Government of Odisha and an active Odia Wikimedia community seeking to create and distribute knowledge in Odia language over the internet has resulted in improving 1,200 articles on different Wikimedia projects, and together has received a near about 16 Million page views. Further, the Government of Odisha adopting an open content policy will provide a significant boost in institutionalising creation, sharing, and re-use of open knowledge resources - including government documents, official statistics, open educational resources, and open cultural resources - in Odia language.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://ova.gov.in/en/" target="_blank">Odia Virtual Academy (OVA)</a> is an organisation established by Government of Odisha for development, promotion and popularization of Odia language, literature, and lexicography for general use. It is an organised initiative to encourage expeditious evolution and popularisation of Odia books, magazines, journals, old songs, manuscripts, assembly speeches, and archival records by digitising and providing internet based resources and opportunities for all odia people living across the globe.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On October 26, 2018, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) signed a MoU with the Odia Virtual Academy to work on drafting an open content policy for the state, to promote use of Wikimedia projects by various user types and to ensure sustainability of Wikimedia projects, and to facilitate development of relevant free and open source software projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This partnership between OVA and CIS will be carried out from December 2018 to November 2019, and its activities are structured by the following objectives:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open Content Policy for the Government of Odisha:</b> The open content policy will include guidelines for the use of open licenses and open standards to enable the resource (text, resources or otherwise) publishing entity to share resources in a manner that it can be easily and freely be accessed, shared, and re-used by entities, without asking for prior permission, while ensuring that full attribution to the creator/publisher is provided and the resources are not misused, or the creator/publisher is not misrepresented in the process.<br /><br /></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Developing Digital and Open Knowledge Resources in Odia Language:</b> The CIS team will undertake awareness-building, training, and outreach activities to develop Odia language content on Wikimedia ecosystem, as well as to enable content creators from across institutions, with a focus on state government officials at district headquarters and college students. The broad mandate of the digital resource generation workshop is to introduce teachers, students, and interested citizens to tools of collaborative knowledge production on the internet and methods for generating new online content or reintroduce offline content in Odia language.<br /><br /></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>‘Revive Odia’ Activities:</b> Odia as a language has a long tradition and has been medium of expression for the native speakers of Odisha. While Odia as a language of communication is not under any immediate threat, its role and responsibility as a language of Knowledge needs to be examined carefully. ‘Revive Odia’ activities have a simple objective: <i>To bring Odia under limelight in the digital domain</i>. Wikimedia projects in Odia language are working actively to increase the presence of Odia language on the Internet. If such projects can be supported new projects can be incubated, Odia will emerge as the language of knowledge production and distribution as well.<br /><br /></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Partnerships:</b> Wikimedia ecosystem offer several platforms for using the power and opportunities of internet to (digitally) preserve, enable access to, and creative re-use of historical, cultural, and social artefacts, and channel the expertise of local populations to build narratives around these artefacts. The CIS team is particularly interested in initiating engagement with public GLAM institutions at various locations and levels, and work with academic and research community to build scientific metadata of these objects. The metadata will be used to represent the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Odisha in projects such as Wikidata.<br /><br /></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Building and Supporting FOSS for Odia Language:</b> To promote and enable usage of Odia language on the web, the CIS team will facilitate development of an Odia font, an input tool, and a spell-check dictionary - all of which will be released as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) resources.</li>
</ul>
<p>To undertake these activities, CIS will receive a grant of Rs 20,00,000 (~$28,000) from OVA.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-signs-mou-with-odia-virtual-academy'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-signs-mou-with-odia-virtual-academy</a>
</p>
No publishersaileshOpen Educational ResourcesCIS-A2KOpen LicenseAccess to KnowledgeOpen DataWikipediaOpen ContentOdia WikipediaOpen AccessWikimedia2018-12-20T00:24:44ZBlog EntryAn open data ecosystem can boost India's GDP by $22 B and double farmer income
https://cis-india.org/openness/news/your-story-sohini-mitter-may-22-2-018-open-data-ecosystem-can-boost-indias-gdp-22-b-double-farmer-income
<b>MeiTY says increased data transparency will drive growth and improve governance across key industry sectors in the time to come. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://yourstory.com/2018/05/open-data-ecosystem-can-boost-indias-gdp-22-b-double-farmer-income/">Your Story</a> on May 22, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">YES Bank in association with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has released a study that says an ‘open data ecosystem’ can grow India’s GDP by $22 billion by 2020. It could impact critical sectors like agriculture and double farmer income by reducing wastage and system inefficiencies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The report titled <i>Open Government, Open Data – Re-imagining India</i> observes that farmers’ income could be twice of what it is in less than five years from now. Universal Health coverage could be strengthened, and micro-loans could be disbursed to millions of MSMEs more effectively through a well-functioning open data ecosystem.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Empirical evidence shows that open data has aided agriculture world over. Combined with agricultural knowledge, remote sensing, and mapping, it helps create early warning systems for farmers. That enables them in “protecting crops from pests and extreme weather, increasing yields, monitoring water supplies, and anticipating changes brought on by climate change,” <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/04/26/open-data-can-transform-farmers-response-to-crisis" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">according</a> to the World Bank.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While India was among the first countries in the world to set up an <a href="https://data.gov.in/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Government Data</a> (OGD) platform that offered open and free access to data and information released by over 100 government departments, there have been loopholes in the project that has led to data being restricted in some cases. At present, OGD houses info-sets from 180,543 ministry resources and is presided over by a hundred-plus data officers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">YES Bank has recommended steps to eliminate the existing gaps and boost usage of OGD to improve governance across sectors. It has also said that emerging technologies like Blockchain, Machine Learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT) would drive further efficiencies in the open data ecosystem, and lead to more tech-focused innovation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One such innovation has been brought about by Silicon Valley agri startup, Harvesting, that recently launched its India operation. <a href="https://yourstory.com/2018/03/silicon-valley-startup-harvesting-plans-bridge-farm-finance-deficit-india">Harvesting uses remote sensing and geo-spatial imagery</a> along with existing farmer data to monitor farmlands, assess them in real-time, and send out reports and analysis to all stakeholders, including farmers, agri lenders, rural banks, and so on.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Harvesting Founder-CEO Ruchit Garg told<i> YourStory</i>,</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">
<p>“There are over 500 million small farm-holders in emerging markets that feed 80 percent of the world. But there is a data asymmetry in the agricultural value chain. Most problems arise because of a massive data deficit. We started to look at how this could be solved by leveraging data and technology.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Besides industries, the open data is available for citizen access too, and that is important.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rana Kapoor, MD and CEO, Yes Bank, said,</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">
<p>“Data is collected from citizens for citizen welfare and should therefore be shared with them. Secondly, data like Government budget usage, welfare schemes and subsidies increases transparency, thereby building greater trust.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">YES Bank also recommends more public-private partnerships (PPP) for open data to be fully utilised. It proposes the formation of an Open Data Council comprising representatives from private and public sectors as well as technology service providers. The council would be chaired by MeitY and will work towards the identification of ‘priority sectors’ which require data digitisation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But, merely having large amounts of open data sets is not enough. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) sounds a word of caution.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a separate report titled <i>Open Government Data Study: India</i>, the CIS states,</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">
<p>“To ensure the relevance of open government data, mechanisms have to be put in place to take its benefits to ordinary people and to marginalised communities. Simply putting up raw data will not suffice.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The report notes that a richer open data ecosystem can be created by harnessing records and information from rural internet kiosks, community e-centres, e-healthcare, geographic information systems (GISs), dairy sector applications, teacher training programmes, online agricultural systems, wireless local loop solutions, databases of rural innovations, land property registrations, women and children’s services, and more.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/news/your-story-sohini-mitter-may-22-2-018-open-data-ecosystem-can-boost-indias-gdp-22-b-double-farmer-income'>https://cis-india.org/openness/news/your-story-sohini-mitter-may-22-2-018-open-data-ecosystem-can-boost-indias-gdp-22-b-double-farmer-income</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpen DataAccess to KnowledgeOpenness2018-05-23T14:37:55ZNews ItemOn World Water Day - Open Data for Water Resources
https://cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources
<b>Lack of open data for researchers and activists is a key barrier against ensuring access to water and planning for sustainable management of water resources. In a collaboration between DataMeet and CIS, supported by Arghyam, we are exploring the early steps for making open data and tools to plan for water resources accessible to all. To celebrate the World Water Day 2018, we are sharing what we have been working on in the past few months - a paper on open data for water studies in India, and a web app to make open water data easily explorable and usable. Craig Dsouza led this collaboration, and authored this post.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Project Blog: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/" target="_blank">Open Water Data
for Integrated Water Science</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Summary: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2017/12/31/OWD-Paper/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Full Paper: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/docs/open-water-data-paper.pdf" target="_blank">Read</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App: <a href="https://water-data-web-app.appspot.com/" target="_blank">View</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App - Tech Stack: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/tech/2017/12/08/OWD-Web-App-Tech-Stack/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App - Precipitation Data: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2018/01/05/OWD-Web-App-Precipitation-Data/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<hr />
<p>The 22nd of March is celebrated internationally as World Water Day. Water is so tightly intertwined in every aspect of our lives that one can only scratch the surface in understanding this resource. Besides directly giving us life, it is a key non-renewable shared resource that dictates whether and how societies can grow and prosper. It has shaped the way civilization arose - on riverbanks and coastal lands. Adequate water of good quality can make or break a child’s early growth. Water available at the right time in the monsoon could shape a family’s fortunes for an entire year.</p>
<p>Unfortunately given the development trajectory of the last century, we have struggled to strike a balance and use water in a sustainable manner. Far too many face the ill effects of this misuse. The challenge with water lies in its nature as a common pool resource, which means that it belongs to everyone. Water is for everyone to benefit from and conversely it is no individual’s responsibility to manage and to ensure its sustainability. While some laws and policies exist to ensure sustainable use of water its fluid (pun intended) and ephemeral nature make those laws very hard to enforce. No one knows for sure how much water lies under the ground and above the surface, we only have estimates. Moreover even these estimates lie in the hands of a few. The Government of India is by far the largest entity that collects data on water across the country. Management of this resource however requires that these data points and the capacity to monitor should be decentralized. The 73rd amendment recognises this by placing the authority to plan and implement local works such as watershed management and drinking water provision under the purview of Panchayats.</p>
<p>To address this shortcoming Datameet and CIS in collaboration have taken first steps with a project to ensure that data and tools to plan for water resources are accessible to all. The strategy within this project has been to seek alternative data sources for water, other than government data much of which still isn’t open data. Two alternatives that have emerged are remote sensing open data and crowdsourced community data. A <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2017/12/31/OWD-Paper/" target="_blank">paper</a> put together by the team highlights the numerous sources available for datasets such as rainfall, soil moisture, groundwater levels, reservoir storages, river flows, and water demand including domestic and agricultural water. Besides the paper the team has also put together a first iteration of a <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2018/01/05/OWD-Web-App-Precipitation-Data/" target="_blank">web app</a> which seeks to provide these datasets in an easy to use intuitive and interactive format to users in the area of water planning and management. The first dataset available here is <a href="http://chg.geog.ucsb.edu/data/chirps/" target="_blank">CHIRPS</a>: a high resolution daily rainfall dataset for the whole of India.</p>
<p>The plans for this project in the future include making available more datasets (crop maps and Evapotranspiration) and features to access them. In addition to this the goal is also to improve our understanding of the usability of remote sensing water data with efforts to calibrate it with ground observations. A key element of these plans is to develop these resources in collaboration with end users of the data so that the tools are developed with their concerns in mind. <strong>We welcome ideas, queries, feedback, and partnerships - do contact us at <a href="mailto:pune@datameet.org">pune@datameet.org</a></strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources'>https://cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen Water DataOpen DataOpen ScienceOpen Government DataEnvironmentFeaturedOpennessHomepage2019-01-28T14:41:51ZBlog EntryOpen Data and Land Ownership - Environment Scan
https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership-environment-scan
<b>The State of Open Data is an ambitious research project reflecting on 10 years of action on open data and providing a critical review of the current state of the open data movement across a range of issues and thematic areas. This environment scan represents the first step in gathering information to support a review of the state of open data with regard to land ownership, and in refining the focus of a chapter. The lead author for this chapter is Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Comments and suggestions: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1teylHd_r-Kan9erpiCb9sHTNKpRv5QwXFE4INjcBDqU/edit#" target="_blank">Environment Scan</a> (Google Drive)</h4>
<h4>State of Open Data: <a href="https://medium.com/@stateofopendata/the-state-of-open-data-join-the-investigation-b223edef2a8a"> Join the Investigation!</a></h4>
<h4>State of Open Data on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/stateofopendata">@stateofopendata</a></h4>
<hr />
<h2>Issues</h2>
<h3><strong>[Gap] Land Ownership data is mostly closed</strong></h3>
<p>Land Ownership data ranks as the least likely data to be available in an open format and under open license (across the world) among the fifteen types of data tracked by <a href="https://index.okfn.org/dataset/">Global Open Data Index</a> developed by Open Knowledge International. Similarly, the latest Global Report of the Open Data Barometer initiative of World Wide Web Foundation finds Land Ownership to be the least open of different categories of data that are essential for ensuring government accountability – only 1% of countries surveyed were found to open up Land Ownership data as opposed to 10% of countries opening up Budget data, and 11% of countries opening up Election Results data (http://opendatabarometer.org/4thedition/report/#table7). Both these findings indicate that Land Ownership data is among the most closed categories of data that are needed globally for ensuring accountability and transparency, as well as for tracking shifts in the distribution of national wealth.</p>
<h3><strong>[Gap] Global paucity of reliable information about cross-border investments in and shifts in ownership of land</strong></h3>
<p>While initiatives like Land Matrix have spearheaded greater availability of open data about global cross-border investments in land and resulting shifts in ownership patterns, researchers have pointed out the limited accuracy and methodological reflexivity in the production of such data sets, and highlighted the possibility of them representing "an instance of '<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2013.799465">false precision</a>'". A recent article in <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/df31f666-0a43-3a0e-a747-ec72f2efb40c">Financial Times</a> notes that “[t]here is plenty of debate over the accuracy of this [open-source data of agricultural land sales]. Official data sources vary widely from country to country, while land deals themselves are notoriously opaque and fluid. Media reports about the leasing or buying of land often lack clairity."</p>
<h3><strong>[Progress] Collaborative and incremental development of extensive and intensive monitoring of openness of land ownership data across countries</strong></h3>
<p>There are several recent examples of collaborative efforts to better collect, organise, and recognise open land ownership data, which indicate at a growing momentum to address this critical weak link in the global open data agenda. Key initiatives include the <a href="https://blog.okfn.org/2017/06/09/what-data-do-we-need-the-story-of-the-cadasta-godi-fellowship/">GODI Fellowship</a> established by Cadasta Foundation and Open Knowledge International, a focus on <a href="https://opendatacharter.net/agriculture-open-data-package/section-2-towards-open-data-infrastructure-agriculture/socio-economic-data/land-use-productivity-data/">Land Use and Productivity Data</a> as part of the Agricultural Open Data Package of the International Open Data Charter, and the work of Land Portal in the Mekong region to develop a <a href="http://www.godan.info/sites/default/files/documents/Godan_Success_Stories_1_Land%20portal%20offers%20innovation%20in%20land%20governance%20through%20open%20data.pdf">common land information vocabulary</a>, especially in a region marked by "its disparate languages and range of national priorities [and] the need to communicate effectively about complex land issues across borders and between individuals with different skill sets".</p>
<h3><strong>[Progress] Success of the Access Land campaign in California, USA:</strong></h3>
<p>"<a href="http://accessland.org/">Access Land</a> is a coalition of 50+ organizations committed to increasing access to our public land through open data. This summer, both the Federal Government and California State Parks released reservation contracts that require open data and plans to engage third party partners – redefining how the public accesses their land forever. Unlocking park data empowers entrepreneurs of all backgrounds to build unique applications that better connect the public to their land. By reaching a wider and more diverse demographic, visitation to our parks will rise, boosting revenue and ensuring the future relevance and sustainability of our public land. <a href="https://medium.com/@alyraz/open-data-for-93af9d3d30aa">Open data is the key</a> to inspiring the next generation of park supporters."</p>
<h3><strong>[Progress] HM Land Registry, Government of UK, publishing Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data and Overseas Companies Ownership Data for free</strong></h3>
<p>On November 7, 2017, the land records authority of UK (<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hm-land-registry-makes-commercial-ownership-data-free">HM Land Registry</a>) started free sharing of two of its land ownership data sets: the Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data and Overseas Companies Ownership Data, which "contain more than 3 million rows of data and include the address, company’s name, price paid and country of incorporation along with other useful information." The decision is expected to "support growth in the property technology (PropTech) sector and among small and medium-sized enterprises."</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Who?: Stakeholders, networks, community</h2>
<h3><strong>Cadasta Foundation</strong></h3>
<p>"Develops and promotes the use of simple digital tools and technology to help partners efficiently document, analyze, store, and share critical land and resource rights information. By creating an accessible digital record of land, housing and resource rights, we help empower individuals, organizations, communities, and governments with the information they need to make data-driven decisions and put vulnerable communities and their needs on the map… Cadasta is dedicated to working in such settings to help partners use simple, low-cost, high-tech tools to efficiently and effectively document their land and resource rights — incrementally strengthening their rights to land. This documentation creates an evidence base and advocacy case for vulnerable communities’ claims to the land. Such documentation can make it less likely that communities will be displaced and can serve to support demands for compensation should communities be displaced. We use and create versatile digital tools for a myriad of purposes from certifying sustainable agricultural production to creating a digital land registry that secures land rights for millions of people."</p>
<blockquote>"Cadasta Foundation is developing an <strong>open platform, informed by the Social Tenure Domain Model</strong>, for documenting land and resource rights. Through the development of an ecosystem of partners, technology and data, the platform is designed to allow the direct capture and documenting of land rights through a global open platform that is secure, cost effective and transparent. The foundation’s perspective is informed by years of experience working with formal land administration processes and national-level land information systems, as well as working with volunteered geographic information to develop robust and upto-date datasets. At Cadasta, the focus is twofold – providing the repository and tools necessary to document the rights of those left out of the formal system, while also serving as a portal for open datasets in land and other resources, such as extractives, forestry and agricultural investment concessions, where they exist."</blockquote>
<p>Supported by the Department for International Development of Government of UK and the Omidyar Network</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://cadasta.org/">http://cadasta.org/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Global Land Alliance</strong></h3>
<p>"The mission of Global Land Alliance is to enable the prosperity of people and places by advancing learning and practice to achieve land tenure security and the efficient, inclusive and sustainable use of land and natural resources. We aim to accelerate quality development by resolving land issues with new paradigms of participation and accountability… Global Land Alliance takes the traditional think tank model a step forward, not only producing new understanding and recommendations based on on-the-ground perspectives of citizens, community leaders and businesses, but also channeling those learnings toward practical implementation at scale. By scaling and speeding up resolution of land issues, we can scale up and speed up improved results in the big issues of our time: urbanization, food security, environmental sustainability and peace."</p>
<blockquote>"<a href="http://www.prindex.net/">PRIndex, the Global Property Rights Index</a>, is a collaborative initiative between Global Land Alliance and the Overseas Development Institute to develop and roll out the first global measurement of peoples’ perceptions of their property rights. PRIndex is establishing a global and national-level baseline of perceptions of land tenure security. This baseline will provide the grounding for a global conversation and movement around securing the property rights of billions who currently lack them."</blockquote>
<p>Supported by Inter-American Development Bank, Omidyar Network, Department for International Development of Government of UK, the World Bank, Overseas Development Initiative, and others</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.globallandalliance.org/">http://www.globallandalliance.org/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Global Land Tool Network</strong></h3>
<p>"The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) is an alliance of international partners committed to increasing access to land and tenure security for all, with a particular focus on the poor and women. The Network’s partners include international civil society organizations, research and training institutions, bilateral and multilateral organizations, and international professional bodies… GLTN develops, disseminates and implements pro-poor and gender-responsive land tools. These tools and approaches contribute to land reform, good land governance, inclusive land administration, sustainable land management, and functional land sector coordination."</p>
<blockquote>"Throughout the world, land provides a primary source of income, food security, cultural identity and shelter. It also serves as a fundamental asset for the economic empowerment of the poor and provides a safety net in times of hardship. To enhance access to information and awareness by land and data community and the wider stakeholders around land indicators in the SDGs and related processes for their monitoring, GLTN in collaboration with Land Portal Foundation produced the <a href="https://landportal.org/book/sdgs">Land and SDGs dashboard</a>."</blockquote>
<p>Facilitated by UN-Habitat; currently implementing programmes supported by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Government of Norway, SIDA, Government of the Netherlands, and UN-Habitat</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://gltn.net/home/">https://gltn.net/home/</a></p>
<h3><strong>International Land Coalition</strong></h3>
<p>"A global alliance of civil society and intergovernmental organisations working together to put people at the centre of land governance. The shared goal of ILC's over 200 members is to realise land governance for and with people at the country level, responding to the needs and protecting the rights of women, men and communities who live on and from the land."</p>
<p>Supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Government of Germany, EU, IFAD, Irish Aid, American Jewish World Service, Belgian Fund for Food Security, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SIDA, and others.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.landcoalition.org/">http://www.landcoalition.org/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Land Matrix</strong></h3>
<p>"A global and independent land monitoring initiative. Our goal is to facilitate an open development community of citizens, researchers, policy-makers and technology specialists to promote transparency and accountability in decisions over land and investment... [The website functions as a] Global Observatory - an open tool for collecting and visualising information about large-scale land acquisitions."</p>
<p>Supported partly by the internal resources of the partner organisations, and partly by Oxfam, SDC, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, BMZ and European Commission; designed and developed by Sinnwerkstatt in partnership with Tactical Studios at Tactical Technology Collective.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://landmatrix.org/en/">http://landmatrix.org/en/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Land Portal Foundation</strong></h3>
<p>"Works to create a better information ecosystem for land governance through a platform based on cutting-edge linked and open data technologies. We help partners to create, curate and disseminate land governance data and information to become part of a more inclusive information landscape. Current information sources are often fragmented, represent a restricted set of perspectives, and are not structured, curated and licensed in ways that support maximum discovery, engagement and reuse."</p>
<p>The Foundation is hosted by University of Groningen, The Netherland; supported by the Department for International Development of Government of UK, International Land Coalition, and the Global Land Tool Network.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://landportal.org/">https://landportal.org/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Open Land Contracts</strong></h3>
<p>"An online repository of publicly available contracts for large-scale land, agriculture, and forestry projects. The repository includes the full text of contracts; plain language summaries (also referred to as "annotations") of each contract’s key social, environmental, human rights, fiscal, and operational terms; and tools for searching and comparing contracts. Launched in October 2015, OpenLandContracts.org promotes greater transparency of land-based investments, facilitates a better understanding of the contracts that govern them, and provides useful tools for governments, communities, companies, and other stakeholders."</p>
<p>An initiative of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), a joint center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, USA; supported by UKaid from the Department for International Development, Government of UK.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.openlandcontracts.org/">http://www.openlandcontracts.org/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Radiant</strong></h3>
<p>"Radiant launched operations in August 2016 to answer the call for open access to geospatial data, with analytical tools for global development practitioners designed to improve decision-making, and to foster entrepreneurship worldwide. Radiant’s geospatial technology platform will permit users to illuminate earth, literally, to allow everywhere to be "seen"; to turn the telescopes back on human activity as we enter the Anthropocene period; and to give decision-makers a scientific window into understanding global activity better. Providing the global community with these tools and data can create powerful insights and accelerate greater catalytic, evidence-based support for change."</p>
<p>Supported by Omidyar Network and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://radiant.earth/">https://radiant.earth/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Research and evidence</h2>
<p><strong>Cotula, Lorenzo, and Thierry Berger. 2017. Trends in global land use investment: Implications for legal empowerment. London, UK: IIED. Accessed from <a href="http://www.landcoalition.org/sites/default/files/documents/resources/12606iied.pdf">http://www.landcoalition.org/sites/default/files/documents/resources/12606iied.pdf</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>This report takes stock of trends in land use investments and legal empowerment responses, with a view to informing next steps for legal empowerment agendas. Drawing on a review of the available literature and global datasets, it discusses evolving patterns in land use investments, developments in investment frameworks, and implications for legal empowerment initiatives.</blockquote>
<p><strong>Ferris, Lindsay, Frank Pichel, and Neil Sorensen. 2016. Land Debate on Open Data and Land Governance. Cadasta Foundation and Land Portal. December. Accessed from <a href="https://landportal.org/pt/library/resources/report-debate-open-data-and-land-governance">https://landportal.org/pt/library/resources/report-debate-open-data-and-land-governance</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>Across most contexts, government data sources on land are largely inaccessible, from land administration data, such as parcel data and ownership information to land investments, contract data and even policy information. In considering data on property ownership specifically, the latest version of the Open Data Barometer shows only two countries, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, obtained a full 100% score on the topic of Land Ownership. When this land administration data is made available, it is commonly made public via a web portal rather than as open data. However, governments are not the sole sources of land data. For example, international organizations such as World Bank, the United Nations and numerous bi-lateral donor organizations publish land related data, while countless NGOs may participate in community mapping and policy analysis. Beyond EU Directives for geospatial datasets, common principles and processes are lacking for determining what data should be open, with often differing interpretations among EU Directives. Finally, questions of how to tackle privacy and security risks to vulnerable populations remain disputed, leading NGOs, governments and international institutions to dismiss open data entirely. However, with an ambitious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, there is an increasing need to pool data resources toward solving global challenges -- while protecting the rights of vulnerable populations. In September 2016, Cadasta Foundation and the Land Portal Foundation teamed up to facilitate a conversation on these issues. Our aims were to better understand the current landscape, potential impacts as well as illustrate the unique challenges in opening land data in order to begin figuring out the solutions. Within the Land Portal platform, we heard the points of view of 26 participants from government land agencies, international institutions and NGOs. Throughout this report, we’ve summarized the main themes that surfaced throughout the three-week Land Debate.</blockquote>
<p><strong>Ferris, Lindsay. 2017. Outputs for the Cadasta GODI Fellowship. Links to four outputs accessed from <a href="https://blog.okfn.org/2017/06/09/what-data-do-we-need-the-story-of-the-cadasta-godi-fellowship/">https://blog.okfn.org/2017/06/09/what-data-do-we-need-the-story-of-the-cadasta-godi-fellowship/</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>Throughout the fellowship, Lindsay conducted interviews with land experts, NGOs and government officials as well as on-going desk research on the land data publication practices across different contexts. She established 4 key outputs: 1. Outlining the challenges of opening land ownership data… 2. Mapping the different types of land data and their availability… 3. Assessing the privacy and security risks of opening certain types of land data… 4. Identifying user needs and creating user personas for open land data… Throughout the GODI process, our aim is to advocate for datasets that different stakeholders actually need and that make sense within the context in which they are published. For example, one of the main challenges in land ownership is that data is not always recorded or gathered by the federal level, and is collect in cities and regions. One of the primary users of land ownership data are other government agencies. Having a grasp of this type of knowledge helped us better define the land ownership dataset for the GODI. Ultimately, we developed a thoughtful definition based on these reflections and recommendations.</blockquote>
<p><strong>Hogge, Becky. 2015. “HM Land Registry: The UK’s trading funds, and two futures for open data”. In Open Data: Six Stories About Impact in the UK. November. Omidyar Network. Pp. 17-24. Accessed from <a href="https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/file_archive/insights/Open%20Data_Six%20Stories%20About%20Impact%20in%20the%20UK/OpenData_CaseStudies_Report_complete_DIGITAL_102715.pdf">https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/file_archive/insights/Open%20Data_Six%20Stories%20About%20Impact%20in%20the%20UK/OpenData_CaseStudies_Report_complete_DIGITAL_102715.pdf</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>HM Land Registry began a phased release of its data on property transactions – the Price Paid Dataset – in March 2012, and by November 2013 the entire historic record dating back to 1995 was released. The data provides much-needed transparency in a historically “murky” business, and is already being used extensively by some traditional players in the property market. Additionally, new players are consolidating around the field of proptech, developing digital tools to bring buying and selling property “out of the Stone Age”. Proptech startups attracted an estimated $1.4 billion in investment globally in 2014. PI Labs, an incubator for proptech startups, opened in London in late 2014.</blockquote>
<p><strong>Raman, Bhuvaneswari, and Zainab Bawa. 2011. Citizens Participation and Technology Interventions in Government Programmes: The Case of Nemmadi Kendras in Bangalore. SIRCA Report. Janastu. Accessed from <a href="http://tgc.janastu.org/2011/06/raman-bawa/">http://tgc.janastu.org/2011/06/raman-bawa/</a></strong></p>
<blockquote>Our findings on Nemmadi corroborates Benjamin et al (2005) suggestion that transparency of land information in contexts such as Bangalore can accentuate existing social and economic inequalities and can weaken the claims on land of relatively weaker groups in society. The reflection of the activist from Dalit Sangarsh Samithi quoted above draw attention to the fact that despite the apparent myth of uniform access to information, there are differences in terms of their ability to capture this information. Specifically, when it comes to land, it is not only about having information but also the power to displace / disposses current occupiers. Thus, power between different users affect their ability to capture this information to their advantage but more importantly, such visibility can pose new risks to the claims of relatively weaker groups. Proponents of data transparency fail to make the distinction between access to and the capture of information and the risk posed by opening up certain types of data. Based on our preliminary observations we suggest that there is need to differentiate between the types of data that is made public and the political economic context in which such information is made public. Our findings suggest the usefulness of further research on this aspect.</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<h2>Events</h2>
<h4>International workshop on Open Land Data: Mobile Apps and Geo-services for Open Soil Data</h4>
<p>Hosted by Tom Hengl and Rik van den Bosch (ISRIC – World Soil Information), and Jeff Herrick (U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service, New Mexico State University), July 2-4, 2017, Wageningen University, the Netherlands, <a href="http://gsif.isric.org/doku.php/wiki:workshop_2017">http://gsif.isric.org/doku.php/wiki:workshop_2017</a></p>
<h4>Responsible Land Governance: Towards an Evidence Based Approach</h4>
<p>Annual Word Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, Washington DC, USA, March 20-24, 2017, <a href="https://www.conftool.com/landandpoverty2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=555&presentations=show">https://www.conftool.com/landandpoverty2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=555&presentations=show</a></p>
<h4>Workshop on Open Data and Land Governance: Moving Towards an Information Ecosystem</h4>
<p>Land Portal Foundation and Cadasta Foundation, March 20, 2017, OpenGov Hub, Washington DC, USA, <a href="https://landportal.org/event/2017/03/open-data-and-land-governance-moving-towards-information-ecosystem">https://landportal.org/event/2017/03/open-data-and-land-governance-moving-towards-information-ecosystem</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Resources and funding</h2>
<h3><strong>Department for International Development, Government of UK: Land Governance for Economic Development</strong></h3>
<p>"DFID will pursue actions globally to improve land rights protection to: help ensure women and men enjoy legally recognised, secure property and tenure rights. To Improve information and knowledge to facilitate the provision of clear, transparent land related information and knowledge, enabling rights to be identified, understood and protected. To improve private sector investment through the development and rollout of a standardized investment risk assessment methodology and implementation of best practice in land governance."</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-204252/">https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-204252/</a></p>
<h3><strong>Omidyar Network – Property Rights</strong></h3>
<p>"We know why this matters: Strengthening rights to land, natural resources, and other assets empowers people to decide, based on their tacit and local knowledge, how best to use their assets. Add in increased decision-making authority with legal rights to benefit from valued uses of property, and you get improved incentives to invest in families, children, farms and businesses. It is worth underscoring that the poor – whether informal urban entrepreneurs or smallholder farmers – are by far the largest group of businesspeople in the world. And, as highlighted in the recent report Accelerating Entrepreneurship in Africa, improving property transfer procedures will strengthen business opportunities..."</p>
<p>Website: <a href="https://www.omidyar.com/investees?initiative=Property+Rights&region=All&search=#filter">https://www.omidyar.com/investees?initiative=Property+Rights®ion=All&search=#filter</a> and <a href="https://www.omidyar.com/blog/why-property-matters">https://www.omidyar.com/blog/why-property-matters</a></p>
<h3><strong>World Bank – Land</strong></h3>
<p>"The World Bank is increasingly working to open land and geospatial datasets for acceleration of growth through businesses, and improving own source local revenue creation, location-based analysis and decision-making, urban management, climate change responses, and resilience… The World Bank recognizes that national land administration systems and spatial data infrastructure are fundamental to disaster risk reduction and response by the provision of historical repository of pre-disaster land use and occupancy, location-based information as well as a unified geospatial platform for planning, monitoring, and implementing responses… The World Bank is working on land tenure as well as land and geospatial infrastructure and systems in 48 countries, with a current investment of approximately $1 billion in commitments, impacting millions of land holders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa."</p>
<p>Website: <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/land#2">http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/land#2</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership-environment-scan'>https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership-environment-scan</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroLand RecordsOpen Government DataOpennessOpen Data2018-02-12T10:37:48ZBlog EntrySteps towards Integrated Open Water Data
https://cis-india.org/openness/steps-towards-integrated-open-water-data
<b>Multiplicity of data collection agencies, formats, and disclosure practices and conditionalities make it very difficult to access interoperable and open data about water resources and systems in India. Barriers to accessing water data impede not only academic and applied research on related topics but also public consumption of information and critical decision making. DataMeet and CIS are proud to collaborate on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector. Supported by a generous grant from Arghyam, we are undertaking an initial study of open water data resources in India and taking first steps towards developing a Free and Open Source data portal for water resources information in India. Here is an initial note about the project. The key leaders and contributors of this project are Craig Dsouza, Namita Bhatawdekar, Riddhi Munde, and Jinda Sandbhor, all of whom are members of the Pune Chapter of DataMeet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Project website: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/" target="_blank">https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/</a></h4>
<h4>Contact: <a href="mailto:pune@datameet.org">pune@datameet.org</a></h4>
<hr />
<h2>The problem statement</h2>
<p>Following devastating precipitation of more than 300mm in 24 hours in early December 2015 the city of Chennai was flooded unlike anything it had seen in recent history. A combination of bad urban planning along with heavy precipitation events had made such eventualities all the more likely. But in the case of such storms what parts of the city are likely to flood? What parts will remain unaffected by the deluge. Specific answers to these questions would help city planners plan better for such emergencies.</p>
<p>Only two months after Chennai was waist deep in water, the city of Latur in 2016 ran dry. The Manjara reservoir, on the river of the same name, the city's source of municipal water supply had not a drop left. With more than 4 months left until the rains would replenish the waters of the dam, the city was now reliant on water being transported in bulk via train tankers from more than 300 kms away, news that made daily headlines. The scale of sugarcane cultivation in the region was being called into question.. Was it possible that lowering the allocation of water to irrigation could have preserved enough water for the city's domestic water needs?</p>
<p>Each of these questions call for answers relating to the exact stock of water resources, and how fast the water flows from one part of the water cycle to another. For example, knowing current soil moisture levels and daily precipitation can we estimate groundwater recharge with a high degree of accuracy? If seasonal groundwater fluctuations and river flows in a watershed or sub-basin is known can we estimate actual quantum groundwater footprint of the crop irrigated with groundwater in that river basin? If new industries are being set up in close proximity to each other what might be the effect of these industries on groundwater stocks in the vicinity.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Towards an (integrated and open) data solution</h2>
<p>Deriving cause-effect links between the scale of use of water in a particular region and its possible effect on the status of water resources in the vicinity is an extremely difficult exercise because water stocks and flows are affected by so many causal links which need to be studied and quantified in an integrated manner. An integral part of any water resource study is developing a water balance model to estimate water availability and water demand.</p>
<p><strong>Water availability</strong></p>
<ul><li>Precipitation in the form of rainfall and snowfall,</li>
<li>Live storage capacity in reservoirs,</li>
<li>Soil moisture,</li>
<li>Groundwater levels (and fluctuation), and</li>
<li>Surface water flows in rivers.</li></ul>
<p><strong>Water use/demand</strong></p>
<ul><li><strong>Domestic water use:</strong> Human Population x estimated per capita consumption (or prescribed norm for domestic water consumption),</li>
<li><strong>Livestock water use:</strong> Livestock population x estimated per capita requirement,</li>
<li><strong>Agriculture and Forests:</strong> Evapotranspiration data (derived from temperatures (daily/monthly), wind speeds, humidity (daily/monthly), soil moisture & type, type of Agricultural land use, stage of plant growth, and</li>
<li><strong>Industry:</strong> Nature of industry and annual production x water required per unit of production.</li></ul>
<p><strong>Overcoming the data challenge</strong></p>
<p>Unknown to many, reasonably high resolution data does exist of these variables both across space and time, as described in detail below. Much of this data though hasn't been made inter-operable. We need tools to model water data, putting together real-time data for water availability and demand onto one platform that can facilitate discussions around it. However what we have are either proprietary river basin modeling software (expensive) OR free open source tools (programming/skill intensive).</p>
<p>They demand:</p>
<ul><li>knowledge of programming or know-how of technical tools and unavoidably</li>
<li>knowledge of the various data sources (to piece together the puzzle)</li></ul>
<p>What if instead, we had access to a tool, open, free, accessible to everyone through a browser (hence no need to download software) and most importantly intuitive to use and understand to someone with little technical or programming knowledge.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>What we propose and who is it for?</h2>
<p>To understand and take the first steps towards developing a completely free and open source data portal for water resources information in India.</p>
<p>Different groups would have different kinds of needs for water data. Researchers for instance tend to think of larger scales (river basins, sub-basins) whereas Gram Panchayat members may not think beyond the village or watershed scale. Hence this proposal aims at macro and micro scales, trying to determine needs at each level and enhancing our platform to meet these different needs.</p>
<p>The project will generate:</p>
<ul><li>A <strong>web app prototype</strong> that will collate secondary data,</li>
<li>A <strong>paper</strong> that outlines sources of data, type of data, level to which available (GP, village, etc.) and nature of the source (Paid/ unpaid/ format available etc.), and</li>
<li>A <strong>model WSP format</strong>, along with indications for what data already exists in secondary sources.</li></ul>
<p>The users of this work will be:</p>
<ul><li>Researchers/Journalists in the water sector, and</li>
<li>Gram Panchayat Members (to effectively develop water security plans, monitor and govern their local water resources).</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Project Team</h2>
<p>The project team is supported by Nisha Thompson (Director, DataMeet) and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</p>
<h4>Craig Dsouza</h4>
<p>Craig is an independent researcher in the development sector with a keen interest in water resources and agriculture. He has a Master’s degree in Energy and Environmental Policy (2013) and has worked as a researcher with the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Mgmt, undertaking river basin studies in central and eastern India. Craig believes that the democratization of data and tools to derive insights from it holds tremendous potential for addressing issues of inequity and environmental sustainability in India. He contributes to these efforts as co-ordinator of Datameet-Pune, a city chapter of datameet.org.</p>
<p><strong>GitHub:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/craigdsouza">https://github.com/craigdsouza</a><br />
<strong>Twitter:</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/dsouza_craig">https://twitter.com/dsouza_craig</a><br />
<strong>Website:</strong> <a href="http://unravellingindia.in/">http://unravellingindia.in/</a></p>
<h4>Namita Bhatawdekar</h4>
<p>Namita is a web developer with 10 years of experience developing web applications and web-based data visualizations. She has worked on developing data Visuaizations for corporate businesses as well as in the research sector. She worked with Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Development (MIT's research lab in Singapore) as a Data Visualization expert where she visualized simulation outputs of autonomous vehicles to evaluate urban transport policies. Her work was showcased in many national and international conferences. She has a keen interest in solving social problems using data and is part of Datameet Pune, city chapter of datameet.org.</p>
<p><strong>GitHub:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/bnamita">https://github.com/bnamita</a><br />
LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/namitabhatawdekar/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/namitabhatawdekar/</a><br />
<strong>Website:</strong> <a href="https://bnamita.github.io/Portfolio/">https://bnamita.github.io/Portfolio/</a></p>
<h4>Riddhi Munde</h4>
<p>Riddhi is a GIS and Remote Sensing professional with 2.5 yrs of experience. She has a Master's degree in Geoinformatics and Earth Observation from ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Her project experience includes implementing GIS and remote sensing solutions across a number of industries. She is interested in location and remote sensing analytics, ML, Image processing, web based visualizations and is proficient in ArcGIS, QGIS, PostGIS, Web mapping, algorithm development in Python and R and cloud computing. At Datameet she contributes with her know how of remote sensing to further improve data access in water and agriculture.</p>
<p><strong>LinkedIn:</strong> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/riddhimunde/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/riddhimunde/</a></p>
<h4>Jinda Sandbhor</h4>
<p>Jinda Sandbhor is an action researcher associated with Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, Pune, where he works to document and analyze issues related to the water and energy sectors in India. He actively supports socio-political movements in Maharashtra, Odisha and North Karnataka. In the past he has conducted research studies on water conflicts around rivers and major dams, socio-economic impacts of droughts, impacts of coal based thermal power on water and the local environment. He has been associated with the Datameet-Pune chapter since its beginning in 2015 and here seeks to improve access to data on social and environmental subjects.</p>
<p><strong>Website:</strong> <a href="http://jinda.manthan-india.org/author/jinda/">http://jinda.manthan-india.org/author/jinda/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/steps-towards-integrated-open-water-data'>https://cis-india.org/openness/steps-towards-integrated-open-water-data</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen Water DataOpen DataOpen Government DataEnvironmentOpenness2017-11-02T09:58:13ZBlog EntryPraja - Enhancing Democracy Through Access to Open Data: What Are the Roles of Government and Civil Society? (Delhi, Sep 08)
https://cis-india.org/openness/news/praja-enhancing-democracy-through-access-to-open-data-what-are-the-roles-of-government-and-civil-society-delhi-sep-08
<b> Open Government Data (OGD) is widely seen to be a key hallmark of contemporary democratic practice and is often linked to the passing of freedom of information legislation. OGD is a philosophy—and increasingly a set of policies—that promotes transparency, accountability and value creation by making government data available to all. Public bodies produce and commission huge quantities of data and information. By making their datasets available, public institutions become more transparent and accountable to citizens. By encouraging the use, reuse and free distribution of datasets, governments promote business creation and innovative, citizen-centric services. Praja is organising a symposium on "open data and civil society" on Friday, Sep 8, which is supported by European Union and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung fur die Freiheit. Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Research Director) will take part in this event as a speaker in the session on "data centric approach and role of stakeholders in the urban governance ecosystem."</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Details</h4>
<p><strong>Date:</strong> Friday, September 08 2017, 9:30 am - 5:00 pm</p>
<p><strong>Venue:</strong> Juniper Hall, India Habitat Centre (Entry from Gate 1)</p>
<p><strong>Invitees:</strong> Government representatives, elected representatives, civil society organisation and media representatives.</p>
<p><strong>Event Page:</strong> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/126667714642843/?ref=br_rs">Facebook</a></p>
<h4>Objectives</h4>
<ul><li>To study the intersectionality between transparency, accountability and consumption of data by stakeholders.</li>
<li>To explore opportunities for the civil society to simplify governance through access to data, privacy of stakeholders and to address challenges faced in data collection and analysis.</li></ul>
<h4>Outcomes</h4>
<p>The takeaway from the seminar should be to develop the idea of achieving data literacy. The presenters after a detailed interaction should take away the following from the event:</p>
<ul><li>Reflections on the use of Internet and technology as tools for better governance</li>
<li>Balance the development of open data and the strategies to use this data in terms of ownership and replication of data</li>
<li>Identify data sets which should be prioritised for release in order to maximise public value</li>
<li>Data Accessibility: Capitalize on the demand for democracy and transparency by making open data more accessible to the larger public</li></ul>
<h4>Sessions</h4>
<p>Through sessions, the aim is to specifically investigate the role of civil society and media in this effort. The participants will deliberate on the above-mentioned objectives of the seminar.</p>
<p><strong>Session I:</strong> Praja Foundation Website Launch</p>
<p><strong>Session II:</strong> Data centric approach and role of stakeholders in the urban governance ecosystem</p>
<p><strong>Session III:</strong> Open data-experiences; trends, challenges and opportunities, relationship between governance and data</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/news/praja-enhancing-democracy-through-access-to-open-data-what-are-the-roles-of-government-and-civil-society-delhi-sep-08'>https://cis-india.org/openness/news/praja-enhancing-democracy-through-access-to-open-data-what-are-the-roles-of-government-and-civil-society-delhi-sep-08</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataOpen Government DataData RevolutionData GovernanceOpenness2017-09-05T10:57:38ZBlog EntryMeeting on Proactive Disclosure and Personal Data (Delhi, May 13, 5:30 pm)
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/meeting-on-proactive-disclosure-and-personal-data-delhi-may-13
<b>CIS is organising an informal discussion on topics related to proactive disclosure and personal data thrown up by the recently published report by Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali titled "Information Security Practices of Aadhaar (or lack thereof)". Please join us at 5:30 pm today, May 13, at the CIS office.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Read the report: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/information-security-practices-of-aadhaar-or-lack-thereof-a-documentation-of-public-availability-of-aadhaar-numbers-with-sensitive-personal-financial-information-1">PDF</a></h4>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Location</strong></h3>
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d876.157470894426!2d77.20553462919722!3d28.550842498903158!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0%3A0x834072df81ffcb39!2sCentre+for+Internet+and+Society!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sin!4v1493818109951" frameborder="0" height="450" width="600"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/meeting-on-proactive-disclosure-and-personal-data-delhi-may-13'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/meeting-on-proactive-disclosure-and-personal-data-delhi-may-13</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPrivacyOpen DataOpen Government DataInternet GovernancePublic Accountability2017-05-13T04:32:41ZEventSoI’s Open Series Maps Fails to Implement Public Sharing of Govt Data
https://cis-india.org/openness/survey-of-india-open-series-maps-fails-to-implement-public-sharing-of-govt-data
<b>Although it has made the topographic maps or the Open Series Maps available to general public, Survey of India’s (SoI) Nakshe portal will have to go through a variety of litmus test, as the initiative fails to implement the mandates of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012, says Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society. This interview was published by Geospatial World on May 02, 2017.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.geospatialworld.net/sois-open-series-maps-fails-implement-public-sharing-govt-data/">Geospatial World</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h4>What are your views on the Nakshe Portal initiative from Survey of India?</h4>
<p>It is a most welcome initiative by the Survey of India to realize the mandate of the National Map Policy (NMP) 2005 to publicly distribute “Open Series Maps of scales larger than 1:1 million”. The Survey of India has also drawn from and implemented the mandate of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) 2012 to make available the shareable and non-sensitive Open Series Maps documents without any necessary fees to access and use them.</p>
<p>The initiative, however, fails to achieve the goal of of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. This substantively raises the barrier to access the Open Series Maps data and reduces its possibilities of reuse, especially for commercial innovation, in a very serious way. This undermining of the open data agenda is not only a concern for the Nakshe portal in particular, but also sets a dangerous precedent for future open government data initiatives in India.</p>
<h4>What is your view on the data provided and its usability?</h4>
<p>The Nakshe portal has created several barriers to access and use of the Open Series Maps data, all of which are in violation of the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>NDSAP 2012 mandates that shareable and non-sensitive government data (such as Open Series Maps) are made public through the data.gov.in portal created under the guidance of the NDSAP 2012. Survey of India may of course decide to publish the Open Series Maps data on the Nakshe portal along with on the data.gov.in portal. Publishing of the data only through the Nakshe portal not only violates the mandate of NDSAP 2012, they make such data much less discoverable.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>NDSAP 2012 allows for “registered access” to open government data. That is, it allows for data to be shared only with users who have registered with the data publishing portal. Making registration only possible via Aadhaar number, however, significantly limits the number of users who can access this data. For example, non-Indian researchers form an important potential sub-section of users of Open Series Maps but they will not be able to access the data. The website neither has a privacy policy that clarifies how these submitted Aadhaar numbers will be stored, protected, and shared (if at all) by the Survey of India.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>NMP 2005 instructs Survey of India to “allow a user to add value to the maps obtained (either in analogue or digital formats) and prepare his own value-added maps”. The Government Open Data License has been recently notified under NDSAP 2012 to guide permitted uses of open government data in India.</p>
<p>The very restricted approach to permitted end-uses of Open Series Maps by the Survey of India neither follow the NMP instruction, nor adopt the Government Open Data License. Data available from Nakshe portal cannot be exported (which is technically an absurd demand due to globally distributed nature of servers), commercialized, or altered. This creates a most serious barrier to using the Open Series Maps data available via the Nakshe portal.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The Nakshe portal has published geospatial data in PDF format. This is a clear violation of open data practices globally and the NDSAP Implementation Guidelines more specifically, which states that open geospatial data standards, like GML and KML, should be used).</p>
</li></ul>
<h4>Does this fall in line with the larger government aim of having open and accessible data? If not why?</h4>
<p>In a nutshell, the Open Series Maps data being published on the Nakshe portal is neither open (as it does not use open standards to share the data and does not share the data under an open licenses) nor universally accessible (due to the requirement for registration via Aadhaar number).</p>
<h4>What improvements do you suggest in the approach of SoI about the portal?</h4>
<p>I have listed four major conflicts that the Nakshe portal has with the directives and guidelines offered by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. I sincerely hope that the Survey of India and the Department of Science and Technology will address them soon, as they significantly limit the ability of users to access and use the Open Series Maps data.</p>
<p>These changes will make the Open Series Maps data open, and ensure that the data can be accessed and innovated with by various stakeholders.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/survey-of-india-open-series-maps-fails-to-implement-public-sharing-of-govt-data'>https://cis-india.org/openness/survey-of-india-open-series-maps-fails-to-implement-public-sharing-of-govt-data</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataOpen Government DataGeospatial DataOpenness2017-05-04T12:19:01ZBlog EntryComments on the Statistical Disclosure Control Report
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-on-the-statistical-disclosure-control-report
<b>This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society, India (“CIS”) on the Statistical Disclosure Control Report published on March 30th by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
</b>
<p><strong id="docs-internal-guid-a12fe2b3-c746-4c1a-0287-1814414668af"><br /></strong></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">1. PRELIMINARY</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society, India (“CIS”) on the Statistical Disclosure Control Report published on March 30th by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">CIS is thankful for the opportunity to put forth its views.<br class="kix-line-break" />This submission is divided into three main parts. The first part, ‘Preliminary’, introduces the document; the second part, ‘About CIS’, is an overview of the organization; and, the third part contains the ‘Comments’.<br class="kix-line-break" /><br class="kix-line-break" /></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">2. ABOUT CIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">CIS is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, freedom of speech and expression, intermediary liability, digital privacy, and cybersecurity.<br class="kix-line-break" /><br /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">CIS values the fundamental principles of justice, equality, freedom and economic development. This submission is consistent with CIS' commitment to these values, the safeguarding of general public interest and the protection of India's national interest at the international level. Accordingly, the comments in this submission aim to further these principles.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3. Comments</h3>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3.1 General Comments</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">As a non-profit organisation we recognize the importance of the efforts by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to make the data you collect available to the public in open formats with relevant information about reliability of statistical estimates.</p>
<p><span style="text-align: justify;">We at CIS have recently released a report titled “Information Security Practices of Aadhaar (or lack thereof): A documentation of public availability of Aadhaar Numbers with sensitive personal financial information”. We encountered several central and state government departments collecting socioeconomic data from citizens, linking it with Aadhaar and even publishing them in exportable data formats like EXCEL and MS ACCESS Databases. </span><span style="text-align: justify;">While we understand this issue primarily concerns to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the lack of standards around information/statistical disclosure are a general threat to transparency in a democracy and privacy of individuals. </span><span style="text-align: justify;">Going through the report we understand the committee is unable to prescribe a standard for other ministries and departments until they try and pilot these standards within Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. This delay in prescribing the standards can be really dangerous in the current circumstances of massive data collection by government departments and linking all the databases with a unique identifier, Aadhaar Number. </span><span style="text-align: justify;">At the same time we understand the importance of data dissemination to be carried out and we recommend the following for improving the standards around data disclosure control.</span></p>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3.2 Integrity of Information and Data</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">We agree with the committee that the error rates need to be kept in mind while designing practices to convert raw data. But we request the process of changes being made be actively measured and documented. In case of errors being computed, guidelines can be made to decrease the possibilities of misinterpretation of errors causing loss of integrity of information. Statistics are important for decision making in governance, errors in computations can be biased towards millions of people. Statistical biases are important to be looked into while converting data from its raw format to make sure there are no damage caused by information.</p>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3.3 Data Security</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">One of the important issues around storage and publication of Aadhaar information is the lack of masking standards. With the availability of data from multiple departments, it is possible to reconstruct identification details by linking data from multiple databases. It is recommended to bring masking standards while personally identifiable micro data is being published. There is an urgent need for departments to also look at auditing access to information and tracking sharing of information. It is recommended the department digitally signs all the information and documents being published or shared by them to keep track of who had accessed the information and verifying the authenticity of information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">We request the department to define what exactly is “usage for statistical purposes only” and recommend standards to control and restrict usage of information for this purpose. It is important they design frameworks or mechanisms to allow others to report violations around this. This process should be transparent and documented heavily.</p>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3.4 Anonymization of microdata</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">We recommend the data being collected be anonymized at source to evade the possibility of the accidental disclosure of personally identifiable information. While the current anonymization efforts have been helpful, with steady increase in data mining and classification algorithms and practices it is recommended to evolve the standards around this area.</p>
<h4 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">3.5 Data Dissemination</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Data dissemination is an important aspect for district statistics officers, we recommend they actively communicate their work through monthly newsletters, quarterly workshops to help improve the conversations around statistics and at the same time engage with the users who would benefit from the data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">We also recommend that data when being published includes metadata of collection, modification, storage and other important information. Also the information needs to be published in open formats which does not require proprietary software to be used to open them. At the same time data should be published in multiple formats like CSV, XLS, PDF,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The committee also recognizes the need for having data users part of discussions around important decisions and be part of committees. We would like the department to recognize our efforts and consider us for future committee representations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Thank you for this opportunity and we look forward to work with you in future.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-on-the-statistical-disclosure-control-report'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-on-the-statistical-disclosure-control-report</a>
</p>
No publisherSrinivs Kodali and Amber SinhaCall for CommentsDigital AccessOpen DataOpen Government DataData ProtectionData GovernanceAadhaarDigitisationInformation SecurityOpennessInternet GovernanceData Management2019-03-13T00:28:44ZBlog EntryCBGA - Consultation on Opening Up Access to Budget Data in India (Delhi, January 27)
https://cis-india.org/openness/news/cbga-consultation-on-opening-up-access-to-budget-data-in-india-delhi-jan-27-2017
<b>Open Budgets India, a comprehensive and user-friendly open data portal to provide free, easy, and timely access to relevant data on budgets, has been developed by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) in collaboration with a number of other organisations. CBGA is organising a Consultation on “Opening Up the Access to Budget Data in India” on Friday, January 27, 2017, to launch the beta version of the portal. Sumandro Chattapadhyay will be a speaker in the panel discussion that will follow the launch.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Venue and time: Juniper Hall, India Habitat Centre (IHC), Lodhi Road, New Delhi, 1:30 pm to 5:00 pm</h4>
<h4>Event details: <a href="http://www.cbgaindia.org/event/2797/" target="_blank">Link</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Event agenda: <a href="https://cis-india.org/openness/files/cbga-consultation-on-opening-up-access-to-budget-data-in-india-delhi-january-27-agenda/at_download/file">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/news/cbga-consultation-on-opening-up-access-to-budget-data-in-india-delhi-jan-27-2017'>https://cis-india.org/openness/news/cbga-consultation-on-opening-up-access-to-budget-data-in-india-delhi-jan-27-2017</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataOpen Government DataOpenness2017-01-27T05:45:30ZBlog EntryComments on the Draft National Policy on Software Products
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society submitted public comments to the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Information & Communications Technology, Govt. of India on the National Policy of Software
Products on December 9, 2016. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>I. Preliminary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>1.</strong> This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society, India (“<strong>CIS</strong>”) on the Draft National Policy on Software Products <a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a> (“<strong>draft policy</strong>”), released by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (“<strong>MeitY</strong> ”).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>2.</strong> CIS commends MeitY on its initiative to present a draft policy, and is thankful for the opportunity to put forth its views in this public consultation period.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>3.</strong> This submission is divided into three main parts. The first part, ‘Preliminary’, introduces the document; the second part, ‘About CIS’, is an overview of the organization; and, the third part contains the comments by CIS on the Draft National Policy on Software Products.</p>
<h2>II. About CIS</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>4.</strong> CIS is a non-profit organisation <a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, freedom of speech and expression, intermediary liability, digital privacy, and cyber security.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>5.</strong> CIS values the fundamental principles of justice, equality, freedom and economic development. This submission is consistent with CIS' commitment to these values, the safeguarding of general public interest and the protection of India's national interest at the international level. Accordingly, the comments in this submission aim to further these principles.</p>
<h2>III. Comments on the Draft National Policy on Software Products</h2>
<h3><strong>General Comments</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>6.</strong> CIS commends MeitY on its initiative to develop a consolidated National Policy on Software Products. We believe that there are certain salient points in the draft policy that deserve particular appreciation for being in the interest of all stakeholders, especially the public. An indicative list of such points include:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;"><li>A focus on aiding digital inclusion via software, especially in the fields of finance, education and healthcare.</li>
<li>The recognition of the need for openness and application of open data principles in the private and public sector. Identifying the need for diversification of the information technology sector into regions outside the developed cities in India.</li>
<li>Identifying the need for innovation and original research in emerging fields such as Internet of Things and Big Data.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>7.</strong> We observe that the draft policy weighs in the favour of creating a thriving digital economy, which indeed is a commendable objective per se. However, there are certain aspects which remain to be addressed by the draft policy, to ensure that the growth of our domestic software industry truly achieves the vision set out in Digital India for better delivery of government services and maximisation of the public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>8.</strong> We submit that the proposed policy should include certain additional guiding principles to direct creation of software and its end-utilisation. These principles would ensure responsible, inclusive, judicious and secure software product life cycle by all the relevant stakeholders, including the industry, the government and especially the public. An indicative list of such principles that we believe should be explicitly included in the policy are:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;"><li>Ensuring that internationally accepted principles of privacy are followed in software development and utilisation, including public awareness.</li>
<li>Requiring basic yet sufficient standards of information security to ensure protection of user data at all stages of the software product life cycle.</li>
<li>Enforcing lingual diversity in software to allow for India’s diverse population to operate indigenous software in an inclusive manner.</li>
<li>Mandating minimum standards on accessibility in software creation, procurement and implementation to ensure sustainable use by the differently-abled.</li>
<li>Focusing on transparency & accountability in software procurement for all public funded projects.</li>
<li>Implementing the utilisation of Free and Open Source Software (“<strong>FOSS</strong>”) in the execution of public funded projects as per the mandate of the Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India; thereby incentivising the creation of FOSS for use in both private and public sector.</li>
<li>For software to be truly inclusive of the goals of Digital India, it is essential that to provide supports to Indic languages and scripts without yielding an inferior experience or results for the end user in non-English interfaces. Software already deployed should be translated and localised.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>9.</strong> The inclusion of these principles in substantive clauses of the policy will go a long way in ensuring the sustainable and transparent growth of domestic software product ecosystem.</p>
<h3><strong>Specific Comments</strong></h3>
<h4><strong>10.</strong> Development of a robust Electronic Payment Infrastructure</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>10.1.</strong> CIS observes that clauses 5.4 and 6.7 of the draft policy aim to establish a seamless electronic payment infrastructure. We submit that an electronic payment infrastructure should be designed with strong standards of information security, privacy and inclusivity (both accessibility and lingual).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>10.2.</strong> We recommend that the policy mandate minimum standards of information security, privacy and inclusivity in all payment systems across private and public sectors. The policy should, therefore, ideally specify the respective standards for these categories, for instance ISO 27001 and National Policy on Universal Electronics Accessibility <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a>, alongside other industry standards for Electronic Payment Infrastructure.</p>
<h4>11. Government Procurement</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>11.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.1 of the draft policy seeks to develop a framework for inclusion of Indian software in government procurement. It is commendable that the draft policy identifies the need for a better framework. CIS notes that the existing procurement procedure allows for usage of Indian software. In fact, the Government e-Marketplace(eGM) already has begun to incorporate some of these principles in general procurement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>11.2.</strong> Indeed, the presence of a transparent and accountable government procurement, which leverages technology and the internet, is key to ensuring a sustainable and fair market. CIS recommends that the policy refer to these guiding principles to enable the development of a viable cache of Indian software products by creating more avenues, including government procurement.</p>
<h4>12. Incentives for Digital India oriented software</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>12.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.3 of the draft policy incentivises the creation of software addressing the action pillars of the commendable Digital India programme.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>12.2.</strong> For development of superior quality software which will ensure excellent success of the Digital India programme, CIS recommends that the incentives should be provided <em>contingent </em>to the incorporation of certain minimum standards of software development. Such products and services should, <em>inter alia</em>, adhere to the stipulations under National Policy on Universal Electronics Accessibility, the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites, Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011, etc. In the process, the software should be subjected to reviews by a neutral entity to gauge the compliance with the abovementioned minimum standards.</p>
<h4>13. Increasing adoption of Open APIs and Open Data</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>13.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.6 of the draft policy promotes the use of open APIs and open data in development of e-government services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>13.2.</strong> We strongly recommend that open APIs and open data principles be adopted by software used in all government organizations, and non-commercial software . Open Data and Open APIs can serve a vital role in ensuring transparent, accountable and efficient governance, which can be leveraged in a major way within the policy by the public and civil society.</p>
<h4>14. Creation of Enabling Environment for Innovation, R&D, and IP Creation and Protection</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 8.1 of the draft policy seeks to create an enabling environment for innovation, R&D, and IP creation and protection.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.2.</strong> CIS submits that the existing TRIPS-compliant Indian intellectual property law regime is adequately designed to incentivise creativity and innovation in the area of software development. The Indian Patents Act, 1970 read with the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions, 2016 do not permit the patenting of <em>computer programmes per se</em>. Several Indian software developers, notably small and medium sized development companies have made evidence-based submissions to the government previously on the negative impact of software patenting on software innovation <a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.3.</strong> CIS recommends that the proposed policy re-affirm the adequacy of the Indian intellectual property regime to protect software development, in compliance with the TRIPS Agreement.</p>
<h2>IV. Conclusion</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>15.</strong> CIS commends the MeitY on the development of the draft policy. We strongly urge MeitY to address the issues highlighted above, especially emphasising the incorporation of essential principles such as information security, privacy, accessibility, etc. Adoption of such measures will ensure a fair balance between commercial growth of domestic software industry and the maximisation of public interest.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify;" />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. National Policy on Software Products (2016, Draft internal v1. 15) available at <a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf">http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf</a></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf">[</a><a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. See The Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a class="external-link" href="http://cis- india.org">http://cis- india.org</a> for details of the organization,and our work.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. See <a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Accessible-format-National%20Policy%20on%20Universal%20Electronics.pdf">http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Accessible-format-National%20Policy%20on%20Universal%20Electronics.pdf</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. See <a class="external-link" href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52159304.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&amp;utm_me%20dium=text&amp;utm_campaign=cppst">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52159304.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_me dium=text&utm_campaign=cppst</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products</a>
</p>
No publisherAnubha Sinha, Rohini Lakshané, and Udbhav TiwariOpen StandardsNational Software PolicyOpen SourceOpen DataInternet GovernanceOpenness2016-12-12T14:45:11ZBlog EntryICANN Begins its Sojourn into Open Data
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/icann-begins-its-sojourn-into-open-data
<b>The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced that it will now set up a pilot project in order to introduce an Open Data initiative for all data that it generates. We would like to extend our congratulations to ICANN on the development of this commendable new initiative, and would be honoured to support the creation of this living document to be prepared before ICANN 58.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To quote the ICANN blog directly, the aim of this project is to “<em>bring selected data sets into the open, available through web pages and programming APIs, for the purposes of external party review and analysis</em>” <a href="#ftn1">[1]</a>. This will play out through the setting up of three components:</p>
<ol><li>Development of a catalogue of existing data sets which will be appropriate for publication</li>
<li>Selection of the technology necessary for managing the publication of these data sets.</li>
<li>Creation of a process to prioritise the order in which the data sets are made available <a href="#ftn2">[2]</a>.</li></ol>
<h3><strong>Principles in Question</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Centre for Internet and Society firmly believes in the value of accessible, inclusive open data standards as a tool for enhancing transparency in any system. Greater transparency goes a long way towards bringing a regulatory authority closer to those who are governed under it – be it a state or a body such as ICANN. It is, in fact, an indispensable component of a multistakeholder model of governance to facilitate informed participation by all parties concerned in the decision making process.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The right to information that a regulatory authority owes those it regulates has two kinds of components. The first may be described as reactive disclosure – “<em>when individual members of the public file requests for and receive information</em>” <a href="#ftn#3">[3]</a>. The second is disclosure that is more proactive in nature – “<em>when information is made public at the initiative of the public body, without a request being filed</em>” <a href="#ftn4">[4]</a>. The former is epitomized by initiatives such as the Freedom of
Information Act <a href="#ftn5">[5]</a> in the United States, the Right to Information Act in India <a href="#ftn6">[6]</a>, or ICANN’s very own Documentary Information Disclosure Policy <a href="#ftn7">[7]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Proactive disclosure policies, on the other hand, operate out of the principle that the provision of information by those in positions of regulatory authority will ensure free and timely flow of information to the public, and the information so provided will be equally accessible to everyone, without the need for individual requests being filed <a href="#ftn8">[8]</a>. Proactive disclosure also goes a long way towards preventing officials from denying or manipulating information subsequent to publication <a href="#ftn9">[9]</a>. Scholars have touted proactive disclosure as the “<em>future of the right to know</em>” <a href="#ftn10">[10]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">At the Centre for Internet and Society, much of our research has pointed towards the direction of creating better open data standards for governments (Please see “<a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-government-data-study">Open Data Government Study: India</a>”). We are one of the Lead Stewards of the International Open Data Charter <a href="#ftn11">[11]</a> and have maintained that it is crucial for governments to maintain open data standards in the interest of transparency and accountability. We firmly believe that the same principles extend also to ICANN – a body which, as per its own by-laws commits towards operating “…<em>to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner and consistent with procedures designed to ensure fairness</em>”<a href="#ftn12">[12]</a>.</p>
<h3><strong>Suggestions</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While this policy is in its nascent stage, we would like to put forward certain principles which we believe ought to be kept in mind before it gets chalked out, in the best interest of the ICANN community:</p>
<ol><li>To determine what data sets should be made publicly accessible, it would be useful to carry out an analysis of existing DIDP requests to understand trends in the kind of information that the ICANN community is interested in accessing, which can then be proactively disclosed. It would be redundant on ICANN’s part to disclose, under this Open Data Policy, data which is already publicly available.</li>
<li>ICANN should first develop a catalog of all existing data sets with ICANN, apply the principles for deciding appropriateness for publication, then make publicly available both the full catalog, and the actual data sets identified for publication. ICANN should make clear the kind of information it is not going to make accessible
under this open data standards, and justify the principles on the basis of which it is choosing to do so (analogous to the exceptions clauses under the DIDP).</li>
<li>With respect to technology to be selected for managing the publication of data sets, free and open source software (such as CKAN) ought to be used, and open standards should be adopted for the use and licensing of such data.</li>
<li>Such data ought to be downloadable in bulk in CSV/JSON/XML formats.</li>
<li>DIDP responses and the open data work flows ought to be integrated so that all the responses to DIDP requests are automatically published in a machine-readable format as open data.</li>
<li>Qualitative (text of speeches, slides from presentations, recordings of sessions, etc.) and quantitative data should both be included under this new policy.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In conclusion, we would like to extend our congratulations to ICANN on the development of this commendable new initiative, and would be honoured to support the creation of this living document before ICANN 58.</p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<div id="ftn1">
<p>[1] Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, <em>ICANN Kicks off Open Data Initiative Pilot</em>, (November 6, 2016), available at <a href="https://www.icann.org/news/blog/icann-kicks-off-open-data-initiative-pilot">https://www.icann.org/news/blog/icann-kicks-off-open-data-initiative-pilot</a> (Last visited on November 9, 2016).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p>[2] Id.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p>[3] Naniette Coleman, <em>Proactive vs. Reactive Transparency</em>, (February 8, 2010), available at: <a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/proactive-vs-reactive-transparency">http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/proactive-vs-reactive-transparency</a> (Last visited on November 9, 2016).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p>[4] Id.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p>[5] Freedom of Information Act, 1966, 5 U.S.C. § 552.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p>[6] Right to Information Act, 2005 <em>available at</em> http://righttoinformation.gov.in/rti-act.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p>[7] ICANN, <em>Documentary Information Disclosure Policy</em>, available at <a href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/didp-2012-02-25-en">https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/didp-2012-02-25-en</a> (Last visited on November 9, 2016).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p>[8] Helen Darbishire, <em>Proactive Transparency: The future of the right to information?</em> Working paper. N.p.: World Bank, (2009).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p>[9] Id.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p>[10] Darbishire, <em>supra</em> note 8.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p>[11] Open Data Charter, <em>Who We Are</em>, available at <a href="http://opendatacharter.net/who-we-are/">http://opendatacharter.net/who-we-are/</a> (Last visited on November 10, 2016).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p>[12] Article III(1), Bylaws For Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers</p>
</div>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/icann-begins-its-sojourn-into-open-data'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/icann-begins-its-sojourn-into-open-data</a>
</p>
No publisherPadmini Baruah and Sumandro ChattapadhyayOpen DataICANNinternet governance2016-11-12T01:17:24ZBlog Entry