Centre for Internet and Society

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

subha — 2012-12-07T22:40:32Z

The Centre for Internet and Society along with Odia Wikipedians in Bhubaneswar organized an Odia Wikipedia workshop on November 18, 2012. It was held in KMBB College of Engineering. Odia Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia in Odia language which everyone can edit.

Odia Wikipedians gathered in the temple city of Bhubaneswar on November 18, 2012 to organize the third Odia Wikipedia workshop in KMBB College of Engineering. KMBB College of Engineering is a BPUT affiliated engineering college supported by Ama Odisha, an organization working for media, communication and development of Odia language. Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Director-Academics, KMBB and a veteran educationalist and open source source enthusiast supported this event. Forty-five students from KMBB attended this workshop. The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.

Dr. Mishra began the session by introducing Odia Wikipedians to the students. He spoke about Open source movement, how the community supports various open source projects, how Wikipedia was started and how it is essential for students to take part in such activities. Subhashish Panigrahi briefly spoke about the history of Odia wikipedia, how it grew up in the recent years to its present state. Odia Wikipedian Manoranjan Behera discussed about how everyone can contribute to the Wikipedia.

To explain the easiness of typing in Odia, some of the students were invited to write text on a board and test the typing tool on Odia Wikipedia. A new article about the college was created and one of the students wrote few sentences. Wikipedians explained the importance of creating user accounts and demonstrated how to search an article, how to create an article and the basics of editing an article. A Question and Answer session was held for students to put their queries. At the end of the session, contact details were shared with the students and the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki) of Odia Wikipedia was shown so that students could continue editing and remain in touch with fellow wikipedians.

Odia daily “The Sambad” covered this event.

Presentation: Copy of Introduction to Wikipedia! on Prezi
Video:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar

Science Gallery Workshop @ Srishti

praskrishna — 2012-12-04T15:42:58Z

Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology is organizing a workshop to discuss the exciting potential of envisaging a Science Gallery in Bangalore as a part of the Global Science Gallery Network. Sunil Abraham is participating in this workshop.

Srishti is hosting this first workshop in collaboration with the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, which is spearheading this initiative across six cities worldwide on November 23, 2012.

Shristi is inviting multiple stakeholders in the city, including scientists, technologists and artists, to begin discussions and collaborations to conceptualize the Science Gallery in Bangalore. The Science Gallery will explore intersections of art, science and technology, through public engagement particularly the youth, to make science accessible and inspirational to all.

Click the links below for more about the Science Gallery:

http://sciencegallery.com/

http://sciencegallery.com/international

Venue
Srishti School of Art Design and Technology (N2 campus)
No. 40/A, 5th Cross, 5th Main,
Shiva Mandir Road,
Yelahanka New Town 5th Phase

Date: Friday, November 23, 2012
Time: 9.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/science-gallery-workshop

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

nitika — 2013-10-30T09:17:31Z

A Wikipedia introductory session was organised at Bharati Vidyapeeth Engineering College in Delhi early this year and a follow up session was organised by CIS on November 19, 2012. About 12 to 15 participants attended the follow up session. Although most of the participants had attended the introductory session there were a few who were coming over for the first time.

Many participants had already tried some wiki editing (such as correcting grammar, spellings, punctuations, etc.) after the introductory session but had several queries with respect to advance editing such as wiki markup, adding references, adding wiki interlinks and so on.

The main aim to conduct a follow up session was to clear these editing doubts, provide editing support and more importantly make these new editors feel a part of the wider Wikipedia community. This session gave us a brilliant opportunity to inform and encourage the participants to be part of Wikipedia mailing lists, talk page discussions, Facebook pages, current Wikipedia projects and Wiki meet ups. Participants were taught difference between article and user talk pages, leaving messages on various talk pages, how to add wiki markups, add references, add inter wiki links, send private mails to other users, page view stats, etc. The good part of organizing a session with second time participants was that they were already familiar with the workings of Wikipedia from the introductory session. They had more intelligent queries especially around editing. In addition, another big advantage was the surety that only those participants will return who are genuinely interested in wiki editing and are not just attracted towards Wikipedia brand or swags.

Albeit being a short two-hour session, the workshop provided a good platform for getting in touch with participants, helping them to gain confidence and edit Wikipedia articles, informing them of different ways in which they could be more involved.

Hopefully, next year we could revisit each of the institutions where we'd organised an introductory Wikipedia session in 2012. Though the number of participants for a follow up session might be small but it definitely guarantees more interested and more involved participants.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/follow-up-to-wikipedia-introductory-session-at-bharati-vidyapeeth

‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’

praskrishna — 2012-11-19T04:40:46Z

Wikipedia’s founder member Erik Möller says their principle is not to decide the map of India, but to explain that there is a controversy.

This article was published in Bangalore Mirror on November 15, 2012.

Erik Möller, vice-president engineering and product development, Wikimedia Foundation, is one of the founder members of Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales, since it started in 2001. Möller was in Bangalore over the weekend to speak at a technical seminar at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a local chapter of Wikimedia. He spoke about India’s role in the growth of Wikipedia not just in the sub-continent, but globally.

BM: How significant is India in the Wikipedia movement?
EM: Very significant and growing. I don’t have the data on exact number of editors based in India. However currently, 2.4 per cent of all Wikipedia edits globally are made from India. As a comparison, the UK’s is 6.5 per cent. India has overtaken Australia and (narrowly) Brazil since last year. In the 2011 fundraiser, India reached the top 10 of countries giving to the Wikimedia Foundation, with 39,000 donors from India giving the equivalent of $360,468. The 2012 fundraiser will be launched in a few days. (Interestingly, India is the only developing nation in the Top 10 contributing nations).

Does the financial support from India surprise you?
Of course not. You are a country of a billion people (laughs). I think Wikipedia appeals to a lot of cultural sensibilities, sharing of knowledge and culture. I think people here want to share.

Where does India stand in the future of Wikipedia’s roadmap?
India was identified as one of three global priority areas in our 2010-15 strategic plan (alongside Brazil and Arabic language countries). While there are active Wikipedia communities in many Asian countries, India continues to be the Foundation’s main focus area in (non-Arabic) Asia through the “Access To Knowledge (A2K)” programme conducted by CIS as our local partner, funded via a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.

From the standpoint of freedom to internet access, what do you think of Indian laws?

Depending on your interpretation, specific laws in India could be challenging, particularly in areas of mapping (geographically). We are concerned about those things, but have to run with it. We consider ourselves specifically (governed by) US laws from where we are legally published. But then, Wiki is not an advocacy organisation that goes around telling people which politician to vote for. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, it’s very important all people become educated on the issues. It’s not up to us to decide what’s the correct map of India, of course, but it is up to us to explain there is a controversy.

Are you constantly bombarded with litigation world over?

Surprisingly not.

What are the big developments happening in Wikipedia?

We are currently running two pilot projects – Wikidata and Wikivoyage. For example, today you can find out the GDP of each country on Wikipedia but cannot query and arrange countries by GDP size. Wikidata will allow you to do that. Similarly, Wikivoyage will provide matter-of-fact information on local sites that are of interest to travellers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bangalore-mirror-article-kalyan-subramani-nov-15-2012-some-indian-laws-could-be-challenging

Odia Wikipedia Gets a New Typing Solution!

subha — 2012-12-12T12:28:57Z

Subhashish Panigrahi worked with Yuvi Panda to create a new typing scheme for Odia Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This blog post gives a summary of this development and its outcome.


Odia Lekhani Phonetic Keyboard Layout

A new typing scheme Lekhani (Odia for a stylus which was used for writing on palm leaves) to be used for Odia Wikipedia, other sister Wikimedia projects and for offline and typing using mobile devices was researched upon.

Indian languagFedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layoutes use various typing schemes (key combinations for output in Indic languages) which could be used for writing, printing, publishing and for any other purpose both for offline and online publication as well as printing. Development for Unicode standard in Odia language progressed lately. Revival of Odia Wikipedia after 2011 helped the use of unicode more on internet because of its extensive content (more than 3100 articles on various topics) and online activities on social media. Currently there are over different typing schemes available for Odia including the non-unicode typing schemes used mostly by the DTP operators and many newspapers and publication houses. One of the earliest development was the Inscript keyboard layout which follows a global standard for most Indic languages. Inscript is useful and once someone gets his fingers used to typing it is fun. But, most of the beginners find it difficult to type in Inscript. In those cases phonetic keyboards are quite helpful where someone need to press the English keys which corresponds to the Roman characters, e.g. R-a-d-h-aa for "Radha". Based on these sort of logics a keyboard layout was deployed for all the Indic languages on Narayam including Odia. (See Odia transliteration for details). The primary developer for transliteration was Junaid PV, a Malayalam Wikipedian who helped for the Indic languages and few other Asian languages. As transliteration follows more a common rule there are many ambiguities and bugs reported after it was deployed on Odia Wikipedia. Even though many rounds of changes there are still bugs which doesn't allow many editors to type accurately. This is one of the reasons when there was a need for a purely phonetic typing scheme which has more affinity to the way an Odia user would type the words using a Roman key board.

The idea for deploying a new phonetic typing scheme was started during Mumbai Hackathon in 2011. Subhashish brought the proposal in community village pump for ideas and consensus and the basic layout and testing was done. The whole project went into a slumber for a long time! Recently when YuviPanda was in Delhi and met Subhashish the idea of hacking and testing the tool came again. The whole keyboard layout was revised and deployed on github. Two main keyboard layouts which were used for keeping the major inputs as standard were Fedora Phonetic keyboard and Apple Oriya Qwerty.


Fedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layout


Apple QWERTY Keyboard

Majority of the key combinations have been kept same except for few small changes. The typing scheme is deployed on TranslateWiki.net for Universal Language Selector and gerrit which will be enabled on Odia Wikipedia soon for Narayam. The recent mobile typing tool, "Indic typing tool" which was developed at Delhi office of the Centre for Internet and Society by Yuvi Panda and Subhashish Panigrahi also uses Lekhani as a default typing tool.

Quick links:

Lekhani typing scheme for Odia
Source file: https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.ime/blob/master/rules/or/or-lekhani.js
Check the github page for other Odia typing tools and here for all other languages
Typing in Lekhani using mobile phone

Credits:

Odia Lekhani Phonetic Keyboard Layout (CC-BY-SA 3.0): Manoranjan Behera
Fedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layout: RedHat
Apple QWERTY Keyboard: Apple Inc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-gets-new-typing-solution

Open Government Platform: An Open Source Solution to Democratizing Access to Information and Energizing Civic Engagement

Neeta Verma, Alka Mishra and D.P. Mishra — 2012-11-19T03:15:01Z

If government could release these datasets in open format for people to use & reuse, a whole lot of new innovative apps could be built around these datasets to provide better, customized services to citizens.

This article by Neeta Verma, Alka Mishra and D.P. Mishra was published as a lead story in the July 2012 edition of Informatics Magazine, printed by the National Informatics Centre.

Online publishing of Government data in open format shall play an important role in enhancing transparency and accountability of the government. It shall enable new forms of citizen engagement & innovation in citizen service delivery. More customized & personalized services could be offered to citizens. When implemented at large scale it shall bring a paradigm shift in development of e-governance applications. At NIC we have recently developed an Open Government Platform (OGPL) to enable government ministries & departments to launch their open data initiative.

Conceptual Overview

OGPL as a product caters to two sets of users - the government and the citizen/civil societies. It facilitates government departments to contribute their datasets, Apps, tools, documents, services etc., which gets validated and published, after passing through a predefined workflow to the citizen interfacing data portal. The single-point citizen interface is designed in such a way that catalogs can be searched with ease and datasets can be accessed/downloaded in various open formats. It also provides a platform for citizens and civil societies to engage with government on various aspects of socio economic development.

OGPL also facilitates building of subject specific communities through Citizen engagement modules. Communities shall discuss online the kind of datasets, government should release and also what kind of apps should be developed around these datasets. This shall provide first hand information to government as well as developer communities on public demand and prioritize their schedules accordingly.

OGPL Components

OGPL essentially consists of three major modules:

Dataset Management System
Data Portal
Monitoring and Management
Dashboard

Dataset Management System

Dataset Management system or DMS shall be used by all contributing ministries, departments as well as organisations using which, authorized officers of the departments can contribute datasets, documents, services, tools and apps which shall then be processed through a predefined workflow of moderation & approval to ensure that datasets being released in public domain are in compliance with existing acts & policies of the government
concerning privacy, security etc.

Through DMS each Ministry/Department can contribute their datasets in the form containing a set of Standard Metadata elements. After passing through various stages of moderation and approvals, these datasets gets published on the data portal viz. data.gov.in

Data Portal

Data Portal is the citizen facing frontend of the OGPL which shall provide single point access to all the datasets, apps as well as services. Portal has a strong component of search, discovery as well as citizen engagement. The development of the data portal is in compliance with the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW).

This Citizen interfacing Data Portal would also have a Communities component built into the system. This component facilitates Forums/Discussions around various datasets, apps available on the portal as well as platform to express and discuss the kind of datasets & apps they would like to have. This shall give first hand input to development community for building new components, apps. It shall also give input to departments as what kind of datasets are more useful and accordingly can raise the priority of their release.

Monitoring and Management Dashboard

Monitoring and management dashboard of OGPL helps government monitor & manage its Open Data Programme through three dimensions

Metrics, analytics & feedback from citizens: Metrics help understand amount of datasets uploaded, updated by different Departments. Frequency of upload is also available on a single dashboard.
Analytics module gives use perspective in terms of their usage of datasets, Number of downloads, aggregated ratings provided to datasets determine their value and to some extent quality of data released by government.
Feedback from citizens provide government with first hand input from citizens on quality, relevance of datasets, new datasets needed, kind of apps need to be developed, etc.

Open government platform can be used in multiple ways. One can directly publish their datasets after one time registration & authentication. Departments could build their subject specific catalogues through a cloud based services of OGPL. One can also ask for independent installation of OGPL with customized look & feel. OGPL can be used by any central or state government department, organisations as well as district and panchayat administrations. It can also be used by private organisations as well as non government organization and civil societies to bring in more
transparency in their functioning.

OGPL isn't simply about setting up a new web platform, moving to cloud computing or adopting open standards but it's about establishing a platform to enhance transparency, accountability & foster development of Innovative applications to better serve the citizens & other stakeholders. Open government data is gaining a lot of popularity & acceptance with governments across the world. Its led by government themselves, development communities, international organisations. OGPL is a perfect platform for them to launch their open data initiative.

Note by BK Gairola In India, National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) has been recently notified by the Government. According to this policy, all government departments shall release their datasets in open format for citizens and other stakeholders to freely use & reuse. To make these datasets easily accessible by citizens, policy has also mandated NIC to provide technology solution for establishing an Open Data Portal (http://data.gov.in) for Departments, Subordinate Offices and Organizations. OGPL implementation in India is being executed by NIC, DeitY in close coordination with DST. OGPL is an open source product with generic architecture, which would easily facilitate other organizations and institutions to adopt for their open data initiatives. Communities could also contribute further by developing innovative apps around datasets and also enhancing the product in terms of features & functionalities. The purpose of the platform is to enhance access and use of government data to foster innovation, promote transparency, accountability and public participation. I am sure it shall go a long way in democratizing the government information.

Indo-US Collaboration Open Government Platform (OGPL) was developed jointly by India & US government as a result of announcement made by President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the Indo-US Open Government Dialogue in 2010. OGPL leverages on the best practices & features of the India’s “India.gov.in” and the “Data.gov” of United States.National Informatics Centre (NIC) from Government of India and General Services Administration (GSA) of United States executed the development of OGPL. Open Government Platform, developed to promote access to government data and information and energize citizen engagement was launched by Hon’ble Minister of Communications & IT and HRD, Govt. of India during a press conference held on 30th March 2012 in New Delhi in presence of Dr. Sam Pitroda, Advisor to Prime Minister of India. Secretary(DEITY), DG(NIC) & Joint Secretary, MEA also participated in the press conference, Senior officers from US Government & US Embassy were also present along with GSA team in India. CIO, US Government along with Deputy CTO also addressed the event over video conference.

OGPL - An Open Source Solution Open Government Platform is completely developed using Open Source Stack. In fact complete management of the collaborative development of OGPL by two teams stationed in two continents of the world was also handled using open source tools.It complies with the best practices of open source development, which helps in leveraging the strengths of future versions of the open source base products used in development of OGPL. OGPL being an open source initiative not only facilitates cost saving in terms of software and licenses but also facilitates community participation in terms of further development of product with additional components and innovative apps around the published datasets. This shall define a paradigm shift in the manner electronic government applications shall be developed in future. The entire source code is made available to public for review, feedback and participation for further development and enhancement.

Citizen Engagement OGPL has a strong component of Citizen engagement. Citizens can view, download datasets as well express their opinion on the quality of datasets, they can rate the datasets on a scale of 1 to 5. One can embed a dataset in their blog or web site as well as contact the owner of the datasets for any query or clarification. One can also publish or connect the datasets on their social media pages such as facebook, twitter etc. for wider reach. Ratings given by citizen are transparently shared on the portal in terms of number of views, current star rating which help new visitor understand quality of data sets, its popularity. Portal also enables visitors to submit their ideas, feedbacks and as well suggest datasets they would like government to release in open domain. These ideas are further rated by citizens to help government allocate priority in release of data sets.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/informatics-nic-in-neeta-verma-alka-mishra-d-p-mishra-july-2012-open-government-platform

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

subha — 2013-07-17T09:02:46Z

A new app is up for typing in Indic languages from mobile phones. This is is available online at: http://bitly.com/indictyping and supports on iOS. Android version is to be released soon.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."
Phil Karlton

Yuvi Panda smiles saying this. Yuvi Panda, a former Wikimedia Foundation contractor and developer was here in our Delhi office and I had an opportunity to spend some time discussing some of the technical problems that we have been facing.

One of the major setback most people have with their phones is the lack of language support and lack of typing support for Indic languages. Fortunately most of the new generation phones support Indic languages. Three of the major operating systems used currently by most phones are Android, Windows, Blackberry and iOS. Android being an open source operating system has extensive community support and developments which is something we were primarily hopeful while starting this project. Windows phones also have a good number of user base in India and support for Indic languages on Windows is really good. Though iOS has good support for Indic display there is no support for typing. IOS, Windows and Blackberry all being proprietary have really less community support and any tool available on these app market would be proprietary. So, our idea was to start a cross platform app which will use the available jQuery ime used for Indic typing for Indic Wikipedias and sister projects.

Currently, most of the Indic language Wikipedias use a typing tool called Narayam ( "Narayam" is a Malayalam word which refers to a metal stylus that was used for writing on palm leaves and papyrus in ancient days). By default the typing scheme for most of the language wikipedias is set to transliteration or phonetic. An Indian mobile user would normally type his own language using Roman letters from a mobile. "और दोस्त सब ठीक है?" in Hindi would be typed as "Aur dost sab thik hai?" when someone pings a friend on facebook or sends a text message. Now with the new typing tool you need to type "aur dosta saba thiika hai?" to get the same text in Devanagari script. This typing scheme is almost same like the phonetic typing most people use for regional languages on mobile which is why typing won’t be much of difference. In terms of usability most people would use the typed text either for web search in regional languages, Facebook posts, tweeting or even sending mails and text messages.

The detailed procedure for typing using this tool is documented at: http://goo.gl/HdVJW. Indic typing tool is available at: http://bitly.com/indictyping

Scan the QR code below using your QR code application to go "Indic typing tool".

Developer speaks:

This is a simple tool that lets you type in your native language on mobile phones. Currently only iOS devices are supported.

The tool is a simple wrapper around Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering's jquery.ime project. It simply adds a much easier to use (on a mobile device) language selector, and makes it available offline (on iOS devices).

Quick links:

Source code: https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool
Test the app and report the bugs directly on GitHub or on Meta.
Credits: YuviPanda, Subhashish Panigrahi, Santhosh Thottingal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/typing-in-indic-languages-from-mobiles

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Yuvi Panda — 2012-12-03T06:37:11Z

BITS Hyderabad had a tech fest from October 25 to 27, 2012, and wanted to conduct a technical wiki hackathon. We decided to do it on October 26 — all night.

We had a Google form that people filled up with a few simple questions — and picked out 12 from the 70 that signed up. This was important since I was the only one conducting it — and I wanted to keep it to a manageable number. It was an all night event that started at 7 p.m. in the evening and was supposed to go on till 6 a.m. next morning.

Hackathon

The hackathon started as scheduled around 7.00 p.m. As people trickled in I talked to them individually and mentally sorted them into two groups — 'people who are already programmatically competent enough to contribute code' and people who were not. A lot of people who were not selected but applied also showed up — since we had not sent rejection emails. I got them started on learning either Javascript or Python — and helped push them along. However, a good amount of time was spent with people who already had prior coding experience.

Most people worked on Gadgets, and a few on Python — exploring the API. We started off with basics of how to customize your Wikipedia experience with JS and CSS, building a very basic user script that changed colours / added new links. Some of the participants spent the entire night building this and others finished this in a few minutes and were on to the next project. Everyone worked at their own pace — and since there were smaller number of people I was able to (mostly) provide individual attention.

As people started working on stuff past hello world, I introduced them to IRC (#wikipedia-en and #mediawiki) and had them say 'hi' to editors. I also introduced them to a bunch of local hacker channels on IRC — and quite a few of them stayed on.

A fair amount of people left at around midnight — but a 'core' group seemed to have formed that stayed on. We hacked on to the wee hours of the morning, and even took small naps. We wound up at around 6 a.m., and staggered back to the hostels (and then proceeded to have long conversations about Linux, history of programming, and graphical raytracing).

Outcomes

We had some students who contributed substantially including Thomas Matthew, Vishwajit Kolathur, Aravind Peddapudi and Varun Chappidi. Most of them have been introduced to the local hacker community via IRC, and I see reports of continuing participation — after accounting for their ongoing exams. They all are technically very competent and have expressed interest in doing Google Summer of Code this year. Among the projects did at the hackathon are:

'Reading mode' gadget
'Reading mode' Chrome Extension that is wikipedia specific
Major work on a '3 hours later' type extension (a tool to produce graphs like (http://xkcd.com/214)

The fact that these people went from having no experience with Wiki related programming to being able to build code for it in a few hours time makes me very happy.

Learnings

Make sure people know that 'Hack'athon has nothing to do with cracking wifi passwords or breaking into Facebook accounts. We had a 'lot' of people apply thinking that was this despite a clear description. I was told that some of the people evangelizing the event also thought the same — so clearer messaging around this was needed.
Send rejection emails. We missed this, and sent only acceptance emails. A lot of people who weren't accepted turned up and we had to figure a way to engage them.
More organized followups. Currently all I can do is introduce them to the local hacker community and hope they 'stick'. GSoC is a good spot, but is too infrequent — and too high stakes.
Find more things for them to do. We had to actually stretch a bit to find them things to do — they were all raring to go, but we found it hard to find 'easy' bugs for them to fix that were actually useful to editors. Clearly editors have a lot of things in their mind that would make their lives better — but they are not listed anywhere public. Having a publicly available list of such things would be helpful. (There is a Gadget requests page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests), but it hasn't been updated in ages).

Finally, I would like to thank the Centre for Internet & Society for supporting my travel for the event, Thomas from BITS for organizing most of the logistics and Ravi Chandra from the Tor community for helping provide technical mentorship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hackathon-hyderabad

Art in the Open Source Age — A Talk by Gene Kogan

praskrishna — 2012-12-13T06:06:34Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is hosting a talk by Gene Kogan, a programmer and digital artist, at its office in Bangalore on November 30th, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m.

Talk Summary

The open source movement has challenged longstanding assumptions about art practice. Communities of programmers and makers have collaborated online to create mature software development kits such as Processing and OpenFrameworks, as well as websites like Instructables.com where users can document and share their process. The rapid digitization of the blueprints for creative projects have greatly lowered the barrier to getting started.

These new tools and practices have greatly influenced the workflows that artists, designers, and technologists operate with, and have upended traditional notions of authorship and copyright. Techniques manipulating existing digital content have inspired much debate over legitimacy and authenticity. This talk will critically examine this new outlook and attempt to resolve some practical issues.

Gene Kogan

Gene Kogan is an American artist and programmer currently based out of Bangalore. He is interested in performance art, generative systems, and machine learning. He writes free software for negotiating high dimensional spaces to discover the unexpected and serendipitous. He is currently based out of Bangalore.

His work can be seen on his website at www.genekogan.com. You can also follow him on twitter at @genekogan.

VIDOE

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/art-in-the-open-source-age

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

Yuvraj Pandian — 2012-12-04T07:31:21Z

Wikipedian Yuvaraj Pandian visited the CIS office in Delhi and helped the Access to Knowledge team conduct a super-ad-hoc mini-hackathon with two other volunteers, Sheel from Delhi and Harsh from Ahmedabad. The aim was to get them a kickstart in developing userscripts/gadgets, and get them to a point where the prior existing documentation makes sense to them.

The ad-hoc plan had three parts:

The execution environment (Concept of userscripts vs gadgets, ResourceLoader)
The API concepts (Special:ApiSandbox, concept of 'actions' in the API)
Accessing the API from JS (mediawiki.api module, concept of AJAX)

Here is the account of what they did, written by Yuvi:

"We covered all parts of them slowly, with both Harsh and Sheel working at things until they fully understood what they were doing and why whatever they were doing was working.

I introduced them to the environment first by having them execute code in Chrome's JS Console, and then in their own common.js. Once they understood the context in which the code was getting executed, the 'ResourceLoader default modules'[1]documentation started making sense to them, and they could pick up other modules from there.

We then explored the API via the API Sandbox[2], which is a relatively new (and not very well known) way of letting people play around with the API. It is a massive improvement over the older, non-interactive docs[3], and both Harsh and Sheel were very excited about being able to discover all the things they could do with the API. A fair amount of time was spent messing around with it on different wikipedias (en, hi and gu) and reading bits of the API Documentation[4] to understand the concepts behind the actions - and for filling in the gaps.

Finally we had them use the API from a userscript to make calls. I went through the entire process line by line, explaining how AJAX works and how asynchronous programming works. We traced the flow of code together to understand how the seamingly nonlinear asynchronous programming model works. Then we dug into a bit of how to use the mw.loader module to make dependencies work, and why the same code that was working in the chrome js console was not working in their common.js.

It ended with them trying to port HotCat to their native language wikipedias. Harsh started to explore more about getting started with MediaWiki dev itself (rather than just gadgets), but the clone took a looooong time and we had run out of time by then. I directed him to a WMF tech open chat happening today, and hopefully that could help!

[1].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Default_modules
[2].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
[3].https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
[4].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mini-hackathon-delhi

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning

subha — 2013-07-17T07:06:59Z

Odia Wikipedians were invited to Academy of Media Learning (AML), Bhubaneswar for a guest lecture and a workshop on contributing to Odia Wikipedia. The event was organised by the Centre for Internet & Society on November 10, 2012. This is a report about the activities in AML.

Soon after Odia Wiki community got felicitated by OdishaDiary.co for Youth Achievement Award for their outstanding contribution for Odia language many institutions have started taking the work of the wikipedians with more seriousness. To empower the community with more activities active members took part in a discussion to start more long term projects like "education programs". In early November, a couple of meetups and workshops were organized in different institutions in Odisha. One of those institutions in Academy of Media Learning. It is a budding institution for journalism and digital media in the city of Bhubaneswar. The institute is led by the Founder-CEO of this institution Nilambar Rath, a veteran journalist and news producer and Saumya Parida, Executive Editor and journalist in the Odia media circle. Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS was invited to AML along with other fellow Wikipedians for a guest lecture and workshop about "Contibution to Wikipedia and its Benefits for Students".

Odia wikipedians like Ansuman Giri, Manoranjan Behera and Diptiman Panigrahi also came over for the event.

Meeting with Nilambar Rath and Saumya Parida

Prior to the lecture and workshop, wikipedians discussed about the education program with the faculty members on how it is essential to engage students in such a program. Subhashish explained the older education programs for other language and the recent Odia Wikipedia Education Program initiated at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal. During this meeting Mr. Rath also suggested to include more linguists and Odia language professors in the community who would guide on standards of language, writing style and grammar as Odia Wikipedia is being accessed more on a daily basis by the main stream media.

Workshop

There were a small set of enthusiast communication students gathered for the event. Subhashish took them through a presentation explaining about Wikipedia, how people like them contribute to Wikipedia and make it grow day by day and how Odia Wikipedia was started. The participants were surprised to see Odia Wikipedia for the first time! Even being communication students and working closely with Odia media they have never came through it. After the presentation he emphasized about the reason why we are focusing on long term support programs like "education program" and how it would be beneficial for students. Students were given a small break for asking queries before a training workshop on editing Odia Wikipedia. One of the students was invited to create his user account. Wikipedians explained how to type in Odia using the typing scheme. Few of the students were invited to edit and make small changes in various articles. Going forward, students were shown Chatasabha and the facebook group page to ask queries online.


A picture of the participants at the Odia Wikipedia workshop at Academy of Media Learning

Picture credit: Manoranjan Behera

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wiki-workshop-at-aml

Steady Steps.....FOSS and the MDG's

praskrishna — 2012-12-09T01:11:31Z

Pranesh Prakash was a panelist at this IGF workshop held on November 9, 2012. It was organised by International Center For Free and Open Source Software and Free Software and OpenSource Foundation For Africa.

IG4D Thematic Cluster 2 "Enabling Environment" Question 1: What does it take to attract investment in infrastructure and enc

Concise Description of Workshop:

This workshop will address some key areas, where Free and open source software has made a milestone, in the last few years to fulfill the Millennium development goal, across the globe. Many a times whenever FOSS is mentioned, , thoughts quickly run to ‘techies’ . In this session , the Panelists will give practical presentations/projects on Free and Open Source Software, outside the technical arena and show how it has changed the face of : 1) Governments:- We will look at, Policy in the area of Open Data, 2) In Academia:- We will look at, Open Education Resources (OER) , FOSS in schools etc, both in Africa and India. 3) In Private Sector- we will look at , Wealth creation, innovation and job creation, just to mention but a few. 1) Secondly we will look at how FOSS is bridging the digital divide, existing between the different age groups more especially the Youth, Women, between the different social circles/media , inclusion of person's with disabilities.etc, through partnerships and rural deployment of FOSS. We will have the privilege to look at initiative(s), in Brazil. 1) Last but not least, It will address, the key policies, that governments should embrace, that would continue to enhance FOSS in the Internet development goal at national level , regional level and at the global level. A rich discussion will be encouraged, from the participants to ensure that the FOSS community understands its strength and role in the internet governance realm, in policy making process and in the privacy, security and openness arena.

Workshop Agenda:
1. What Milestone has FOSS made in:
i) Academia
ii) Government
iii) Private Sector
2. Is FOSS factor to consider in bridging the digital divide?
3. Regarding the Milestone that FOSS has achieved, should there be national, regional, global.etc policies to ensure a fair palying field it?
- Closing remarks, What actions to be taken, conclusion.

Submitted Workshop Panelists:

1. Mr. Satish Babu - ICFOSS, India (Government)- Moderator- Confirmed
2. Mr. Fernando Botelho- F123.org, Brazil (Remote Participation)- Confirmed
3. Ms. Anne Rachel Inne, ICANN- Confirmed
4. Mr. Pranesh Prakash, CIS Bangalore, India- Confirmed
5. Ms. Mishi Choudhary, Executive Director of International programs at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), India- Confirmed
6. Mr. Yves Miezan Ezo, FOSSFA , CHALA, France- Confirmed
7.Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, CEO, Nnenna.org, Cote d' Ivoire- Confirmed

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Ms. Judy Okite, FOSSFA

Assigned Panellists:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/steady-steps-foss-and-mdgs

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller

praskrishna — 2012-12-18T06:51:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore is hosting a talk by Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation at its office in Bangalore on November 12, 2012, from 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m., followed by a lunch discussion.

Talk Summary

Wikipedia's technology platform is rapidly changing, with improvements being deployed every day. Unlike other top websites, Wikipedia is run by a non-profit (Wikimedia Foundation) and all its technology is open source, ready to be improved and extended by you.

Learn about the recent and coming technology changes to Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other projects: the new Visual Editor, improvements to mobile sites and apps, Wikidata, and projects with mysterious codenames like "Echo", "Milkshake", "Agora" and "Flow". Learn how to get involved and ask anything you'd like to know about Wikipedia.

Erik Moeller

Erik Moeller is the Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, overseeing a department of about 70 people. Erik has been involved in Wikipedia since 2001 and joined the staff of Wikimedia in 2008. He previously worked as a journalist and project manager.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-state-of-tech-talk-by-erik-moeller

Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia

noopur — 2012-11-04T02:12:56Z

This was a competition to raise Wikipedia awareness and help students discover the joy of writing articles in their native language and an attempt to connect producers having knowledge in Gujarati to a wide audience of more than four lakh readers.

The Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition was held among 10 Gujarati medium schools of Ahmedabad city in Gujarat with the support and cooperation of The Open Page publication and Gujarati Lexicon in two phases over a period of two months.

Initial discussions about doing something to promote Gujarati language on the internet started when Shiju Alex, Indian language Wikipedia consultant met Yatrik Patel from Inflibnet. With Mr Yatrik Patel's intervention we were able to meet Mr Archit Bhatt, the director of Tripada Education Trust in Ahmedabad.

After a round of presentations from Wikipedians, Gujarati Lexicon and interested schools in August, we charted out a rough sketch of the article competition. Then, this plan was proposed to Gujarati editors online. Again, without the cooperation and encouragement of long term members like Mr Dhaval S Vyas, Mr Ashok Modhvadia, Mr Sushant Savla and Mr Maharshi Mehta, these students would not have had the freedom to make mistakes and learn as they progressed. Apart from these online members, constant guidance and support was provided by Mr Ashok Vaishnav, Mr Harsh Kothari and Mr Konarak Ratnakar. They coordinated with Ms Hemangini Kanth from The Open Page and Ms Shruti from Gujarati Lexicon to materialize the competion.

Structure

Phase I: Over 200 students from the ten schools were invited to write articles with references on Gujarati literary personalities (poets and writers) on paper. These entries were then collected and checked by Mr Yogendra Vyas, a consultant to GSEB (Gujarat Education Board) and Mr Ashok Vaishnav.

The above picture shows a student learning Gujarati typing

Phase II: 20 students were selected from these entries and invited for a workshop on Gujarati typing, introduction to GU WP and were briefed on how to write articles. Once the deadline was over, these on-wiki articles were checked by Mr Dhaval Vyas and Mr Ashok Modhvadia and two winner entries were selected. They were subsequently awarded trophies and certificates in a small ceremony on 21^st October.

Here is a list of articles written by the students.

Learnings

Given that this was a pilot program and I have read about only one such prior attempt in Javanese Wikipedia, we had much to learn:

It was a wise decision to take primary speakers of Gujarati because their proficiency in spelling, punctuation and vocabulary was good. This may not be possible for students with Indian languages as secondary language.
While we had estimated a maximum of one month's time, it took us nearly two months to accomplish it because of the huge number of entries. Perhaps, the work should be distributed amongst more people.
The biggest challenge that lies ahead is retaining these editors – we are working to get feedback from students to see how this could have been better and what attracted them about Wikipedia.

This competition has given the community a batch of new editors along with valuable content and we hope to retain the momentum by engaging more Gujarati students further.

Click below to download the posters

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-article-competition

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

noopur — 2012-10-31T08:17:56Z

This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012.

I visited Gujarat for a few Wikipedia activities – including Wikipedia meets in the cities of Ahmedabad and Rajkot, interacted with students and teachers from various colleges as well as to successfully conclude the Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition.

I visited Rajkot on October 17, 2012 with two Wikipedians – Harsh Kothari and Konarak Ratnakar, both from Ahmedabad. We were scheduled to take up a small introductory lecture on contributing to Wikipedia at Christ College, Rajkot in the afternoon and meet up with other Gujarati Wikipedians from Rajkot and Junagadh later in the day. Fortunately, I was able to connect with Rashmikant Makwana, a teacher at TGS (The Galaxy School) in Rajkot. I had first met up with him during the photo walk – Wiki takes Ahmedabad in January 2012. He had shown a great deal of interest in doing something for his school students. Thanks to Mr. Makwana's prompt response and support, we visited three branches of TGES (The Galaxy Education System) and had the opportunity of interacting with over 100 students from secondary and higher secondary divisions.

Interactions with TGES students

I got to read Mr. Makwana's email only after I reached Rajkot. He wrote that he spoke to a couple of teachers about our visit and their students were very eager to meet us as they had many questions about Wikipedia! I was pleasantly surprised because once we met these students (mostly 11^th standard, English medium students) we realized they had already tried their hand at editing and even creating articles! So, they had far more advanced queries like how to verify information on Wikipedia, what is the authenticity of information there, questions on notability and so on. Next, we were taken to the vadi branch of the education group. These were children from fifth and sixth standards and who also had questions and better ones about stories of vandalism they had committed on Wikipedia! We told them how Wikipedia was one of the best ways of telling people about their culture, identities, city and language. Besides students, we also met teachers who taught Gujarati, History and Geography.

Interactions with Christ College students

Wikipedians giving lecture.

Christ College offers a variety of graduate courses. We were connected with their faculty, Mr. Rushabh, by Umesh Joshi from the Open Page publication in Rajkot.

I am thankful to both of them for their support in gathering their MBA students! Harsh Kothari, a Gujarati Wikipedian presented on how one can contribute to Gujarati Wikipedia while Konarak helped them in a live editing session. One question that everyone asked us was – WHY do people edit Wikipedia?

So, we called upon Jitendrasinh Chauhan, a long-term Gujarati Wikipedian. He came up and spoke to them on how he discovered Gujarati Wikipedia and has not only gained in terms of knowledge but also friendships that he has made with fellow editors across the state and overseas! We also explained the importance of learning correct ways of editing to these students who might pursue public relations as their professions.

Meeting Wikipedians

The trip to Rajkot, apart from meeting a whole bunch of new people, was also about connecting offline with Gujarati Wikipedians. Their warmth and day long support in terms of logistics, context and guidance kept us enthused. I extend my gratitude to Jitendrasinh Chauhan and his friend Harsh, both Wikipedians for their help. They have also helped us establish a dialog with Saurashtra University where we hope to plan a two-day conference centered around Gujarati language and digitization.

Given here is a network visualization infographic highlighting the key points.

Videos

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ college - 1

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ College - 2

Write about your city on Gujarati Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-education-program-rajkot

Centre for Internet and Society

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

Presentation:

Video:

Science Gallery Workshop @ Srishti

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’

Odia Wikipedia Gets a New Typing Solution!

Open Government Platform: An Open Source Solution to Democratizing Access to Information and Energizing Civic Engagement

Conceptual Overview

OGPL Components

Dataset Management System

Data Portal

Monitoring and Management Dashboard

Note by BK Gairola

Indo-US Collaboration

OGPL - An Open Source Solution

Citizen Engagement

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

Developer speaks:

Quick links:

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Hackathon

Outcomes

Learnings

Art in the Open Source Age — A Talk by Gene Kogan

Talk Summary

Gene Kogan

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning

Meeting with Nilambar Rath and Saumya Parida

Workshop

Steady Steps.....FOSS and the MDG's

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller

Talk Summary

Erik Moeller

Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia

Structure

Learnings

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

Interactions with TGES students

Interactions with Christ College students

Meeting Wikipedians

Videos