Centre for Internet and Society

Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web

praskrishna — 2015-01-01T14:49:05Z

Andhra Loyola College in association with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS- A2K) is conducting a six-day camp titled ‘Wiki Winter’ at Wikipedia Lab in the campus.

Click to read the PDF of the original article published by Hans India here.

The camp will conclude on Wednesday. Around 45 volunteers from BSc (Physics) and BA (Telugu) streams are attending the camp. The students are being trained to be the contributors for Wikipedia and they are authorised to add, edit and delete articles in Wikipedia using validated user ids.

The articles in the field of Physics which are not in Telugu language are being prepared by the students. The articles are scrutinised by experts from other parts of the world and are accepted on permanent basis. The students of BA (Telugu) are preparing the classical works of Kandukuri Veerasalingam. His works are being digitalised and are made available to people.

Kola Sekhar of Department of Telugu and the organising secretary said that Kandukuri Veerasalingam is a well-known social activist and a writer. His works reflected the social evils prevailing in the society which are still relevant today. The solutions Veerasalingam showcased through his works are not available to current generation. This camp aims to put his works online. Sekhar said that they would strive hard to add more and more classical works in Telugu to the Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hans-india-december-31-2014-works-of-veerasalingam-pantulu-on-web

Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Sakshi

praskrishna — 2015-01-01T16:58:23Z

Media coverage for the Wiki winter camp held at Andhra Loyola College.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/sakshi-december-31-2014-wiki-winter-camp

Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Eenadu

praskrishna — 2015-01-01T17:17:42Z

Media coverage of Wiki Winter Camp held at Andhra Loyola College.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/eenadu-december-31-wiki-winter-camp

December 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-01-12T16:56:54Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wishes you a very happy new year and welcomes you to the twelfth issue of the newsletter (December 2014).

Highlights

CIS prepared a policy brief that identifies the problem areas with the current work flow being used to publish documents and proposes suitable modifications to make them easy to locate, authentic and accessible.
NVDA team conducted two workshops. The first one was held at the Hyderabad Central University for reading and writing in Telugu. The second one was held at the Blind Empowerment Foundation in Kolkata for reading and writing in Bangla.

Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the 29^th WIPO-SCCR held in Geneva from December 8 to 12, 2014 and on behalf of CIS gave statements on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations , Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching, Research Institutions and Persons with Disabilities , made a brief pointed intervention on the Broadcast Treaty , and briefly interviewed Prof. Crews on his Updated Study on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives .
Nehaa Chaudhari analyses the broadening of definitions/concepts in the Proposed Broadcast Treaty versus those in pre-existing international instruments.
Maggie Huang, an intern at CIS as part of the Pervasive Technologies projects conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings are highlighted in two separate blog entries. The first one explores some of their views on the current intellectual property system and the second explores the tension between market forces and governmental intervention in providing access to mobile technology .
Tejaswini Niranjana, a distinguished fellow at CIS wrote an op-ed in the Hindu telling readers to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system.
Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya have co-authored a white paper that seeks to identify aspects of privacy in Islamic Law and demonstrate that the notion of privacy was recognized and protected in traditional Islamic law.
Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya have produced a white paper seeks to locate privacy in Classical Hindu Law, and by doing so, displace the notion that privacy is an inherently 'Western' concept that is the product of a modernist legal system.
Vipul Kharbanda authored a white paper establishing the relationship between privacy and confidentiality.
Geetha Hariharan in a blog entry examines the constitutional validity of Section 69A and the Blocking Rules.
Shyam Ponappa in an article published by the Business Standard writes that India's current policies for telecommunications don't serve our interests and tells readers what must change.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Update

December 2014 Report (Suman Dogra; December 30, 2014).

Events Organized

Telugu eSpeak Training with NVDA (Organized by NVDA team; Hyderabad Central University, Hyderabad; December 1-2, 2014).
Bangla eSpeak training with NVDA (Organized by NVDA team; Blind Empowerment Foundation, Kolkata; December 19-20, 2014).

Upcoming Event

Training in Use of eSpeak with Malayalam (Co-organized by CIS, DAISY Forum of India and Chakshumathi Assistive Technology Centre; Trivandrum; January 24 - 25, 2015, Trivandrum).

►Other

Blog Entry

Availability and Accessibility of Government Information in Public Domain (Sunil Abraham, Nirmita Narasimhan, Beliappa, and Anandhi Viswanathan; December 9, 2014).

Participation in Event

First meeting of the high level committee on National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility (Organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology; December 30, 2014; New Delhi). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting.

Media Coverage

When technology is able but the mindset is not (Governance Now; December 1-15 issue). Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan gave their inputs.

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Maggie Huang conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings from the samples are highlighted in four part series. The third and fourth parts have been published:

Blog Entries

[Open] Innovation and Expertise > Patent Protection & Trolls in a Broken Patent Regime (Maggie Huang; December 26, 2014).
"Copyright Management in the Age of Mobile Music" - Living Methodology Document (Maggie Huang; December 26, 2014).

►Other

Blog Entries

Nehaa Chaudhari attended the 29^th WIPO-SCCR held in Geneva from December 8 to 12. The following are the outputs:

29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS Intervention on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 9, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS- 2nd (brief) Intervention on the Broadcast Treaty (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 11, 2014).
The Broadening of Definitions in the Proposed Broadcast Treaty Compared to Other International Conventions (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 11, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: CIS Intervention: Questions to Prof. Kenneth Crews on his Updated Study on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 14, 2014).
29th Session of the WIPO SCCR: Statement on the Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching, Research Institutions and Persons with Disabilities (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 20, 2014).
Protection of Broadcasting Organisations under the Proposed Treaty as Compared to Other International Conventions (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 21, 2014).

Participation in Event

Save the Date - 10 December 2014: The Broadcasting Treaty: A Solution in Search of a Problem? (Organized at WIPO; December 10, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker at this side event. The details were originally published by Knowledge Ecology International.

Media Coverage

SCCR 29: Public Interest Organizations Statements regarding the Broadcasting Treaty (Knowledge Ecology International; December 9, 2014).
SCCR 29 Libraries, Archives and Public Interest NGOs in Q&A with Dr. Crews (Knowledge Ecology International; December 11, 2014).
At WIPO, Study On Copyright Exceptions Stimulates Broad Discussion With Author (Catherine Saez; December 18, 2014).
WIPO Delegates Hear Concerns of NGOs on Exceptions for Libraries (Catherine Saez; IP Watch ; December 19, 2014).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Newspaper Article

Beyond the Language Tussle (Tejaswini Niranjana; The Samaja, November 17, 2014).

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource campus project at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 3, 2014).
Several Publications Now Available under Creative Commons License (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 28, 2014).
Odia Wikisource workshop at New Delhi (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 30, 2014). The event was organized by CIS in collaboration with "The Intellects" on December 14.

News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Odia Wikipedia (Dhatri; December 1, 2014).
Odia Wikipedia (Odiapua; December 1, 2014).
Access to Rare Books Made Easy (Diana Sahu; Indian Express; December 5, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia gets some push (Hindu Businessline; December 13, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (Kannada Prabha; December 14, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (Vijaya Karnataka; December 15, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia (VijayaVani; December 27, 2014).
Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web (Hans India; December 31, 2014).
Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Sakshi (Sakshi; December 31, 2014).
Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Eenadu (Eenadu; December 31, 2014).

Event Co-organized

Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014 (Co-organized by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia Community; November 28, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Participation in Events

ICT for Development (Organized by Christ University; December 3, 2014). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was a speaker at this event.
Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala (Organized by ICFOSS, Govt. of Kerala; Hotel Hycinth by Sparsa, Trivandrum; December 18 - 20, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan chaired a session on Wikimedia and Access to Knowledge in India and Rahimanuddin Shaik co-presented on Making DLI Accessible.

►Openness

Blog Entry

Department of Science and Technology & Department of Biotechnology adopt Open Access Policy (Anubha Sinha; December 29, 2014).

Participation in Events

Tech for Citizen Engagement 2014 (Organized by Omidyar Network; New Delhi; December 11, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session "Rules of Engagement: Emerging Trends in Citizen Outreach".
Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala (Organized by ICFOSS, Govt. of Kerala; Hotel Hycinth by Sparsa, Trivandrum; December 18 - 20, 2014). Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was a speaker and made a presentation on Open Science.

Internet Governance

►Privacy

As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. During the month we published the following blog entries:

White Papers

Locating Constructs of Privacy within Classical Hindu Law (Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya; December 29, 2014).
Relationship between Privacy and Confidentiality (Vipul Kharbanda; December 30, 2014).

Blog Entry

Identifying Aspects of Privacy in Islamic Law (Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya; December 14, 2014).

Upcoming Events

Security, Governments, and Data: Technology and Policy (Co-organized by CIS and the Observer Research Foundation; January 8, 2015; New Delhi).
CPDP 2015 : The eighth international conference on computers, privacy and data protection will be held in Brussels from January 21 to 23, 2015. CIS is a moral supporter of CPDP.

Event Organized

Security and Surveillance: A public discussion on Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights (CIS; December 19, 2014).

►Free Speech

Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, CIS is doing research on the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute studies, reports and policy briefs to feed into the ongoing debates at the national as well as international level. As part of the project we bring you the following outputs:

Blog Entries

ICANN reveals hitherto undisclosed details of domain names revenues (Geetha Hariharan; December 8, 2014).
Revolving Door Analysis: IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (Lakshmi Venkataraman; December 10, 2014).
Is India's website-blocking law constitutional? - I. Law & procedure (Geetha Hariharan; December 11, 2014).

►Other

Participation in Event

National Seminar on Cyber Security & Cyber Laws - Issues and Concerns (Organized by the Advanced Centre for Research, Development & Training in Cyber Laws & Forensics; National Law School of India University, Bangalore; December 27 - 28, 2014). Sharath Chandra Ram was part of a plenary session on "Multi-Disciplinary Challenges in Ensuring Cyber Security".

Blog Entries

Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act (Pranesh Prakash; December 15, 2014).
Reply to RTI filed with BSNL regarding Network Neutrality and Throttling (Tarun Krishnakumar; December 22, 2014).

---------------------------------
News & Media Coverage
---------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

India sees biggest improvement in Internet freedom, says report (Moulishree Srivastava; Livemint; December 5, 2014).
Are Cab Apps safe? (IBN Live; December 8, 2014).
FrndiNeed; an app for passengers' safety (Athira A. Nair; Economic Times; December 10, 2014).
Thank You To Our 2014 Sponsors (Medianama; December 22, 2014).
Why did India fail to discover the ISIS Twitter handle? (Anita Babu; Business Standard; December 26, 2014).
Targeting surveillance (Ajai Sreevatsan; The Hindu; December 28, 2014).
Centre blocks 32 websites for security reasons, restores some later (S. Ronendra Singh; Hindu Businessline; December 31, 2014).
DoT Reportedly Orders Blocking of 32 Websites Including GitHub, Archive.org, SourceForge (NDTV; December 31, 2014).
Govt blocks 32 websites, including Vimeo and Github (Moulishree Srivastava; Livemint; December 31, 2014).
Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pastebin Among Sites Blocked In India For 'Anti-India' Content From ISIS (Jeff Stone; IB Times; December 31, 2014).
Pastebin, Dailymotion, Github blocked after DoT order: Report (Anupam Saxena; The Times of India; December 31, 2014).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

A Road Map for Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; December 3, 2014 and Organizing India Blogspot; December 4, 2014).

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Blog Entry

The Spaces of Digital (P.P.Sneha; December 30, 2014).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2014-bulletin

Odia Wikisource workshop at New Delhi

subha — 2014-12-30T01:08:00Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team in collaboration with "The Intellects" organized a seminar in New Delhi on December 14, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi gave a talk.

The seminar was on the Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age. After attending the event one of the participants Pankajmala Sarangi took great interest in Odia Wikisource which was then an incubator project. Since then she has digitized three books and is now proofreading Odia Bhagabata, an Odia language classic from the 14th century. Having the highest number of edits in Odia Wikisource, Ms. Sarangi took interest to build a community in Delhi. Another Odia Wikilibrarian Sitikantha Kheti also joined in to organise the first Odia Wikisource workshop in Delhi. These Wikimedians, a Delhi based group The Intellects and CIS-A2K collaboratively conducted a workshop.

The Intellect's president Debendra Rout addressed the participants and broadly spoke about the goal of the workshop and long term plans in Delhi. Both the Wikilibrarians shared their experience on Odia Wikisource. The workshop started with self introduction of the participants followed by screening of a documentary "Odia: Silalekharu Mobile".

Video

A handbook with details on the project, Odia input and keyboard layout was distributed among all. Subhashish Panigrahi demonstrated Odia input and the process of digitization of books on Wikisource. Plans for more workshops and digitization sprints were also charted out.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikisource-workshop-new-delhi-december-14-2014

Several Publications Now Available under Creative Commons License

subha — 2014-12-28T03:05:06Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has got the following publications under Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0) license. These are from multiple authors.

Samadrusti Publications

Samadrusti is a Bhubaneswar based organisation working on issues related to the development sector. Their publications are mostly related to their work in rural Odisha. They have relicensed 3 essay books authored by many authors on notable people and industrial work and issues in rural Odisha (many of which are of interest for Wikipedia as well), a poem collection and a catalogue of books published by them. Some of the books will be shared in the future in the form of digital typeset so there will not be any need for re-typing the books.

Dr. Gayatri Mishra

7 books (poems, stories, etc.)

Manoj Kumar Panda

Book: "Hada bagicha" (Story compilation)
This is a critically acclaimed book and many readers have requested if this could be brought into Wikisource.

Asim Basu

Book: "Kathare Kathare" (autobiography)
Asim Basu is a notable stage artiste, director, painter, art director and writer from Odisha. His autobiography is also a historical documentation of the art scenario in general and Odia film production, Odia typography and book cover design in particular.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/publications-under-creative-commons-license

Tech for Citizen Engagement 2014

praskrishna — 2014-12-28T03:03:11Z

Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session "Rules of Engagement: Emerging Trends in Citizen Outreach" at this event organized by Omidyar Network on December 11, 2014 in New Delhi.

Details of the agenda can be seen here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/omidyar-network-december-11-2014-tech-for-citizen-engagement-2014

Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala

praskrishna — 2014-12-28T02:44:19Z

ICFOSS, Govt. of Kerala organized the fifth international Free Software Conference at Hotel Hycinth by Sparsa, Trivandrum from December 18 - 20, 2014. The Centre for Internet and Society was one of the organizations supporting the event. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was a speaker and made a presentation on Open Science.

Click to download Prof. Arunachalam's presentation on Open Science here. For more details see the ICFOSS web page. T. Vishnu Vardhan chaired a session on Wikimedia and Access to Knowledge in India and Rahimanuddin Shaik co-presented on Making DLI Accessible. The programme schedule can be seen here.

Theme: Free Software for a Free World

About Swatantra 2014

After India's first-ever Free Software event, “Freedom First!” that was convened in Trivandrum in 2001, Kerala had organized international Free Software conferences in 2005, 2008, and 2011. These conferences were an occasion to highlight Kerala's achievements in the domain of Free Software, as well as to bring together the community to discuss priorities and action items.

ICFOSS is proud to present the fifth international Free Software conference of Kerala, Swatantra 2014, scheduled during 18-20 December 2014 at Thiruvananthapuram.

The theme of the conference is “Free Software for a Free World”. This reflects emerging concerns that citizens and communities face vis-a-vis privacy, online rights & freedoms, and security at the global level. Free Software provides a viable alternative to proprietary software which often compromises on these aspects. Further, Free Software also provides a technologically robust and cost effective alternative to other genres of software for all public uses, notably in Academia, Government, and personal computing, and even in the Arts & Culture domains.

International dignitaries participating at the Conference include Dr. Richard Stallman and Ms. Nina Paley. Several luminaries from the FOSS world within the country are also expected to take part.

About 150-200 Free Software enthusiasts, including practitioners, developers, researchers, academics, students, as well as representatives from civil society institutions, industry and the Government are expected to participate in the three-day conference.

Supported by

FSF-India
Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
SFLC.IN, Delhi
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
FOSSEE, IIT-B
SPACE
DCBB, Kerala University
Spoken Tutorials, IIT-B
IEEE Kerala Section

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/swatantra-2014-icfoss-december-18-20-2014-fifth-international-free-software-conference-in-kerala

Access to Rare Books Made Easy

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T01:56:57Z

Rare Odia books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet, will now be available at the click of the mouse. In a bid to make them available online, the Odia Wikipedia community last week launched WikiSource, an Odia e-library and a sister project of Odia Wikipedia that has been trying to popularise use of Odia language on the Internet since 2002.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on December 5, 2014

The online library has 69 books by authors Jagannath Mohanty, Upendra Bhanja, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopabandhu Das, Baladeva Rath and Ram Das. Besides, the complete volume of Bhagwad Gita in Odia language is available on WikiSource.

The project has been implemented by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to knowledge programme. Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi, also a programme officer of the Centre for Internet and Society, said work on digitisation of the books was started in April this year by a team of 12 Wikipedians, comprising mostly students and working professionals.

Apart from them, 50 tribal students and nine faculty members of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) helped them with the digitisation job. As most of the books were typed in Akruti font - a proprietary Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) compliant font - the font was converted to Unicode text type to make the books searchable and accessible universally in all mobile and web platforms.

In the first phase, 11 books focusing on children’s literature, travelogue and biographies of noted people from Odisha by eminent Odia author Jagannath Mohanty were digitised. Subsequently, works of other authors were added to the e-library and made available on the internet with open access through free licence.

Subhashish said the WikiSource project was started in 2013 as an incubator project. It went through a tough process of being accessed by the Wikimedia Language Committee and Wikimedia Foundation’s board before being released last week. “There are several precious books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet. So we thought of digitising them and taking them to the masses. Apart from the 69 books, 81 of seven Odia authors that were already scanned and digitised by Bhubaneswar-based voluntary organisation, Srujanika, have been re-licensed and added to the library,” he said. Srujanika has digitised 740 old Odia magazines and books so far.

Generally a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used for digitising scanned books, which currently is in testing phase in Odia. “Faculty member of ITER in Bhubaneswar Ajit Nayak along with his students have rectified the bugs and made character recognition more accurate.

But because of problems with OCR, the books had to be re-typed by the students of KISS on Odia Wikisource, Subashish added. Old books apart, books by contemporary authors like Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Ramakrushna Nanda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and Nirmala Kumari Mohapata, and many other authors have been taken up for digitisation by Odia WikiSource team. Odia WikiSource is now live at or.wikisource.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/new-indian-express-december-5-2014-diana-sahu-access-to-rare-books-made-easy

Tulu Wikipedia - Coverage in Vijaya Karnataka

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T16:36:09Z

This is the coverage in Vijaya Karnataka on December 15.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/tulu-wikipedia-december-15-2014-coverage-in-vijaya-karnataka

Tulu Wikipedia (Coverage in VijayaVani)

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T16:30:57Z

Media coverage in Vijayavani.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/tulu-wikipedia-coverage-in-vijayavani

Tulu Wikipedia Presentation: Coverage in Kannada Prabha

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T14:46:59Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja made a presentation on Tulu Wikipedia at a workshop held in Mangalore on December 14, 2014. This was covered by Kannada Prabha.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/kannada-prabha-december-14-2014-tulu-wikipedia-presentation

Tulu Wikipedia gets some push

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T15:20:04Z

Tulu Wikipedia, which was launched in 2007, is still in incubation stage, according to UB Pavanaja, Programme Officer at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society.

The article was published in the Hindu Businessline on December 13, 2014

Speaking at a technical session on ‘Tulu in technology’ as part of Global Tulu Festival in Mangaluru on Saturday, he said that now some push has been given for reviving Tulu Wikipedia.

Workshops on Tulu Wikipedia were conducted in March, April and November this year. The number of Tulu articles in Wikipedia was 135 in January 2014. It has increased to around 750 now, he said.

Referring to the lack of encyclopaedic knowledge in Tulu language, he said there is a need to give push for creating encyclopaedic knowledge in Tulu in such a situation.

Steps should be taken to contribute entries for Tulu Wikipedia regularly to keep it live. Those who work for Tulu Wikipedia should meet regularly to discuss future course of action.

He said that Wikipedia entries in Tulu language can be made under the URL http://bitly.com/tuluwiki

A live Tulu Wikipedia will help bring pressure on the Government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of the India Constitution, he said.

Tulu-speaking people can request for including the Tulu script in Unicode, if there is a live Tulu Wikipedia, he added.

It may be mentioned here that works in Tulu language are prominently written in Kannada script, as Tulu script has not gained acceptability.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/hindu-businessline-december-13-2014-tulu-wikipedia-gets-some-push

Creating Free Software Environment at Andhra Loyola College

rahim — 2015-05-27T00:54:42Z

Andhra Loyola college has signed an MoU with CIS-A2K and as part of it CIS-A2K team has provided a free and open software environment at Andhra Lyola College's Computer Center. Thirty machines have been installed with free software Operating system and some useful applications such as GIMP, Inkscape, firefox, libreoffice, etc.

Principal, Vice-principal, management and faculty at Andhra Loyola College expressed interest in upgrading their lab computers to latest software without having the glitches of piracy issues. The obvious solution to this was to install Linux based free OS like Ubuntu/Debian

Program Director of CIS-A2K advised to have this process done in a pilot manner instead of forced imposition on faculty and students to use a totally new working environment. So, 30 machines from PG lab were selected for this purpose.

These machines were installed with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS edition. In addition to the default available Libre office, firefox and terminal, Tools like Gimp, inkscape, apache web server were also installed.

Each of the faculty and students present at the installation time were evangelized about Free Software and its wise uses in the long term.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creating-free-software-environment-at-alc

Beyond the Language Tussle

teju — 2014-12-10T14:08:02Z

It might be more productive to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn.

The Op-ed was published in the Hindu on December 6, 2014.

The ongoing Sanskrit vs. German controversy is being seen by some as the sign of a sinister conspiracy to change educational options, and by others as a much-needed corrective to bring back “Indian culture” into the schools. It might be more productive to see it instead as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn. The attempt to implement the teaching of Sanskrit in schools seems to be supported by a remarkably uninformed view about what sort of language policy we require today. And this is not to say that previous governments had any greater insight into how to handle either the medium of instruction problem or the issue of how many languages to teach and at what level.

Education budget cut

Far more disturbing than the Sanskrit-German debate was the news last week that the new Central government has decided to cut Rs.11,000 crore from the Education budget (The Hindu, “Social sector funds slashed,” Nov. 27). The favouring of physical infrastructure over “the social sector” (health, education, social security, nutrition, etc.) disregards the intangible factors that go into strengthening knowledge bases and the setting up of infrastructure in the first place. One of the implicit casualties of the massive cut in the Education budget is a proposed 12th Plan programme to revitalise Indian language resources in higher education. The rationale for this programme was that generation of knowledge in Indian languages would not only create new intellectual resources but transform the teaching-learning process in positive ways. The access-equity-quality triangle emphasised by policymakers could effectively be strengthened through a focus on Indian languages. Since the default medium of instruction at the tertiary level was actually a local language rather than the “mandatory” English, the deliberate blindness of successive governments to this fact was depriving students across disciplines of good quality resources. This linguistic divide affects the majority of tertiary students in the country. Thus, investing in Indian language materials at the basic and advanced levels is a sustainable (not to mention cost-effective) way by which Indian higher education could be strengthened.

“The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.”

We should note here that the emphasis is not on how many languages the student learns but on whether s/he is developing cognitive capabilities. This too has been a serious blind spot in modern Indian education over the decades, right up to the recent May 2014 Supreme Court judgment on the non-enforceability of mother-tongue instruction. The Court invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression in this instance to say that children and parents could choose the language in which the child wanted to be educated. With all respect to the learned judges, one wonders if they sought expert opinion in the matter or merely relied on their common sense. If they had done the former, they might have found out that worldwide research has proved that the most effective teaching and learning happens through the use of the mother tongue. If exposing a child to English at a very young age is dictated by opportunism and a skewed sense of what makes social mobility possible, this choice flies in the face of language and education research as well as the most enlightened pedagogic practices available. If mother tongue or Indian language education is not practical today, it’s because of the enormous lack of good educational resources in those languages, another need that state initiatives have failed to address adequately.

Parallel with China

Since, these days, China is the favourite country of comparison for us, we should pay attention to the fact that students in China start learning English in the fourth standard and for the most part study all their subjects in Mandarin. In my experience, the English fluency of the average Chinese undergraduate ranges from functional knowledge of English to complete proficiency, with an emphasis on reading and writing rather than speaking. Even those with functional knowledge are far more capable of dealing with the world of higher education today than most students I encounter in India. The single most important variable here would have to be that of mother tongue instruction combined with later exposure to a language that gives students access to resources not so readily available in Chinese. It’s a different matter that Internet use is so heavily policed in China. However, every person I know inside and outside the university has figured out how exactly to access the resources they want, which is much more than can be said of Indian students who don’t experience government-imposed firewalls. So, again, is the ability to navigate the digital domain related to language skills or critical skills?

Lack of clarity

The inability to create a systematic curricular exposure to language and critical skills is perhaps what prompts periodic outbursts like the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directive to replace German in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools with Sanskrit. Combined with this lack of application is what can only be seen as the extraordinarily resilient prejudices about what constitutes “Indian culture.” We routinely tend to forget that this is a modern concept, mobilised by colonialist as well as nationalist perspectives on our society. Lack of clarity about what education is for leads to muddled thinking about what should be done in the space of education. We should not confusedly believe that the primary task of education is to pass on ways of living — we do that in almost every domain of social engagement. The task of education is to foster and strengthen cognitive capacities that can equip students to produce original knowledge on their own terms, for which we are likely to need bilingual and trilingual education. Debating whether we should learn Sanskrit instead of German is a distraction from the real tasks that lie ahead. We need to reorient the language debate to focus not on learning the language (any language) but learning how to think.

Language use analysis

The CBSE circular of June 30, 2014, instructing its affiliated schools to observe ‘Sanskrit Week’, introduced the topic by stating that “Sanskrit and Indian culture are intertwined as most of the indigenous knowledge is available in this language.” It’s shocking to see that people in the business of education are unaware about the fundamental histories of language use in our country, and that mere assertion can pass for accurate information. Apart from the facile collapsing of “culture” onto “knowledge,” the circular’s statement about Sanskrit as the language of indigenous knowledge appears as a sweeping generalisation when you look at it from the point of view of medical, artisanal or performing arts knowledge forms. Even if we stay with just one example, that of indigenous medicine, and even if we stay with the venerable Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a quick overview of the books listed would show that the languages of indigenous knowledge include Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Tamil in addition to Sanskrit. The library currently lists 137 Tamil books on Siddha, for example, with 157 Sanskrit books on Ayurveda. Some of this knowledge is also available in Malayalam, like the important works on vishavaidyam.

Coming to contemporary language use in India, it would be important to note that just as modern Kannada, Marathi or Telugu for example have drawn on Sanskrit to build their vocabulary, they have equally strongly drawn on other languages. Here are some sample Kannada words that reveal the original language coiled inside the present day usage: adalat, vakila, javabu, ambari, gulabi, sipayi, taakathhu, firyadu, bunadi, najooku (Persian/Urdu). This kind of sampling could be replicated for any contemporary Indian language, and an exhaustive mapping exercise might reveal fascinating borrowings and transformations that gesture well beyond language use.

Most of our languages cannot sustain teaching and research in the context of the modern university and its disciplines. We need to create critical vocabularies across several conceptual domains. Students need to learn the ability to distinguish between levels of meaning, to contextualise/translate, and to create new concepts that capture the life of our societies and our institutions. And in doing this, they have to learn to draw on multiple linguistic resources.

Ensuring the entry of Indian language resources into the mainstream of our higher education system is a long-delayed project. By bringing these resources into a national educational structure, we will be (a) expanding the analytical abilities of these languages, and (b) making the curriculum more relevant to the society we live in. The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.

(Tejaswini Niranjana is with the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-hindu-december-6-2014-tejaswini-niranjana-beyond-the-language-tussle