Centre for Internet and Society

January 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-03-03T16:34:21Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of its e-Newsletter for 2019.

The CIS newsletter aims to highlight developments in copyright and patent, free speech and expression, privacy, cyber security, telecom, etc. as well as Industry 4.0, big data, additive manufacturing and so on which are revolutionizing and moving the digital world forward. Through this newsletter we look to engage you with our research and build a strong bond by bringing you insightful articles and blog posts which will be beneficial for you and your business. Throughout the year we will send you stories and insights from our board, staff and community leaders. We welcome your feedback, suggestions or comments regarding our newsletter or any other aspect of our research.

Welcome to r@w blog!

CIS researchers@work programme (RAW) is delighted to announce the launch of its new blog hosted on Medium. The RAW blog will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society. The blog will also feature highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.

Highlights for January 2019

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi have produced a research paper that contextualises the narrative around Industry 4.0 and the future of work with reference to the female labour force in India.
Gurshabad Grover, Nikhil Srinath and Aayush Rathi (with inputs from Anubha Sinha and Sai Shakti) presented a response to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-The-Top (OTT) Communication Services. CIS appreciates the continual efforts of TRAI to have consultations on the regulatory framework that should be applicable to OTT services and Telecom Service Providers (TSPs).
Pranesh Prakash, Karan Saini and Elonnai Hickok authored a policy brief that recommends several changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding coordinated vulnerability disclosure (“CVD”) for improving the overarching information and cyber security posture of the country.
The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of eminent individuals across the globe opened a public comment procedure to solicit comments and obtain additional feedback. Arindrajit Basu, Gurshabad Grover and Elonnai Hickok responded to the public call-offering comments on all six norms and proposing two further norms.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:

How to make EVMs hack-proof, and elections more trustworthy (Pranesh Prakash; Times of India; December 9, 2018).
Registering for Aadhaar in 2019 (Sunil Abraham; Business Standard; January 2, 2019).
The DNA Bill has a sequence of problems that need to be resolved (Shweta Mohandas and Elonnai Hickok; Newslaundry; January 15, 2019).
India should reconsider its proposed regulation of online content (Gurshabad Grover; Hindustan Times; January 24, 2019). Akriti Bopanna and Aayush Rathi provided feedback for the article.
India’s proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese laws (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 27, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Creeped out by Netflix's 'You'? Here's how you can avoid online stalkers, data thieves (Sanyukta Dharmadhikari; The News Minute; January 10, 2019).
Civic activism over WhatsApp and stories of and from cab drivers are part of a new narrative in Bengaluru (Sowmya Rajaram; Bangalore Mirror; January 13, 2019).
They know where you are (Tini Sara Anien; Deccan Herald; January 17, 2019).
Oyo Hotels’ Real-Time Digital Record Database Sparks Privacy Fears (Nishant Sharma; Bloomberg Quint; January 16, 2019).
Is the viral #10YearChallenge just another sneaky way for tech firms to gather users’ personal data? (Devarsi Ghosh; Scroll.in; January 18, 2019).
Google Gives Wikimedia Millions—Plus Machine Learning Tools (Wired; January 22, 2019).
New movies lose out due to piracy (Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; January 23, 2019).
Submitted Your Biometrics for Aadhaar? Here’s How You Can Lock/Unlock That Data (Vidya Raja; Better India; January 24, 2019).
India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers (Zack Whittaker; Tech Crunch; January 30, 2019).
Open standards can disrupt Facebook’s messaging monopoly (Abhimanyu Ghoshal; The Next Web; January 30, 2019).
Conmen seed fake phone numbers in Google to trap people looking for customer care details (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; January 30, 2019).
Amazon and Walmart are about to take a big hit in India (Q13 Fox; January 31, 2019).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Cyber Security

Submission

Response to GCSC on Request for Consultation: Norm Package Singapore (Gurshabad Grover, Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; January 22, 2019).

Policy Brief

Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India (Pranesh Prakash; Karan Saini and Elonnai Hickok; January 23, 2019).

Privacy

Submission

CIS Submission to UN High Level Panel on Digital Co-operation (Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; January 30, 2019).

Gender

Research Paper

A Gendered Future of Work (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; December 19, 2018).

Event Organized

RFCs We Love meetup (Organized by CIS and India Internet Engineering Society; CIS, Bangalore; January 19, 2019).

Events Participated / Partnered In

Webinar on the draft Intermediary Guidelines Amendment Rules (Organized by CCAOI and the ISOC Delhi Chapter; New Delhi; January 10, 2019). Gurshabad Grover was a discussant in the panel.
MediaNama roundtables on intermediary liability rules (St. Marks Hotel, Bangalore; January 25, 2019). CIS was a community partner. Gurshabad Grover participated in the meeting.
DSCI's Bangalore chapter meet (Organized by Data Security Council of India; Bangalore; January 29, 2019). Karan Saini and Gurshabad Grover participated in the meet.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions.

Submission

Response to TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-The-Top (OTT) Communication Services (Gurshabad Grover, Nikhil Srinath and Aayush Rathi with inputs from Anubha Sinha and Sai Shakti; January 10, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Announcement

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan (P.P. Sneha; January 9, 2019).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and 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, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@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/january-19-newsletter

January 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-03-01T01:35:56Z

January 2018 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
The paper titled "Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products" has been published in the latest issue of the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. It is one of the outputs of the Pervasive Technology project and has been authored by Prof. Jorge L. Contreras, Paxton M. Lewis, and Rohini Lakshané. CIS made a submission to the Department of Industrial Planning and Promotion on mobile patents. CIS offered its assistance on matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare in India is increasing with new startups and large ICT companies offering AI solutions for healthcare challenges in the country. The report by by Yesha Paul, Elonnai Hickok, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari seeks to map the present state of AI in the healthcare sector in India. About 27% of India's population is still illiterate or barely literate. Most privacy policies and terms of services for web and mobile applications are in English and therefore it is only 10% of us who can actually read them before we provide our consent. The article by Sunil Abraham was published in Deccan Herald on January 20, 2018. CIS made a submission to TRAI Consultation on inputs to the National Telecom Policy. CIS in its submission also recommended what all should be the main objectives of TRAI while drafting the next edition of National Telecom Policy. Under a research grant from the Azim Premji University CIS has initiated a study of the ongoing updation process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and the resultant reform of citizen identification infrastructure in India. The 2G judgment of December 2017 provides a critique of how no proper evidence was presented on existence of an FCFS policy and its improper implementation, wrote Shyam Ponappa in his article in the Business Standard which was published on January 3, 2018.

Highlights

The paper titled "Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products" has been published in the latest issue of the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. It is one of the outputs of the Pervasive Technology project and has been authored by Prof. Jorge L. Contreras, Paxton M. Lewis, and Rohini Lakshané.
CIS made a submission to the Department of Industrial Planning and Promotion on mobile patents. CIS offered its assistance on matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare in India is increasing with new startups and large ICT companies offering AI solutions for healthcare challenges in the country. The report by by Yesha Paul, Elonnai Hickok, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari seeks to map the present state of AI in the healthcare sector in India.
About 27% of India's population is still illiterate or barely literate. Most privacy policies and terms of services for web and mobile applications are in English and therefore it is only 10% of us who can actually read them before we provide our consent. The article by Sunil Abraham was published in Deccan Herald on January 20, 2018.
CIS made a submission to TRAI Consultation on inputs to the National Telecom Policy. CIS in its submission also recommended what all should be the main objectives of TRAI while drafting the next edition of National Telecom Policy.
Under a research grant from the Azim Premji University CIS has initiated a study of the ongoing updation process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and the resultant reform of citizen identification infrastructure in India.
The 2G judgment of December 2017 provides a critique of how no proper evidence was presented on existence of an FCFS policy and its improper implementation, wrote Shyam Ponappa in his article in the Business Standard which was published on January 3, 2018.

The following articles were written by CIS members:

Digital native: Memory card is full (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 3, 2018).
The 2G Judgment of December 2017: What Was It About? (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 3, 2018).
Fixing Aadhaar: Security developers' task is to trim chances of data breach (Sunil Abraham; Business Standard; January 10, 2018).
Another Step towards Privacy Law (Elonnai Hickok; Governance Now; January 15, 2018).

Data Protection: We can innovate, leapfrog (Sunil Abraham; Deccan Herald; January 20, 2018).

CIS in the News:

From net neutrality to IBC & Aadhaar, how Vidhi is framing key government legislation (Surabhi Agarwal and Samanwaya Rautray; Economic Times; January 4, 2018).
UIDAI denies any breach of Aadhaar database (Komal Gupta; Livemint; January 7, 2018).
Token security or tokenized security? (Manasa Venkataraman and Ajay Patri; Livemint; January 9, 2018).
UIDAI introduces new two-layer security system to improve Aadhaar privacy (Economic Times; January 11, 2018).
Hammered government offers Virtual ID firewall to protect your Aadhaar (New Indian Express; January 11, 2018).
Virtual Aadhaar ID: too little, too late? (Yuthika Bhargava; Hindu; January 11, 2018).
India To Introduce Virtual ID For Aadhaar To Strengthen Privacy (Bloomberg Quint; January 11, 2018).
UIDAI's Virtual ID, limited KYC does little to protect Aadhaar data already collected, say critics (Business Today; January 12, 2018).
Aadhaar Body Talked About Virtual ID 7 Years Ago, Put It Off: UIDAI Chief (Sukriti Dwivedi; NDTV; January 13, 2018).
Bengaluru gives data safety tips to panel (Deccan Herald; January 14, 2018).
Is your personal information under lock and key? (Sravanthi Challapalli; Hindu Businessline; January 16, 2018).
Aadhaar-privacy debate: How the 12-digit number went from personal identifier to all pervasive transaction tool (First Post; January 18, 2018).
Paytm Payments Bank woos corporates with digital incentives (Komal Gupta and Remya Nair; Livemint; January 24, 2018).
Aadhaar's new security measures are good, it is still work in progress (Alnoor Peermohamed; Business Standard; January 25, 2018).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is 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.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Government of Odisha adopting Creative Commons License to Promote Transparency and Access to Knowledge (Sailesh Patnaik; January 17, 2018).
Experience and Learning outcome from Wikipedia Education Program (Lakshmi Karlekar; January 30, 2018).

Events Organized

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Dept. of Mass Communication, Solapur University (Organized by CIS-A2K and Dept of Mass Communication, Solapur University; Solapur; January 2, 2018).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Dayanand College, Solapur (Organized by CIS-A2K and Dayanand College, Solapur; Solapur; January 3, 2018).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Willingdon College, Sangli (Organized by CIS-A2K and Willingdon College; Sangli; January 5, 2018).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Govt.Science & Arts College, Aurangabad (Organized by CIS-A2K and Govt.Science & Arts College; Aurangabad; January 9, 2018).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Dr.Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada Vidyapeeth (Organized by CIS-A2K and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University; Aurangabad; January 10, 2018).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Shivaji University, Kolhapur (Organized by CIS-A2K and Shivaji University; Kolhapur; January 15, 2018).
Wikidata Workshop (Organized by CIS-A2K and Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada; January 20 - 21, 2018).
Train the Trainer 2018 (Organized by CIS-A2K; Mysore; January 26 - 28, 2018).

►Pervasive Technologies

Research Paper

Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products (Jorge L. Contreras, Rohini Lakshané and Paxton M. Lewis; JIPEL NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, Vol. 7 - No.1 on January 16, 2018).

Submission

Submission to DIPP at Meeting with IP Stakeholders (Anubha Sinha; January 1, 2018). The submission was made in December 2017 but it was published on the website in January 2018.

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

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Internet Governance
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►Privacy

Blog Entry

Artificial Intelligence and the Healthcare Industry in India (Yesha Paul, Elonnai Hickok, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari (Ecosystem mapping by Shweta Mohandas, Sidharth Ray and Elonnai Hickok. Designed by Saumyaa Naidu under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; January 26, 2018).

Events Organized

Roundtable on A.I. and Manufacturing and Services (TERI, Bengaluru; January 19, 2018).

null Bangalore Meet: Special Session on Digital Identity and Privacy (CIS, Bengaluru; January 19, 2018). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.

►Free Speech and Expression

Blog Entries

Internet Governance Forum Report 2017 (Shweta Mohandas; January 11, 2018).

Mobile net ban during peaceful protest leaves farmers confused (Shruti Jain; January 19, 2018).

‘Hurt sentiments’ cost Udaipur internet access for four days (Shruti Jain; January 19, 2018).

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Telecom
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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:

Article

Submission to TRAI Consultation on "Inputs for Formulation of National Telecom Policy - 2018" (Pranesh Prakash; January 25, 2018).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Blog Entry

Life of a Tuple: National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Reform of Citizen Identification Infrastructure in Assam (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; January 22, 2018). All posts related to the study can be found here.

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About CIS
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► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/Qjanuary-2018-newsletter

January 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-03-01T06:00:37Z

Welcome to the January 2017 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Dear readers,

We are pleased to bring you the Centre for Internet & Society's January newsletter. Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPD) Act, which was passed in December 2016, seeks to give effect to the rights and obligations enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities, which India signed and ratified nearly a decade ago. Nirmita Narasimhan in a blog entry has summarized the key provisions of the Act relating to digital accessibility. The latest judgment in the matter of Super Cassettes v. MySpace is a landmark and progressive ruling, which strengthens the safe harbor immunity enjoyed by Internet intermediaries in India. CIS was one of the intervenors in the case, and has been duly acknowledged in the judgment. Meena Gayathri became the first South Indian Wikiwoman to complete 100 Wikidays challenge. The challenge required Wikipedians to create one new article per day for one hundred days in a row. Gayathri's contribution and passion towards Telugu language and culture have transcended into a "knowledge revolution". The Committee on Digital Payments constituted by the Ministry of Finance and chaired by Ratan P. Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog, submitted its report on the "Medium Term Recommendations to Strengthen Digital Payments Ecosystem" on December 09, 2016. The report was made public on December 27, and comments were sought from the general public. CIS submitted its comments. The comments were authored by Sumandro Chattopadhyay. ICANN sought community input on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy on 7 November 2016. In response to this CIS submitted its comments. The comments were authored by Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda. The eleven sessions selected for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) to be held at the IIIT Bangalore campus during March 3-5, 2017 has been announced. The conference is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore and CIS.

CIS in the news

India’s Digital ID Rollout Collides With Rickety Reality (Gabriele Parussini; Wall Street Journal; January 13, 2017).
Millions of Indians move from cash to digital payments. But some ask whether it’s safe (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; January 14, 2017).
Sunil Abraham on Aadhaar's misuse during demonetisation (Economic Times; January 14, 2017)
The soon-to-be launched Aadhaar Pay will let you make purchases using your fingerprint (Indulekha Aravind; January 15, 2017).
Lost your phone? Here's how you can make your mobile theft-proof (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; January 16, 2017).
The Dangers Of Aadhaar-Based Payments That No One Is Talking About (Mayank Jain; Bloomberg; January 17, 2017).
Supreme Court issues notice to WhatsApp, Centre on data privacy (MJ Antony, Ayan Pramanik and Apurva Venkat; Business Standard; January 17, 2017).
Demonetisation: Cost Vs Benefit (NDTV; December 24, 2016). Sunil Abraham took part in the Big Fight programme aired by NDTV. The video was published on January 17, 2017.
For India’s complaints department, visit Facebook Live (Amy Kazmin; Financial Times; January 23, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles:

Cashlessness Needs Connectivity (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017).
Digital Native: The Dream of the Cyborg (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 8, 2017).
Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently? (Zeenab Aneez; London School of Economics and Political Science; January 16, 2017).
Digital native: Back at it Again (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 22, 2017).

Jobs

Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Internship - Application accepted throughout the year
Survey Participants for Research on Musician Livelihood

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Blog Entry

Digital accessibility in the Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act 2016 (Nirmita Narasimhan; January 23, 2017).

Participation in Event

Workplace Solutions Champions Consultative Workshop (Organized by Enable India, January 21 - 22, 2017; Ecumenical Christian Centre, Bangalore). Nirmita Narasimhan attended the workshop.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entry

Super Cassettes v. MySpace (Redux) (Anubha Sinha; January 16, 2017).

Event Organized

Seminar on Rethinking Copyright and Licensing for Digital Publishing Today (Organized by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, and CIS; New Delhi; January 23, 2017). Anubha Sinha attended the event.

►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).

Blog Entries

WikiSangamotsavam 2016 (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Hyderabad Book Fair (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Rajahmundry Book Fair (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Mini Workshop on Tools: Wikipedia Monthly Meetup, Hyderabad (Manasa Rao and Pavan Santhosh; January 18, 2017).
Meet Telugu Wikipedian Surampudi Meena Gayathri – the first South Indian Wikiwoman completing 100 Wikidays Challenge (Ting-Yi Chang; January 23, 2017).

Event Organized

Odia Wikipedia and Orientation Training Programme (Organized by CIS-A2K team; Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal; January 31, 2017).

►Openness

Participation in Event

CBGA - Consultation on Opening Up Access to Budget Data in India (Organized by CBGA; January 27, 2017; New Delhi). Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a speaker.

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Internet Governance
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►Privacy

Submission

Comments on the Report of the Committee on Digital Payments (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Amber Sinha; January 12, 2017).

Blog Entries

The Design & Technology behind India’s Surveillance Programmes (Udbhav Tiwari; January 20, 2017)
Workshop on ‘Privacy after Big Data’ (Amber Sinha; January 27, 2017).

Events Organized

Discussion on Ranking Digital Rights in India (India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi; January 7, 2017).
Rankathon on Digital Rights (CIS office, New Delhi; January 8, 2017).

Participation in Events

Global Governance Futures 2027 - Session 3 (Organized by Global Public Policy Institute and supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung; New Delhi; January 17, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay joined Ankhi Das (Facebook) and Arun Mohan Sukumar (Observer Research Foundation) to discuss the "data governance" scenarios developed by the GGF 2027 Fellows.
CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection) 2017 (Organized by Privacy International; Brussels, January 26, 2017). Amber Sinha participated as a panelist.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

New Media, personalisation and the role of algorithms (Amber Sinha; January 2, 2017).

Participation in Events

Training programme for Chairs, Convenor and Experts for International Standardization Work (Organized by National Institute of Training for Standardization, under the Bureau of India Standards; January 19 - 20, 2017; NOIDA). Udbhav Tiwari attended the training programme.
Seminar on Understanding Financial Technology, Cashless India, and Forced Digitalisation (Centre for Financial Accountability; New Delhi; January 24, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay spoke on the emerging architecture of FinTech in India.

►Free Speech & Expression

Submission

Comments on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy (Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda; January 13, 2017).

Blog Entry

Social Media Monitoring (Amber Sinha; January 13, 2017).

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Telecom
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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:

Article

Cashlessness Needs Connectivity (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; January 5, 2017).

Event

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selected Sessions (Organized by Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy and CIS; IIIT, Bangalore; March 3 - 5, 2017). Eleven sessions have received 10 or more nominations.

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About CIS
-----------------------------------
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2017-newsletter

January 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-02-26T17:02:23Z

Our newsletter for the month of January can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of the newsletter (January 2015). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights

Forbes India in an article titled “Minds that (should) matter” names Sunil Abraham as one of the Thinkers who best explain a rapidly-changing India to the world (and the world to India).

Subhashish Panigrahi won the 2015 Opensource.com Community Awards under the category 'People's Choice Awards'.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay has joined CIS team as Research Director. Sumandro has replaces Nishant Shah who stepped down from the position.
Rishika on behalf of CIS prepared an analysis of the disability exceptions in Copyright Legislations . The blog post provides in detail the country-wise exceptions in copyright legislations.
NVDA team conducted a training programme on Malayalam eSpeak with NVDA in Thiruvananthapuram on January 24 and 25, 2015. Chakshumathi's main trainer Akhil M. took eSpeak Malayalam classes and Dr. Homiyar took classes on NVDA and accessible equipment.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Government of India invited comments on the First Draft of India's National IPR Policy. CIS made its submission.
As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Nehaa Chaudhari has produced a research methodology document which maps the existing literature around questions of competition law intersecting with intellectual property law on the specific issue of enabling access to sub hundred dollar mobile devices .
Maggie Huang, an intern at CIS as part of the Pervasive Technologies project has written a blog entry which documents, synthesizes, and analyses learnings from attending various music industry trade conferences.

CIS-A2K team on December 28, 2014 organized a MediaWiki hackathon event for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.

Subhashish Panigrahi authored an op-ed that highlights the need for taking Odia language to the international fora instead of keeping it confined in the books. The op-ed was published in the Samaja on January 30, 2015.

A journal article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India along with a few suggestions was published by the Indian National Science Academy Journals.
The Supreme Court, in Sabu George v. Union of India and Ors. (WP (C) 341/2008), is looking into the presence of material regarding pre-natal sex determination on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo that has been falling foul of section 22 of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 as amended in 2002. Geeta Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian analyse this in their blog post.
As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of 'bodies of knowledge' which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. Tejas Pande wrote an abstract which examines the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking.

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

January 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; January 31, 2015).

Event Organized

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

Other

Blog Entries

Disability Exceptions in Copyright Legislations (Rishika; January 12, 2015).
Response to RTI Applications from Different States on Accessibility (Anandhi Viswanathan; January 31, 2015).

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

Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Document 2 Literature Review on Competition Law + IPR + Access to < $100 Mobile Devices (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 1, 2015).
Relationship between App Developers and App Platforms: An Intellectual Property Perspective (Anubha Sinha; January 7, 2015).
Beyond Alcohol and Angel Investors: Building Business Models in an Age of Mobile Music Streaming (Conference Learnings) (Maggie Huang; January 20, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: The Development of the National IPR Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 22, 2015).
RTI Responses - MHRD IP Chairs: Details of Funding & Expenditure (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: CIS Comments to the First Draft of the National IP Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015).

Participation in Events

Global Intellectual Property Convention (Organized by ITAG Solutions; Mumbai; January 15 - 17, 2015). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.
Library and Information Professionals Summit (LIPS) 2015 (Organized by Society for Library Professionals, National Law University Delhi with UN Information Centre for India & Bhutan and Special Library Association (USA), Asian Chapter; January 23 - 24, 2015; New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari was on a panel discussing Internet Technology and Challenges for Libraries in IPR Regime. She made a presentation on Technology (Internet?), Libraries and the Law (?).

Upcoming Event

Announcing the Institutional Partner for the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015 (Organized by the National Law School of India University; New Delhi; December 2015).

Wikipedia

Op-ed

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଅନ୍ତର୍ଜାତୀୟ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ (Subhashish Panigrahi; The Samaja, January 31, 2015).

Blog Entries

Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014 (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015).

Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014 (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015). The event was conducted on December 28, 2014. However, the blog post was published in January 2015.

News and Media Coverage

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

Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web (Hans India; January 1, 2015).
Centre should partner local communities in 'Digital India': Expert (IANS and mirrored in Zee News; January 9, 2015).
Musician donates Gwalior Gharana songs to free e-library (Times of India; January 20, 2015).

Announcement

2015 Opensource.com Community Awards : Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source. Subhashish Panigrahi from the CIS-A2K team won the award under the category 'People's Choice Awards'.
CIS-A2K team also published the Telugu Wikipedia Stats tables. Most metrics have been collected from a partial dump (aka stub dump), which contains all revisions of every article, meta data, but no page content.

Participation in Event

Citizen Media Summit 2015 (Organized by Global Voices; January 24 - 25, 2015). Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker.

Openness

Journal Article

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers (Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran; Indian National Science Academy Journals, Proc Indian Natn SciAcad 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929).

Internet Governance

Articles and Blog Entries

Indians Plead for #NetNeutrality as Airtel Raises Data Charges (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; December 30, 2014). The article was published in the month of December but mirrored on CIS website in January.
Indian Netizens Criticize Online Censorship of 'Jihadi' Content (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; January 6, 2015).
Security and Surveillance - Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights (Elonnai Hickok; January 19, 2015).
Search Engine and Prenatal Sex Determination: Walking the Tight Rope of the Law (Geetha Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian; January 29, 2015).

Event Co-organized

Security, Governments, and Data: Technology and Policy (Organized by CIS and Observer Research Foundation; January 8, 2015, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event.

Participation in Events

Symposium on Human Rights and the Internet in India (Organized by the Center for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg; New Delhi; January 17, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a panelist.
Winter School on Privacy, Surveillance and Data Protection (Organized by the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg and the Hans Bredow; Delhi; January 19 - 23, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a facilitator.
ASSOCHAM National Council on IT / ITes (Organized by ASSOCHAM; New Delhi; January 30, 2015). Geetha Hariharan participated in the event.

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:

Government blocks 32 websites to check ISIS propaganda (Kim Arora; The Times of India; January 1, 2015).
Internet users fume as govt blocks 32 sites (Jaison Lewis; Mumbai Mirror; January 1, 2015).
India 'jihadi' web blocking causes anger (BBC; January 2, 2015). This was also mirrored in Puffington Post.
Govt cracks down on cyber jehad network, blocks access to 32 websites (India Today, January 1, 2015).
Indian Government still blocks 20+ websites - Indian Censorship on Internet (Times of Assam; January 2, 2015).
350% surge in Cyber crimes in last 3 years (Devanik Saha & Indiaspend.org; Hindustan Times; January 20, 2015).
TOI literary festival kicks off today (The Times of India; January 31, 2015).

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:

Staff Movement

Sumandro Chattapadhyay has joined CIS as Research Director. His academic interests span over topics of history and politics of informatics in India, new media and technology studies, and data infrastructures and economies. He is also keenly interested in questions and techniques of digital humanities. Recently, Sumandro has completed a study on policy and practices of open data in India as part of the Open Data Research Network managed by the World Wide Web Foundation. He is an involved member of DataMeet, a leading community of open data and data science enthusiasts from India. Sumandro studied economics in Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, and in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has variously worked on topics of urban development, information technology in governance, data visualisation, and early electronic governance in India with MOD Institute, Azim Premji University and the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Blog Entry

Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer (Tejas Pande; January 30, 2015).

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2015-bulletin

January 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-06-11T11:56:35Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the first issue of our newsletter for the year 2013. This issue brings you an overview of our research programs, events organised and participated, news and media coverage, and videos of recent events.

Jobs

CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge — Indic Language Initiatives), Developer (NVDA Project), Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge and Openness), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org. For our Privacy project, we are seeking applications for the post of Researcher, Technology/Security Expert, Graphic Designer as well as for internships. To apply for these posts, please send in your resume to Elonnai Hickok (elonnai@cis-india.org).

Accessibility

CIS is carrying out two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. The first one is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and the second one is for developing a screen reader and text to speech synthesizer for Indian languages. We are also working with the World Blind Union to develop the Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons, and assisting in the negotiations at WIPO:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities

Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Shruti Ramakrishnan has left the project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapter on Haryana:

The Haryana Chapter (by Anandi Viswanathan, January 31, 2012): The state implements the provisions under the central laws, particularly the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act 1995 and the National Trust for Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation and Multiple Disabilities Act 1999.

Submission / Notification

Making Public Libraries Accessible to People with Disabilities (by Rahul Cherian, January 23, 2013): CIS was one of the 20 disability rights groups that wrote to the Ministry of Culture.
Government of Madhya Pradesh initiates ICT Accessibility in Public Communication (by Nirmita Narasimhan, January 31, 2013): CIS with Daisy Forum of India member Arushi in Bhopal submitted a request for a notification mandating that all communication by the Government of Madhya Pradesh should be accessible to persons with disabilities.

Report

Accessible Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, January 11, 2013): The abridged version of ITU’s report "Making Television Accessible" which was initially put up for comments last year has been updated once again.

Blog Entry

Linking Commercial Availability and Exceptions in the Treaty for Visually Impaired/Persons with Disabilities (by Rahul Cherian, January 23, 2013).

Access to Knowledge

In partnership with the International Development Research Centre we are doing a project on Pervasive Technologies examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. The Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program to support and develop free knowledge in India is now being executed by us. We are also supporting the Iraq government in developing an eGovernment Interoperability Framework:

Wikipedia

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of four members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

New Project Director

T. Vishnu Vardhan is the new Programme Director-Access to Knowledge at CIS. Vishnu has over the last 11 years worked in various capacities as researcher, grant manager, teacher, project consultant, information architect and translator. Vishnu managed the Art, Crafts and Culture portfolio of Sir Ratan Tata Trust and also worked as Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society.

New Distinguished Fellow at CIS

Tejaswini Niranjana, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai is joining our team as an Adviser to the 'Access to Knowledge' project. She will guide the A2K team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

Reports

Access to Knowledge Report — September to December 2012 (by Noopur Raval, January 31, 2013): The report covers an overview of the activities done by the Access to Knowledge team under the grant provided by the Wikimedia Foundation from September 2012 to December 2012.
Indic Language Wikipedias — Statistical Report — 2012 (by Shiju Alex, January 21, 2013): A statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias for the year 2012 providing perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias.

Wiki Event Reports
CIS organised a series of Wiki workshops in Goa in the month of December 2012, we bring you the reports from those events.

Note: The workshops were held in the month of December 2012 but the reports were published only in the month of January.

Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Nitika Tandon, January 15, 2013).
Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 19, 2013).
Bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in Public Domain (by Nitika Tandon, January 22, 2013).
Promoting GLAM in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 24, 2013).
Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level (by Nitika Tandon, January 25, 2013).

CIS also organised a Wiki workshop in Ghaziabad:

A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad (RKGIT, Ghaziabad, January 17, 2013).

Wiki Event Participated

Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 (organized by Wikipedia Club, Pune, January 12 – 13, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Wikipedia News Coverage

First Odia Wikipedia Education Program concludes at IIMC, Dhenkanal (Odisha Diary Bureau, Dhenkanal, January 27, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia's 9th Anniversary and Workshop on Application of Odia in Media (Sambad, January 30, 2013).

Wiki Events Organised

Odia Education Program (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, Orissa, January 26, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia 9th Anniversary Celebration (Academy of Media Learning, Samantha Vihar, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, January 29, 2013).

Pervasive Technologies

The Pervasive Technologies project carries out research on the intellectual property implicated in the hardware, software and content available in low-cost mobile devices.The long-term outcome of this project is to create a legitimate, legal space for these technologies to exist on the Indian market.

Events Participated

Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Market Place — A Presentation by Sunil Abraham (FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, December 15, 2012).
Fifth International IPR Conference (GIPC 2013) (organised by ITAG Business Solutions, Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bangalore, January 30, 2013): Snehashish Ghosh made a presentation on the Pervasive Technologies Project.

Other Openness Updates

Blog Posts / Columns

The Violence of Knowledge Cartels (by Nishant Shah, Hybrid Publishing Lab, January 17, 2013).
Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, January 24, 2013).

Interview

Aaron Swartz: The First Martyr of the Free Information Movement: Prabir Purkayastha interviewed Lawrence Liang on Newsclick, January 19, 2013. The video is published.

Media Coverage

Bangalore hackers write code as tribute to Aaron Swartz (by Deepa Kurup, Hindu, January 21, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru.
Event Organized Aaron Swartz Memorial Hacknight (CIS, Bangalore, January 19 – 20, 2013): Aaron’s collaborators such as Anand Chitipothu and A S L Devi participated in the event.

Internet Governance

With Privacy International, London we signed an agreement to facilitate the implementation of activities related to surveillance and freedom of speech and expression. In this month we have blog posts on data retention, international principles of surveillance and human rights and comparitive analysis of Indian legislation vis-à-vis draft of the International Principles on Surveillance of Communications by Ellonai Hickok, and columns by Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah:

Privacy Research

Data Retention in India (by Elonnai Hickok, January 30, 2013): The post provides an insight into the data retention mandates from the Government of India and data retention practices by service providers.
Draft International Principles on Communications Surveillance and Human Rights (by Elonnai Hickok, January 16, 2013): These principles were developed by Privacy International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and seek to define an international standard for the surveillance of communications.
A Comparison of Indian Legislation to Draft International Principles on Surveillance of Communications (by Elonnai Hickok, January 31, 2013): The principles, first drafted in October 2012 and developed subsequently seek to establish an international standard for surveillance of communications in the context of human rights. CIS is contributing feedback to the drafting of the principles.

Columns/Op-eds

Web of Sameness (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, January 18, 2013).
TV versus Social Media: The Rights and Wrongs (by Sunil Abraham, The Tribune, January 20, 2013).

Statement

Statement of Solidarity on Freedom of Expression and Safety of Internet Users in Bangladesh (by Pranesh Prakash, January 15, 2013): This is a statement on the violent attack on blogger Asif Mohiuddin by the participants to the Third South Asian Meeting on the Internet and Freedom of Expression.

Blog Entries

No Civil Society Members in the Cyber Regulations Advisory Committee (by Pranesh Prakash, January 10, 2013).
Five Frequently Asked Questions about the Amended ITRs (by Chinmayi Arun, January 28, 2013): The author discusses the five major questions that have been the subject of debate after the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT).

Upcoming Event

DML Conference 2013 (co-organised by CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central, Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2013).

Event Organized

An Introduction to Bitfilm and Bitcoin – A Discussion by Aaron Koenig (CIS, Bangalore, January 23, 2013): Aaron Koenig, Managing Director, Bitfilm Networks of Hamburg, Germany gave a talk.

Events Participated

Panel Discussion on E-Commerce at NLSIU (organised by National Law School of India University, Bangalore, January 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
Mobile Broadband: Leveraging for Business Transformation (Chancery Pavilion, Bangalore, January 9, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist in this event.
Third South Asian Meeting on the Internet and Freedom of Expression (organized by Internet Democracy Project, Voices for Interactive Choice & Empowerment and Global Partners & Associates, Dhaka, January 14 – 15, 2013): Pranesh Prakash moderated the session on "Understanding cyber security and surveillance in South Asia”.
Is Freedom of Expression under Threat in the Digital Age? (organized by Editors Guild of India, Index on Censorship and Sage, India International Centre, New Delhi, January 15, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist at this event.
7th India Digital Summit 2013 (organised by Internet and Mobile Association of India, Lalit Hotel, New Delhi, January 16 – 17, 2013): Sunil Abraham was the moderator for Plenary Session 3: Discussion on Social Media – Freedom, Moderation or Regulation.

Upcoming Event

9th International Asian Conference (organised by ITechLaw, February 14 – 15, 2013): Sunil Abraham will be participating as a panelist in the session on “Censorship of Online Content”.

Media Coverage

2012 in Review: Biometric ID Systems Grew Internationally...and So Did Concerns about Privacy (by Rebecca Bowe, Right Side News, January 1, 2013)
Cool Jobs | Parmesh Shahani, Head, Godrej India Culture Lab (LiveMint, January 4, 2013).
Clash of the cyberworlds (by Latha Jishnu, Dinsa Sachan and Moyna, Down to Earth, January 15, 2013 issue). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Is freedom of expression under threat in digital age? (originally published by Indo Asian News Service, January 16, 2013 and also covered in the Business Standard, Vancouver Desi, DNA, and Tech2). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Is freedom of expression under threat in the digital age? (by Mahima Kaul, Index on Censorship, January 18, 2013).
Internet Freedom in India – Open to Debate (by Kirsty Hughes, Index on Censorship, January 22, 2013). CIS research on censorship is quoted.
Cyber security, surveillance and the right to privacy: country perspectives (by Richa Kaul Padte, Internet Democracy Project).
Surveillance Camp: Privatized State Surveillance (by Katitza Rodriguez, Electronic Frontier Foundation, January 28, 2013). Elonnai Hickok is quoted.
An innovative concept comes to the fore (Deccan Herald, January 29, 2013).

Internet Access – Knowledge Repository
In partnership with Ford Foundation, CIS was tasked to produce and disseminate modules on various aspects of telecommunications including policy, regulations, infrastructure and market. However, as on November 9, 2012 there was a change in the mandate of the project. Currently, we are working on building a knowledge repository on “Internet Access”. This new repository will cover the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access. It will also touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for such policy formulation. For this purpose we will be hosting a new website: www.internet-institute.in.
We are also organizing an “Institute on Internet and Society” in collaboration with the Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registrations and relevant details will be soon announced on our website.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum.:

Column by Shyam Ponappa

What's Needed Is User-Centric Design, Not Good Intentions (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, January 3, 2013 and Organizing India Blogpost, January 6, 2013).

Event(s) Participated

21^st Convergence Conference Conference India 2013 (organized by Exhibitions India Group, January 16 – 17, 2013, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi). Snehashish Ghosh participated in the event.

Digital Humanities

From 2012 to 2015, the Researchers At Work series is focusing on building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. We organised the first Habits of Living workshops in Bangalore last year. The next workshop is being held in Brown University:

Habits of Living Workshop

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects (organised by CIS and Brown University, March 21 – 23, 2013, Brown University, Rhode Island). Nishant Shah will be speaking at this event.

About CIS
CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We have conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.
CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO. CIS staff participates in the Standing Committee for Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) meetings regularly held in Geneva, and participate in the discussions and comments on them from a public interest perspective. Our Policy Director, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://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 or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2013-bulletin

It’s Common Practice

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:41:47Z

Technologies are no longer abstract. They're habits. What constitutes a habit? The gestures that you make as you read this, the way your eyes flick when you encounter somebody you like, the way you stroke your chin in a moment of reflection, or the split second decisions that you make in times of crises — these are all habits. They are pre-thought, visceral, depending upon biological, social and collective memories that do not need rational thinking. Habits are the customised programming of human life.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on May 12, 2013.

However, habits are not natural. They are, in fact, man-made nature. They appear as natural, matter-of-fact, instinctive and intuitive, but they are built over years of shared experiences, learning and empathy. And more often than we realise, habits are formed because of the different technologies that surround us.

If you are reading this column on paper, look at the way you are holding the magazine, folding the paper and note how you can read this easily because the text has been arranged from left to right, top to bottom. If you are browsing through this piece on a digital device, look at how your fingers move on your scroll button, or on your touchscreen, helping you make sense of complex devices without a second thought.

Habits that are formed through technologies work so seamlessly because they make technologies transparent. They make us forget that there is a complex network of machines, devices, grids and information that shape our lives. Do you remember the time when you came across something online and didn't look for the 'Like' button that is now a part of everyday internet practice? Do you remember the last time you struggled to manage the cursor on your screen using a mouse? Do you realise how the mouse has already become obsolete and is now being replaced by other touch-and-flick devices for a new generation?

I recently encountered this habit when my three-going-on-90-year-old Kindle — the Amazon device I use to read books — fell in the hands of a six-year-old. Like many digital natives of her time, she is unfazed by technology and, as her parents confess, is much better at operating most things digital in the house than them. She thinks nothing of streaming her favourite cartoon show from a website. She is adept at customising the many screens on her father's smartphone and has accepted that specific movements of her fingers will produce information on brightly-lit touchscreens.

However, when she used my non-backlit, non-touch Kindle that requires buttons to be pushed, she faced acute frustration. After trying to scroll, flick, activate, zoom and pinch on the screen she flung it at me, bewildered and angry that her habits were suddenly redundant and challenged. I want to use this moment of reflection to understand how technologies are integral to our ways of living. Technologies are habits. You don't need to be online 24x7, constantly upgrading yourself to the latest version of Android to interact with technology. Instead, we need to think about technologies as outlets that allow us to think about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

One way of looking at technology as habits is to see how we have started thinking of ourselves through metaphors of the machines that we use. For example, it's quite common to hear people complain about "lack of bandwidth" to describe busy schedules. We now think of ourselves as systems that need upgrading. Life has long been lived on windows through which we recycle ourselves.

If technologies are such an inseparable part of ourselves, maybe it is time to stop making a distinction between the human and the technological. It is time to stop thinking about technologies only in terms of gadgets that can be removed from our biological assemblage. And indeed, if we are ready to recognise these technologies as a part of being human, then we need to think of technology politics in a new way. The questions around piracy, privacy, intellectual property, proprietary technologies, openness, etc. which are relegated to the digital world are also questions of us. They are not external problems but are centrally shaping how we construct ourselves as humans. Through habits.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice

Is India's Digital Health System Foolproof?

aayush — 2019-12-30T17:58:00Z

This contribution by Aayush Rathi builds on "Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?" (by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 6, 09 Feb, 2019) and seeks to understand the role that state-run reproductive health portals such as the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) and the Reproductive and Child Health will play going forward. The article critically outlines the overall digitised health information ecosystem being envisioned by the Indian state.

This article was first published in EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 47, on November 30, 2019

Introduced in 2013 and subsequently updated in 2016, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW) published a document laying out the standards for electronic health records (EHRs). While there exist varying interpretations of what constitutes as EHRs, some of its characteristics include electronic medical records (EMRs) of individual patients, arrangement of these records in a time series, and inter-operable linkages of the EMRs across various healthcare settings (Häyrinen et al 2008; OECD 2013).

To work effectively, EHRs are required to be highly interoperable so that they can facilitate exchange among health information systems (HIS) across participating hospitals. For this, the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) is being developed so as to assimilate data from various registries across India and provide real-time information on health surveillance (Krishnamurthy 2018).

EHR Implementation: Unpacking the (Dis)incentive Structure

As the implementation of EHR standards is voluntary, anecdotal evidence indicates that their uptake in the Indian healthcare sector has been very slow. Here, the opposition of the Indian Medical Association to the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010, resulting in nationwide protests and subsequent legal challenges to the act, is instructive. To start with, the act prescribes the minimum standards that have to be maintained by clinical establishments which are registered or seeking registration (itself mandatory to run a clinic under the act) [1]. Further, Rule 9(ii) of the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Rules, 2012, drafted under the act, requires clinical establishments to maintain EMRs or EHRs for every patient. However, with health being a state subject in India, the act has only been enforced in 11 states and all union territories except the National Capital Territory of Delhi (Jyoti 2018). The resistance to the act is largely due to protests by stakeholders from within the medical fraternity regarding its adverse impact on small- and medium-sized hospitals (Jyoti 2018).

Contextualising Clinicians' Inertia

Another major impediment to the adoption of EHRs by health service providers is reluctance on the part of individual physicians to transition to an EHR system. This is because compliance with EHR standards requires physicians to input clinical notes themselves.

Comparing the greater patient load faced by doctors in India vis-à-vis the United States (US), the chief medical officer of an EHR vendor in India estimates that the average Indian doctor sees about 40–60 patients a day, whereas in the US it may be around 18–20 patients (Kandhari 2017). This is suggestive of the wide disparity in the number of physicians per 1,000 citizens in both countries (World Bank nd). Given this, doctors in India tend to be more problem-oriented, time-strapped, and pay less attention to clinical notes (Kandhari 2017). Thus, clinicians will consider a system to be efficient only if the system reduces their documentation time, even if the time savings do not translate into better patient care (Allan and Englebright 2000). The inability of EHRs to help reduce documentation time deters clinicians from supporting their implementation (Poon et al 2004). Additionally, research done in the United States indicates that there is no evidence to suggest that an information system helps save time expended by clinicians on documentation (Daly et al 2002). Moreover, the use of an information system is stated to have had no impact on patient care, but doctors have acknowledged its use for research purposes (Holzemer and Henry 1992).

Prohibitive Costs of Implementation

While national-level EHRs have been adopted globally, their distribution across countries is telling. In a survey published in 2016 by the World Health Organization, wealthier countries were over-represented, with two-thirds from the upper-middle-income group and roughly half from the high-income countries having introduced EHR systems. On the other hand, only a third of lower-middle-income countries and 15% of low-income countries reported having implemented EHRs (World Health Organization 2016). A major reason for the slow uptake of EHRs in poorer countries is likely to be funding as EHR implementation requires considerable investment, with most projects averaging several million dollars (US) (Kuperman and Gibson 2003). Although various funding models for EHR implementation are being utilised globally, it is unclear what model will be adopted in India to bring in private healthcare service providers within its ambit (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2007). This absence of funding direction for private actors poses to be a significant impediment in the integration of private databases with other public ones.

In general, poorer countries are also more likely to have less developed infrastructure and health Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to support EHR systems. Besides this, they not only lack the capacity and human resources required to develop and maintain such complex systems (Tierney et al 2010; McGinn et al 2011), but training periods have also been found to be long and more costly than expected (Kovener et al 1997).

Socio-economic Exclusions and Cross-cultural Barriers

There exists scant research investigating the existing use of EHRs in India, though preliminary work is being undertaken to assess EHR implementation in other developing countries (Tierney et al 2010; Fraser et al 2005). Even in the context of developed countries, where widespread adoption of EHRs has been gaining traction for some time now, very little data exists around implementation and efficacy in underserved regions and communities. This is further problematised as clinical information systems and user populations also vary in their characteristics and, for this reason, individual studies are unable to identify common trends that would predict EHR implementation success.

Underserved settings may lack the infrastructure needed to support EHRs. The risk of exclusion already exists in parts such as difficulties inherent in delivering care to remote locations, barriers related to cross-cultural communication, and the pervasive problem of providing care in the setting of severe resource constraints. Equally important is the fact that health workers who already report significant existing impediments in their delivery of routine care in these settings do not necessarily see EHRs as being useful in catering to the specific needs of their patient population (Bach et al 2004). Moreover, experience with EHRs also reveals that there are cultural barriers to capturing accurate data (Miklin et al 2019). What this could mean is that stigma associated with the diagnosis of conditions such as HIV/AIDS or induced abortions will result in their under-reporting even within EHR systems.

Stick or Twist?

Other modalities have been devised to nudge healthcare providers into adopting EHR standards voluntarily. The National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH), India, a constituent board of the Quality Council of India (a public–private initiative), has been reported to have incorporated the EHR standards within its accreditation matrix. NABH accreditation, considered an indicator of high quality patient care, is highly sought–after by hospitals in India in order to attract medical tourists as well as insurance companies: two prominent sources of income for hospitals (Kandhari 2017). Additionally, NABH accreditation is valid for a term of three years, thus requiring hospitals seeking to renew their accreditation to adopt EHR standards as well.

Another commercial use of EHR has been in health insurance. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDAI) have both voiced their support for expediting the implementation of the EHR standards (EMR Standards Committee 2013). Both, the FICCI and IRDAI have placed emphasis on adopting EHRs, seeing it as a necessary move for formalising the health insurance industry (FICCI 2015). They have also had representation on the committee that sent recommendations to the MHFW on the first version of the EHR standards in 2013 (FICCI 2015). FICCI had additionally played a coordination role in having the recommendations framed for the 2013 EHR standards.

Fluid Data Objectives

The push for EHR implementation is emblematic of a larger shift in the healthcare approach of the Indian state, that of an indirect targeting of demand-side financing by plugging data inefficiencies in health insurance.

The draft National Health Policy (NHP), published in 2015, reflected the mandate of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to strengthen the public health system by creating a right to healthcare legislation and reaching a public spend of 2.5% of the gross domestic product by 2018. The final version of the NHP, published in 2017, however, codified a shift in healthcare policy by focusing on strategic purchasing of secondary and tertiary care services from the private sector and a publicly funded health insurance model.

In line with the vision of the NHP 2017, in February 2018, the Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Arun Jaitley, announced two major initiatives as a part of the government’s Ayushman Bharat programme (Ministry of Finance 2018). Administered under the aegis of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, these initiatives are intended to improve access to primary healthcare through the creation of 150,000 health and wellness centres as envisioned under the NHP 2017, and improve access to secondary and tertiary healthcare for over 100 million vulnerable families by providing insurance cover of up to ₹ 500,000 per family per year under the Pradhan Mantri–Rashtriya Swasthya Suraksha Mission/National Health Protection Scheme (PM–RSSM/NHPS) (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2018). The NHPS, modelled along the lines of the Affordable Care Act in the US, was later rebranded as the Pradhan Mantri–Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) at the time of its launch in September 2018. It is claimed to be the world’s largest government-funded healthcare programme and is intentioned to provide health insurance coverage for vulnerable sections in lieu of the Sustainable Development Goal-3 (National Health Authority nd).

To enable the implementation of the Ayushman Bharat programme, the NITI Aayog then proposed the creation of a supply-side digital infrastructure called National Health Stack (NHS) (NITI Aayog 2018). As outlined in the consultation and strategy paper, the NHS is “built for NHPS, but beyond NHPS.” The NHS seeks to leverage the digitisation push through IndiaStack, which seeks to digitalise “any large-scale health insurance program, in particular, any government-funded health care programs.” The synergy is clear, with the NHPS scheme also aiming to be “cashless and paperless at public hospitals and empanelled private hospitals" (National Health Authority nd) [2].

The NHS is also closely aligned with the NHP 2017, which draws attention to leveraging technologies such as big data analytics on data stored in universal registries. The Vision document for the NHS emphasises the fragmented nature of health data as an impediment to reducing inequities in healthcare provision. The NHS, then, also seeks to be the master repository of health data akin to the IHIP. By creating a base layer of registries containing information about various actors involved in the healthcare supply chain (providers such as hospitals, beneficiaries, doctors, insurers and Accredited Social Health Activists), it potentially allows for recording of data from both public and private sector entities, plugging a significant gap in the coverage of the HIS currently implemented in India. With the provision of open, pullable APIs, the NHS also shares the motivations of the IndiaStack to monetise health data.

A key component of the proposed NHS is the Coverage and Claims platform, which the vision document describes as “provid[ing] the building blocks required to implement any large-scale health insurance program, in particular, any government-funded healthcare programs. This platform has the transformative vision of enabling both public and private actors to implement insurance schemes in an automated, data-driven manner through open APIs " (NITI Aayog2018). A post on the iSPIRT website further explains the centrality of this Coverage and Claims platform in enabling a highly personalised medical insurance market in India: “This component will not only bring down the cost of processing a claim but ... increased access to information about an individual’s health and claims history ... will also enable the creation of personalised, sachet-sized insurance policies." These data-driven customised insurance policies are expected to generate “care policies that are not only personalized in nature but that also incentivize good healthcare practices amongst consumers and providers … [and] use of techniques from microeconomics to manage incentives for care providers, and those from behavioural economics to incentivise consumers" (Productnation Network 2019). The Coverage and Claims platform, and especially the Policy (generation) Engine that it will contain, is aimed at intensive financialisation of personal healthcare expenses, and extensive experiments with designing personalised nudges to shape the demand behaviour of consumers.

The imagination of healthcare the NHS demonstrates is one where broadening health insurance coverage is equated to providing equitable healthcare and as a panacea for the public healthcare sector. The first phase of this push towards better healthcare provision is to focus on contextualising the historical socio-economic divide. The next phase is characterised by digitalisation: the introduction of ICT to bridge the socio-economic divide in healthcare provision. In this process, the resulting data divide has been invisibilised in reframing better healthcare as an insurance problem for which data needs to be generated. Each policy innovation is then characterised by further marginalisation of those that were originally identified as underserved. This is a result of increasing repercussions of the data-divide, with access to benefits increasingly being mediated by technology.

Concluding Remarks

The idea that any person in India can go to any health service provider/ practitioner, any diagnostic center or any pharmacy and yet be able to access and have fully integrated and always available health records in an electronic format is not only empowering but also the vision for efficient 21st century healthcare delivery.
— Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Electronic Health Record Standards For India (2013)

The objective of health data collection has evolved over the course of the institution of the HIS in 2011, to the development of the NHPS and National Health Policy in 2017. What began as a solution to measure and address gaps in access and quality in healthcare provisioning through data analysis has morphed into data centralisation and insurance coverage. Shifting goalposts can also be found in the objectives behind introducing digital systems to collect data.

In recent iterations of the healthcare imaginary, such as the IHIP and the NHS, data ownership by the beneficiaries is stressed upon. In the absence of a rights-based framework dictating the use of data, the role of ownership should be interrogated, especially in the context of a prevalent data divide (Tisne 2019). The legitimisation of data capture can be seen in the emergence of opt-in models of consent, data fiduciaries managing consent on the data subject’s behalf, etc. (Zuboff 2019).

This framing forecloses a discussion about the quality and kind of data being used. The push towards datafication needs to be questioned for its re-indexing of categorical meaning away from the complexities of narrative, context and history (Cheney-Lippold 2018). Instead, the proposed solution is one that stores datafied elements within a closed set (reproductive health= [abortion, aids, contraceptive,...vaccination, womb]). While this set may be editable, so new interpretations can be codified, it inherently remains stable, assuming a static relationship between words and meaning. Health is then treated as having an empirically definable meaning, thus losing the dynamism of what the health and wellness discourse could entail.

It has been historically demonstrated in the Indian context that multiple tools and databases for health data management are a barrier to an efficient HIS. However, generating centralised or federated databases without addressing concerns in data flows, quality, uses in existing data structures, and the digital divide across health workers and beneficiaries alike will lead to the amplification of existing exclusions in data and, consequently, service provisioning.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Ambika Tandon for their inputs and editorial work on this contribution. This work was supported by the Big Data for Development Network established by International Development Research Centre (Canada).

Notes

[1] Section 2 (a) of the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010: A hospital, maternity home, nursing home, dispensary, clinic, sanatorium or institution by whatever name called that offers services, facilities requiring diagnosis, treatment or care for illness, injury, deformity, abnormality or pregnancy in any recognised system of medicine established and administered or maintained by any person or body of persons, whether incorporated or not.

[2] The National Health Stack, then, is the latest manifestation of the Indian government’s push for a “Digital India.” A key component of Digital India has been e-governance, financial inclusion, and digitisation of transaction services. The nudge towards cashless modes of transaction and delivery, also accelerated by India’s demonetisation drive in November 2016, has led to rapid uptake of digital payment services in particular, and that of the IndiaStack initiative in general. Developed by iSPIRT, IndiaStack (https://indiastack.org/) aspires to transform service delivery by public and private actors alike through its “presence-less, paperless, and cashless” mandate.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/is-indias-digital-health-system-foolproof

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:55:24Z

Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.

Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?

Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).
Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.
Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.
Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.

Session Team

Priyanka is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.

Aditya is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.

Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.

Bhanu Prakash GS - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.

Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.

Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.

Aishwarya is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.

A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.

In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.

All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.

Dinesh is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.

Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:52Z

Details of a session proposed by Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

2017 saw the sudden emergence of the hashtag #metoo, both in India and across the world. This has impacted not just the general public of the internet, but also the global movement women's rights movement and feminist discourse around sexual assault, gender and consent. #MeToo allowed (female) survivors of harassment to resort to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a tool to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment. In 2017, we saw this with Rose McGowan who tweeted about Harvey Weinstein or Raya Sarkar who released #LoSHA, which further erupted in late 2018 into a larger wave of ‘outing’ of Indian perpetrators in media, politics, and other areas of work.

With #LoSHA and the 2018 wave of #metoo in India, there have been a gamut of responses, even some amount of polarisation, especially among Indian civil society. During #LoSHA, we observed resistance from traditional legal and Human Rights activists and practitioners against acknowledging the unique impact of ‘survivors’ testimonies on social media’ for fear of validating a method that lies outside of ‘due process’ and ‘fair trial’. They reason that due to the ungoverned nature of social media, its platforms are without checks and balances and therefore cannot regulate arbitrary misuse. However, one can argue that social media platforms are indeed regulated by the service providers who have the ultimate power to censor complainants by simply suspending or expelling them from the platform altogether. This became evident when Twitter silenced Rose McGowan and Facebook, Raya Sarkar, promptly after their testimonies began to gather accelerated traction. Thus, the accused may always appeal to the ultimate gatekeepers, the platform providers themselves. It is precisely due to the above stated reasons, that the 2017-2018 wave of social media testimonies has garnered considerable support from a typically contemporary civil society, who recognise the disruption as powerful despite the gaps in the methodology.

Our Proposal

The tentative proposal is for our team of 2 researchers to carry out a 15-20 minute lightning talk (a conversation or debate) providing a landscape analysis of #metoo, raising specific points of discussion and interest. Following this, we will open up the discussion with the audience in the form of multiple roundtable conversations, which will seek to address the following 2 questions:

If survivors of sexual harassment are resorting to social media as a ‘means’, or their choice of instrument, what does this imply about the existing fora for due process?
New and emergent imaginaries/perspectives around the end of ‘justice’ that may lie outside the contours of conventional legal frameworks i.e. to what ‘end’ are these survivors disposed?

Our session aims at working towards the following outcomes:

A comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenon of social media - mediation of justice
A current and expanded understanding of 'justice' that is not bound by legal recourse

Session Team

Esther Anne Victoria Moraes (Communications Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist and researcher who is passionate about expanding the discourse on the evolving forms of rights-based movements. At TYPF, Esther works on building feminist leadership through on-ground programming and on research on youth movements. Esther also works with on communication and public advocacy around issues of health, rights and youth leadership with a focus on young girls and adolescents. She coordinates online and on-ground public advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights and access to information through TYPF's national-level campaign, Know Your Body, Know Your Rights.

Manasa Priya Vasudevan (Programme Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist researcher who is passionate about the theory and praxis of social justice in an increasingly internet-mediated world, especially in the context of urbanization and datafication. She has undertaken research and advocacy on issues at the intersections of information communication technologies and social justice, primarily in the area of internet governance. She has actively engaged with international multi-sectoral movement building and strategy, both online and offline. At TYPF, she manages the Know your body know your rights programme. Prior to this, she worked at IT for Change in Bengaluru.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:03Z

Details of a session proposed by Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

#PowerListing: Approaches towards an understanding of power dynamics of knowledge creation and agency behind ‘listing’ as exercised by the State, Individuals and Corporations

‘Lists’ come with an ontological mandate of organising information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This has a deliberate aspect with respect to the question of power. Our panel attempt to investigate the question of power in terms of who wields it and what implications, philosophically and materially, this lands on the stakeholders thereof. The questions of power have different insinuation when the agency of the ‘listing’ rests with the state, the individual or if it is folded within the operational matrix of a corporate service.

Our panel attempts to bring all these myriad conversations together to try and unpack the various nuances of this discussion on power around ‘lists’. Listed below is the detailed breakdown of this plan:

Paper 1: Digital Lists and List-making in Post-disaster Contexts [Prof. Shubhda Arora]

Looking at crowd sourcing of lists for humanitarian and relief purposes, this paper explores list making and circulation in a post-disaster context, specifically looking at aspects of public list making and its challenges of credibility and duplicity. The paper further examines the interaction between these ‘unofficial’ lists and intervention agencies namely the Government, Army and NGOs, which prepare their own ‘official’ lists for purposes of relief and rehabilitation. Lists of missing people, of people being marked safe, of relief material and centres, of monetary aid, of loss in terms of human life, land and money are the different kinds of lists prepared and circulated through media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram among others. The constant revision of lists based on localized information and on-ground data, the compilation of master list from various sources of lists and the problem of ‘fake lists’ need further inquiry to understand digital list making after a disaster.

Paper 2: Identity frameworks and #MeToo in India [Prof. Nidhi Kalra]

When Lawrence Grossberg argued that "Cultural studies needs to move towards a model of articulation as 'transformative practice', as a singular becoming of a community", he likely did not anticipate what became the #MeToo movement. Concerns of identity-transformation, community creation, and activism spread over social has been termed as arm-chair slactivism. Yet, we are witness and participant in a movement whose terrains and possibilities are forming as we read and write. Just a few hours before writing this piece news came of Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo claims that she is wary that the movement will need "to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women. That has to shift."

In the Indian context, #MeToo has been the vehicle of a movement with many identities linked to it--from scholars, politicians, celebrities, to Dalit female students, to women and men in the Media industry. Considering it is such a historic moment in internet history, it is important for us to use the lens of cultural studies to ask what this wave of activism does vis-a-vis identity production/transformation? What the sites of contestation around the concern of identity as it used in the #MeToo movement in India? This talk will hope to open dialogue about recording, transcribing and understand this moment and it's frameworks of identity.

Paper 3: “Making” the (ethnic) citizen: NRC list as State power and anxiety [Prof. Smitana Saikia]

In borderland regions of modern nation states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to a historical movement of peoples from Bangladesh (then East Bengal/Pakistan). Assam’s own nativist movement against “illegal” immigrants in 1980s (both popular and an armed resistance) catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining and interpellating its citizens, in an Althusserian sense. In this context, the NRC emerges as a tool to affect order in what remains a contested terrain of citizenship. This paper thus situates the NRC in the interacting landscape of the Indian nation-state’s attempt to “identify” (and hence create) citizens on one hand, and on the other, the Assamese elite’s attempt to create the ethnic “other” to consolidate and preserve political power. The paper argues that the state’s need to create a register (list) of citizens is at once a display of its hegemonic power, as it is also reflective of an acute anxiety inherent to projects of constructing (nation-) states.

Paper 4: ‘Congratulations you got a match’-- The embedded listing within the dating app ‘Tinder’ & its implications thereof [Prof. Ravikant Kisana]

The process of ‘listing’ involves the act of segregating and organising data. This involves questions of power. Who makes the lists and to what end— the state or the subversive, with what motivations, are important points of investigation and discussion. However, such an operational understanding of a ‘list’ assumes a mechanical agency in the ‘listing’ process. This paper looks to investigate the digital apps and services which are based on automated listing and hierarchical segregation of its subscribers. Google, Facebook, Uber, etc— all contain within the folds of their operational code, an algorithmic listing of data. The researcher will seek to explore this nuance in the context of dating app ‘Tinder’, which now offers three levels possible dating matches that have been ‘listed’ and curated automatically. This paper will seek to interview users of the app and try to map the ideas and anxieties around such a digital listing of their very identity profiles.

Session Team

Dr. Shubhda Arora is currently working as assistant professor of media and communication at FLAME University, Pune after having completed her doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad . Her doctoral thesis is in the area of Environmental and Disaster Risk Communication.

Dr. Smitana Saikia is an assistant professor of Politics at FLAME University, Pune. She has received her PhD from King’s College London and her thesis studied long term state and identity formation processes to explain conflict in India’s northeast. Her research interests include ethnic conflicts, borderlands, federalism, and caste and electoral politics in India.

Prof. Nidhi Kalra has been a learning facilitator since 2008. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune. Prior to that, she has taught at the English Department in Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi. Nidhi has received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked on problematizing Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Oral History, Digital Humanities, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature.

Prof. Ravikant Kisana is currently the Co-Chair of Humanities & Languages at Flame University, Pune. He has previously completed his doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad. His doctoral research focused on the oral histories of Bollywood cinema in Kashmir, and its intersections with Kashmiri nationalism and resistance. His areas of research focus on the sociology of cinema, gender & sexuality intersections with films & new media platforms, as well as investigations into the structural mores of cybercultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:21:01Z

Details of a session proposed by Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

In an attempt to initiate a conversation around #LoSHA, a group of more than twenty students of Ambedkar University, Delhi, organised a series of events in April 2018, under the campaign ‘Questioning The Silence’. While the primary focus of the initiative was to point to the cultures of sexual harassment in academia, concerns were also raised around the immediate reception of the LoSHA. What the crowdsourced LoSHA by Raya Sarkar, a law student and an Ambedkarite feminist, triggered were a series of responses, including the Kafila statement; the second list which was made public on Facebook under the pseudonym Malati Kumari, and later deleted; followed by other lists and sexual harassment accusations in different workspaces; institutional backlash, as the LoSHA accused ‘trusted’ men in positions of power in academic spaces. Many also questioned the credentials of the list or chose to remain silent altogether.

Coming from an experience of institutionally engaging with the #LoSHA through the #questionthesilence campaign, we propose to conduct a session that seeks to theorize the ‘list’ as a document, the particularity of its form, and list as a medium and a message. What goes into the making of a list, and what are the kind of subjectivities produced through it? How does social media as an internet platform, in the preparation and circulation of the list, determine the discourses that emerge from it? Further, we want to explore the various possibilities of solidarity networks and feminist practices that have emerged post-LoSHA. Given the possibilities of new intimacies and relationships that liberal spaces open up, how have the debates around the LoSHA questioned the contemporary feminist understanding of sexual harassment and violation in these spaces? How has the existing imagination of gender justice been challenged by the LoSHA?

In an attempt to address these questions, we propose a session with three components. The first part will be a paper presentation which will theoretically engage with the concept of a list. It will explore whether ‘list’ as a medium can define the message, and perhaps mark its limits. It will critically engage with the LoSHA in the larger background of #MeToo with respect to questions around scope for subjectivity in list-making, its potential in questioning power and the ‘due process’ in place, politics around its making, and some of its limitations in addressing the issue of sexual harassment. The second part entails a curated panel discussion with the session organizers as panelists, wherein we will thematically engage with the responses to the #LoSHA, as crowdsourced through our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter in the month of December. Speaking about the shortcomings of our past engagement, we see a need to approach the LoSHA from different vantage points. The third part of the session will be a poster exhibition, partly curated during the campaign itself, that seeks to demonstrate the kind of problematic remarks normalised under the garb of progressive pedagogy in liberal academic spaces.

Session Team

Anannya Chatterjee is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, a Hindustani classical singer and a theatre artist. She is a part of Sar-e-raahguzar, an endeavour to talk about love, resistance, hate crimes and freedom on the streets by employing the art forms she practices. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and has written her Masters’ dissertation titled Love, Passion, Peril: A Feminist Understanding of Abuse in Heterosexual Romantic relationships in India. She has also been a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks, and believes in bringing together her art with her feminist politics.

Arunima Singh holds a Bachelors deree in History form Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked as a freelance writer, model, game show host, and is currently working with Swiggy in Sales and Accounts Management. She is a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks. She also plans to one day follow her dream of becoming the Jon Stewart of India. She worked on the figure of Bharat Mata for her MA thesis titled: Clothing Womanhood - meanings of modesty and tradition: from colonial modernity to the contemporary, and wishes to work on studying and deconstructing the discourses around oppression and modesty in her future studies.

Bhanu Priya Gupta is an M.Phil. student in Women and Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), who has been invested in issues of gender, sexuality and mental health. She has previously worked with Indian Social Institute on social conflict among dalit women in rural Haryana. She is a freelance facilitator on gender, violence and identity formation, with People for Parity, and has conducted gender and capacity building workshops in urban and rural Rajasthan with adolescent school children, middle-aged women and village stakeholders. She has also attended training programmes on gender, sexuality and rights, at Crea and TARSHI. She is currently working on physical disability, sexuality and the emergence of disability life writing in India.

Renu Singh is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies Program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Study (CWDS). She holds an M.Phil. degree in Public Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her interdisciplinary training has allowed her to work in the development sector for eight years, while she has also been associated with sexual harassment complaints committees at some of the academic institutions she has been a part of. She is involved with the women’s movement for almost 15 years, especially in Delhi, on issues around social reproduction, affect and care, gender & sexuality, intimacy, love and interpersonal lives. She has also been involved in student politics and is an active member of New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and Stree Mukti Sangathan. She is currently working on higher education, young women’s aspirations and interpersonal ties in the backdrop of liberalization.

Rhea Bose did her Bachelors in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and holds a Masters’ degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Until recently, she was working at Centre for Social Research, Delhi. Her interest in the field of gender has manifested in different ways, including participation in the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) where she presented a paper on women in global politics, conducting workshops on gender sensitization in schools as a part of an initiative called Khalbali.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:20:14Z

Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?

We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.

Session Team

Ria De is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.

Samata Biswas teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListInterface

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:19:12Z

Details of a session proposed by Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

We would, as a starting point like to consider the conditions of possibility for the ‘list’ to emerge as the core thematic for this year’s Internet Researchers’ Conference. The proposal call provides several motivating questions and anchoring reasons foregrounding the list as an object for analysis and discussion. Broadly these may be divided along two lines - one pertaining to the qualities of the list (who makes it, why are they ephemeral, what makes lists this or that) and the other pointing to certain critical questions that emerge on our political landscape, with the list or practices of listing central to this politics.

Segment 1 [15 minutes]

In our session, the first item on the agenda (this also is a list!) is an outline of the way lists are thought of in 2 contexts:

Bureaucratic processing/management (lists and their relationship to documents, files in offices, and also, everyday lists such as shopping lists).
List as a technological object in networked technological systems ie the list-interface.

The late media theorist Cornelia Vismann is our guide among others, including Umberto Eco and Foucault’s notion of the ‘statement’.

Segment 2 [15 minutes x 3 => 45 minutes]

In the second part of our proceedings, we would like to consider 3 problems pertaining to the list:

‘List’ as a mode of presentation in various user-interfaces, such as the whatsapp screen and its relationship to the subjective experience of time : It's winter and you've opened the Amazon app to buy one winter jacket. You open the app on your phone and begin to search for one, only to realize you've been endlessly scrolling for the last half an hour looking for jackets without buying a single one and if your friend hadn't called you to break you out of that flow, you would have most probably continued to scroll for another half an hour. I could make a similar point about how you keep scrolling through Instagram endlessly without stopping or how you similarly keep scrolling endlessly through Netflix or YouTube videos without touching to watch a single one. A common theme that connects these interfaces is their "no dead end" feature. They are arranged in the form of “lists” keep going on without a stop, structuring the user’s experience of subjective time.
The #MeToo movement is, as the proposal call says, a few years old, but it is only with the publishing of this list that it erupts into the terrain of the political, at least within the context of academic institutions. We would like to examine the conditions that make this political emergence possible. As first pass, we will note here that the #LoSHA is a list that refuses to process (Other facebook posts for example, are read, ‘liked’ or commented on and then passed over, ie processed).
Social media platforms - sites of media exchange are organized structurally as lists. There’s a list of posts, responses to ‘posts’ are also lists and even interactive features are available as lists -“Like, Share and Subscribe” at the end of a youtube video for example. On Facebook, audiences would be asked to “Like, Comment and Share” in that order of increasing activity. In the recent past, “Likes” have been expanded further to “reacts” which gives a list of “reacts” (including emotions, example-sad), a list or sequence of sentiments which people use to register their response. Similarly, there are such structures present in the forms of lists across platforms, built into the keyboard to be able to structure our immediate response or sentiment (emoticons, stickers gifs etc). These are attempts to codify emotion or more broadly, affect. The 3rd problematique in our panel will consider the process of structuring affect in online environments through the listing of signs such as the ‘like’, the ‘react’ etc.

Segment 3 [30 minutes]

Following our presentation of these problems and modes of analytically situating ‘lists’ in everyday practices in online spaces, we will open the floor for discussion.

Session Team

Bharath Sivakumar graduated with a B.Sc (Research) degree in mathematics from Shiv Nadar University and currently works for Loonycorn where he's part of the team that creates technical courses. He has eclectic tastes ranging from mathematics to philosophy to Anthropology and feels at home in the hills. He enjoys trekking, loves performing on stage and aspires to be a stand up comedian one day.

Rakshita Siva is a researcher at IIIT Bangalore in the faculty of Digital Society. She graduated with a Mechanical engineering major and a minor in Sociology from Shiv Nadar University. Her interests relate to the digital, questions of self, interiority and the psyche. Rakshita is a singer and enjoys a good jam.

Deepak Prince is a course instructor and Phd candidate in the Department of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social sciences at SNU. His thesis research seeks to grapple with the 'explosion' of smartphones and touchscreens in practices of everyday sociality through the conceptual categories of the screen and the interface. Deepak's key research interest revolves around technics, the history and philosophy of technical objects. He also takes an interest in questions of anthropological disciplinarity, the history of ideas and political anthropology.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:18:07Z

Details of a session proposed by Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The session will comprise of three segments, where we shall analyse and highlight the form that is “List” in its multifarious inhabitations. From the much talked about spaces of the Hindi Film Industry to unfolding the dynamics of WhatsApp Groups, and finally to the listicles of violence and terror, the session will pose questions and argue for the malleability and limitations of the form. The obsession to finish a to do list and scheduling tasks around lists, makes list making one of the highest priority task in the big data age. The session will engage in unravelling these dynamics as well as texture its implications in varied spaces.

Paper 1: The Grapevine List - Hindi Film Industry Professionals Post #MeToo [Akriti Rastogi, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

In the age of data big data enlightenment (Byung Chul Han, 2017), the statistical tool of list making makes a comeback with a vengeance. List as a form of data-design enumerates and informs at a glance. When there are unending social media posts of harassment narratives shaking the readers (who might just be acknowledging the mobilization of social media into a movement), a list becomes an escape from the detailed unnerving and ugly truths. A red list of perpetrators scours many small to large scale films, but the voices against the powerful allegedly remain mum. In the ‘filmy’ world of filmmaking professionals, Izzat (Honour) finds poetic justice in a small way in this moment, but does it culminate into a change? An assistant director in a field interview spoke of the horror stories from a shoot, when a powerful actor targeted a crew professional. The said actor however may never find a mention on the list. Despite the social media emancipation – and what have you, the powerful remain in the white-washed limelight spiced with scandalous details that never filter out from the PR barricade.

On an entertainment channel, a veteran actress spills the beans on the working conditions in the maligned and besotted Hindi Film Industry. This sparks off a chain reaction, and in the following days, Twitter becomes a testimonial sharing courtroom. The press quotes it as the arrival of #MeToo and #TimesUp in the ‘Bollywood’ from the ‘Hollywood’. While a formal list is not abbreviated to gasp at the morbid working conditions that men and women face at the glamorous film industry, the survivor stories become a staple for transmedia channels. But where is the list? The absence of the list making aside from the Indian Express Article dated October 11, 2018 points to an important power driven working culture and network of the Hindi Film Industry. In the case of Hindi Film industry, the list has been talked about more in terms of the survivors than the perpetrators. The absence then of a #MeToo list indicates a power dynamic here. While in case of other media industries, the perpetrators have been terminated from their working projects, here the powers that be have tried to salvage the money by transferring the projects to bigger and more powerful media companies in the market. The message is clear, more the power , more the PR, less the risk of being named and shamed. This paper will map out the nuances of the absence of this “list” in the wake of #MeToo moment. While the lists form an intrinsic part of the hearsay and grapevine among professionals working in the Hindi film industry, there is an absence of a formal crowdsourced list like in case of #LoSHA. What then can be said about the industry’s working dynamics, and how does this hearsay list become a marker for the professionals to manoeuvre their daily work becomes the key analysis of this segment.

Paper 2: Most Disturbing [Ishani Dey, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

During the era of analogue tape, video circuits were replete with rumors of an underground network of snuff/gore video productions, which featured actual murder and torture caught on tape. It was speculated that there was a lucrative market for these videos, which was being cashed in by shadowy figures. However, whenever a snuff film surfaced in the mainstream, it turned out to be a simulation of crime, as opposed to real acts of violence. This changed with the emergence of the internet, which hosted a subculture dedicated to snuff/gore videos. These included websites and forums where video producers would often be in dialogue with their viewers. These communities consisted of snuff/gore aficionados who prided themselves on their ability to be able to distinguishing ‘real crime’ from mere simulations of violence. Speculations over authenticity dominated conversations on these forums, which even witnessed creators of snuff/gore taking extra measures to prove the authenticity of their product. For instance, in 2012 the headquarters of the ruling party in Canada received six packages which contained severed body parts of a victim whose death had been featured in a video which was circulating on the snuff forum, GoreGrish. Such stories were not uncommon in snuff/gore sites, which circulated videos that were often linked to crimes under investigation, at times leading to apprehending perpetrators. Many videos from such snuff/gore sites (even those that are now defunct) are often curated on mainstream video sharing platforms like YouTube, where their ‘shock value’ is highlighted through listicles like the ‘top 5 most disturbing videos on the internet (Snuff edition)’ or ‘5 Real MURDER VIDEOS You Can't Find on the INTERNET’. While the desire to capitalize on clickbait can be one motivator, snuff/gore videos have traditionally (and continued) to thrive only in niche circuits. I am therefore interested in interrogating the function of the listicle in showcasing snuff/gore content. In specific, who hosts these listicles? What kind of videos are chosen? How are the chosen clusters received? And, finally, what function do these listicles serve in the larger network of snuff/gore subcultures?

Paper 3: The Anatomy of a WhatsApp List [Sagorika Singha, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

The WhatsApp list or group is one rapidly growing communication platforms at present. As the usage of this application rises, so does one’s chances of being in a WhatsApp group. There is a group for everything - for booking portals to share online tickets, for news publications to send their latest news, for workgroups to communicate outside formal communication channels, for students, for teachers, for people selling handmade products among many others with both crafty and well-meaning intentions. In the early days of WhatsApp, being a part of such groups was not only useful but perhaps even had some associated novelty. However, with the continued mushrooming of various groups and their corresponding increase in reach, WhatsApp groups have mutated into something more formidable. I am interested in unfolding the avenues generated by this cross-platform messaging application which owing to its encryption makes conversations hard to trace. The puerile group formations in WhatsApp has grown into a mechanism of self-forming lists wherein, at times, participants are involuntarily included. The participants have different patterns of presence in such WhatsApp groups. This paper compares the growing mundanity of such list-making with the casual readiness observed in sharing information via such platforms. I consider such WhatsApp groups as lists of users. What are the dynamics that lead to the creation of such lists? How can we read into such forms of network formation? What fuels the propagation of such lists and what does it say about our current communication practices? Just the way users have become immune to the content and their presence in such groups, it has also become routine for them to share the content. The habit of sharing becomes as mundane as the habit of being participants in multiple groups, with their own purposes and directions. As participants, we are unsure both about the groups we will be added to in the future as well as the multiple lists that the contents shared in a group will end up in. This organic network formation is what gives power to such groups and explains their existence and ramifications which we have been witnessing in the contemporary time.

Session Team

Akriti Rastogi is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies department of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her current work proposes to trace the design of monetization channels of cinema effects in a new media environ. She has previously worked as a radio broadcast producer at All India Radio, New Delhi.

Ishani Dey is working on her PhD in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her current project seeks to analyse some of the ways in which the body-technology ensemble has changed with the rise of the digital. While every new image making technology since the mid-nineteenth century has reconfigured the human body, this project is dedicated to understanding the implications of twenty-first century digital technologies and the internet on bodies that inhabit the screens of the ‘post-cinematic’.

Sagorika Singha is a doctoral candidate in the department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include cinema, subculture, queer studies, technoculture, post-cinema, new mediascape, and digital societies. Her ongoing doctoral work virtually reimagines the contested region of North-east India following the arrival and popularity of mobile media and media-sharing technologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #FOMO

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:17:11Z

Details of a session proposed by Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The broad basis of the discussion would be the lists that address and invoke aspirations to know, particularly what has come to be known as 'listicle'. The focus would also be on social media and other digital platforms, including blogs and fan clubs, which list out cultural objects like books, films, music, etc. that one must not miss. On one hand, many of such listicle-s are essentially advertising devices and, in that way, descendants of the bestseller list and such that one used to encounter on the pages of The Hindu and so on. On the other, we have similar lists made by fans and culture enthusiasts, and the consumers. Both of these play on a specific type of aspiration and the attendant anxiety, expressed in common parlance as FoMo, i.e. Fear of Missing Out, in this specific case the fear of missing out on knowing/knowing about something. But FoMo, as a dominant structure of feeling in contemporary society, in the context of listicle-s, begs many more questions: what is one afraid to miss out and how intense can that fear be? Who is afraid to miss out and what does missing out represent to them? Who decides what can be missed and what not? What is deemed to be the proper content of listicle-s and what is not; and what are the repercussions of the list form on the overall repository of knowledge from which the listicle-s are culled? What is the difference and continuity between lists meant as content that leads to commercial advertisement and lists made by the consumers? What happens when one begins to increasingly learn everything from the list form? Is there a 'list knowledge', the way there is a 'bookish knowledge'? What are the political repercussions of such 'list knowledge'?

The sessions will begin with two presentations/short papers (15 minutes each), mainly to provide an initial guide map for the discussion. The next 45 minutes will be devoted to discussion with the audience, so as to list out the complex factors and facets the conjugation of listicle and FoMo has produced, which will be moderated by both the presenters. The final 15 minutes will be assigned to the summarization of the points discussed by the speakers.

Session Team

Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Pune. Besides receiving his doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from EFL University, Hyderabad, he has also worked in the publishing industry as well as a content editor in the corporate sector. His doctoral dissertation maps the ideological terrain of contemporary Bollywood against the rise of neoliberalism in India. His areas of interests include contemporary film cultures, digital modernity, particularly digital cinephilia, comparative cultural studies, etc.

Pritha Chakrabarti is an independent researcher based out of Hyderabad. She has recently submitted her doctoral dissertation titled Politics of Screen Dance in Indian Cinema in the department of Cultural Studies at EFL University, Hyderabad. A recipient of the ICSSR-CSDS doctoral fellowship, she has worked on the ideology of on-screen choreographic construction and dissemination and reception of film dance as popular culture. Professionally a Content Manager, she has nearly a decade-long experience in marketing content generation, both offline and online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo

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This article was first published in EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 47, on November 30, 2019

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