Centre for Internet and Society

March 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-05-12T01:36:18Z

Newsletter for the month of March.

We are happy to share with you the third issue of the CIS newsletter (March 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights

In a landmark judgement upholding the freedom of expression, the Supreme Court of India on March 24, 2015 struck down a provision (Section 66 A of the IT Act) which provided the power to arrest anyone for posting offensive comments online. Geetha Hariharan in her blog post captures the happenings which led to the court ruling.

CIS in partnership with Privacy International is doing the GSMA project that seeks to understand different legal and regulatory aspects of security and surveillance in India. The research outputs published thus far are now online in a consolidated blog post.
CIS as part of its RAW programme is inviting abstracts for essays that explore what it means to study Internet(s) in India today.
CIS is pleased to announce that the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is supporting a new collaborative publishing project led by T.A.J. Residency / SKE Projects and or-bits.com. The first volume of the series titled 'Silicon Plateau' will feature contributions by a group of well-known artists, researchers, and writers.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay's paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015.
CIS has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001 - 2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon. The sections will discuss the activities and experiences of civil society organisations in Asia and India, respectively, in national, regional, and global Internet governance processes. Draft outlines of the sections are shared here . Comments and suggestions are invited.

CIS has prepared an open proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation to support its annual plan with USD 208,603.
CIS has prepared a draft work plan for the period July 2015 to June 2016 . This work plan consists of 18 programs across 6 verticals.
On December 24, 2015, Bharti Airtel, one of India's largest telecom players, announced the introduction of a new 'VOIP' usage policy for its mobile users. Tarun Krishnakumar analyses the developments in a blog post.

In his monthly column published in the Business Standard on March 4, 2015, Shyam Ponappa writes "systems and methods for access through elements that provide connectivity - spectrum, fibre-optic cable, coaxial cable, or "twisted-pairs" for ADSL - must be devised in an integrated manner and made available at low cost.
NVDA team as part of its project on developing text-to-speech software in 15 Indian languages has published key updates ofBengali and Assamese language testing.
In the year 2013 Nehaa Chaudhari had worked on a module on IP Rights for UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum. The module was published recently and is available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO license.

Rohini Lakshané in a blog post chronicles information about big-ticket lawsuits pertaining to mobile technology patents filed in India.

► Vacancies at CIS

CIS is seeking applications for these posts:

Assistant Project Manager : To assist the Project Manager on all tasks relating to the organization of the Fourth Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, which will take place in New Delhi from December 15-17, 2015.
Internship : CIS is providing opportunities for students enrolled in graduate programmes to undertake internship at its offices in Bangalore and Delhi. Eligible candidates are welcome to participate in our internship programme.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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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 Updates

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

Language Testing Reports

Assamese Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; March 23, 2015).
Bengali Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; March 24, 2015).

Event Organized

Report on Training on the Use of eSpeak in Hindi with NVDA (Organized by NVDA team; Dr. Shakuntala Mishra National Rehabilitation University, Lucknow; March 16 - 29, 2015).

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Access to Knowledge
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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, Rohini Lakshané has written a blog entry that chronicles information on big-ticket lawsuits pertaining to mobile technology patents filed in India. As part of broader Access to Knowledge work UNESCO published a module on Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright and Alternative to a Strict Copyright Regime.

Module Units

Intellectual Property Rights - Open Access for Researchers (Nehaa Chaudhari; March 19, 2015, UNESCO). Nehaa worked on a module on Intellectual Property Rights for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s Open Access Curriculum (Curriculum for Researchers) as part of a project for the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia. UNESCO published the module this year. Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga were among the Module preparation team. Nehaa Chaudhari was the writer for Units 1, 2 and 3: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright and Alternative to a Strict Copyright Regime.

Blog Entries

Mobile App Developer Series: Terms of Agreement - Part IV (Samantha Cassar; March 23, 2015).
Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; March 15, 2015).
Interviews with App Developers: Open Source, Community, and Contradictions - Part III (Samantha Cassar; March 24, 2015).
Interviews with App Developers: Name of the Game - Part IV (Samantha Cassar; March 24, 2015).

Participation in Events

Conference on Standards Setting Organisations (SSOs) and FRAND (Organized by MHRD Chair on Intellectual Property Rights, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights and Advocacy (CIPRA), National Law School of India University, Bangalore, in association with Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd.; Bangalore; March 21-22, 2015). Rohini Lakshané participated in this event.
4th IPR Researchers Confluence (Organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai and National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai with support from Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi; March 27 - 28, 2015). Maggie Huang presented intermediary findings of the research entitled "India's Music Copyright Management in the Age of Music Streaming".

Media Coverage

The perils of not protecting intellectual property for new ventures (Evelyn Fok and Shonali Advani; Economic Times; March 20, 2015). Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

►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).

Announcements

Open Proposal for Funding : CIS has prepared an open proposal for funding for about USD 208,603 from the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS is inviting comments on the proposal. CIS is proposing to contribute to the qualitative and quantitative growth of 12 Wikimedia projects across 9 Indian languages and associated communities, in addition to providing need based support to other Indic communities.
Access to Knowledge Work Plan : CIS has prepared the India Access to Knowledge work plan (July 2015 to June 2016). The work plan consists of 18 programs across 6 verticals. These include eight programs in five language areas, two community strengthening initiatives, five stand-alone Wikimedia projects, creating movement resources, publicity, research and documentation, and general support and service to the movement.

Event Organized

Train the Trainer Program (CEO Centre; Dodda Gubbi; Bangalore; February 26 - March 1; 2015).

Blog Entry

Hindustani Language: We Are Wikipedia (Syed Muzamiluddin; March 27, 2015).

Participation in Event

2nd National Language Conference, Bhubaneswar (Organized by Institute of Odia Studies and Research; Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar; March 30 - April 2, 2015). Subhashish Panigrahi presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

News and Media Coverage

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

Train the Trainer (Udayavani; March 2, 2015).
More articles for Tulu Wikipedia (The Hindu; March 10, 2015).
GoI body National Mission for Manuscripts has digitised 3 million manuscripts (Sneha Johari; Medianama; March 13, 2015).
Bangla Wiki turns 10 (Sudeshna Banerjee, Showli Chakraborty and Abhinanda Datta; The Telegraph; March 29, 2015).

Events Co-organized

Women's History Month - India (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikimedia India; India, March 2015). March 8 is International Women's Day, and to celebrate this women in India organized edit-a-thons and meetups to create and expand articles of importance to women in Wikipedia in English and various Indian languages. Online events were organized for these Wikipedias: Bengali , Punjabi , Odia , Marathi , Kannada and Malayalam .

►Openness

Media Coverage

India backs open source software for e-governance projects (originally published by IDG News Service was mirrored on the website ofCIO and PC World; March 29, 2015). Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

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Internet Governance
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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 International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

►Freedom of Expression

India's Apex Court in a landmark decision struck down section 66A of the IT Act. The judgment provided great relief for advocates of freedom of speech on the Internet. The development attracted lots of media coverage to which CIS gave its inputs:

Articles

Internet censorship will continue in opaque fashion (Sunil Abraham; The Times of India; March 25, 2015).
Historic day for freedom of speech and expression in India (Vidushi Marda; Bangalore Mirror; March 25, 2015).
India's Supreme Court Axes Online Censorship Law, But Challenges Remain (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices Online; March 25, 2015).
Big win for freedom of speech. Really? (Sunil Abraham; Bangalore Mirror; March 29, 2015).
Three reasons why 66A verdict is momentous (Pranesh Prakash; The Times of India; March 29, 2015).

Blog Entries

What Does Facebook's Transparency Report Tell Us About the Indian Government's Record on Free Expression & Privacy? (Pranesh Prakash; March 17, 2015).
No more 66A! (Geetha Hariharan; March 24, 2015).

· Requests to ICANN: CIS sent ICANN six requests to ICANN regarding ICANN's expenditure on travels and meetings, granular revenue, cyber-attacks on ICANN, ICANN's implementation of the NETmundial principles, complaints under the Ombudsman process, and information regarding revenues received from gTLD auctions. These were prepared by Geetha Hariharan:DIDP Request #7: Globalisation Advisory Groups and DIDP Request #8: ICANN Organogram.

Participation in Events

Tech Law Form @ NALSAR (Organized by NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad; March 7 and 8, 2015). Geetha Hariharan participated as a speaker.
Roundtable on ICANN Accountability (Organized by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), National Internet Exchange of India and Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi; March 13, 2015).

►Privacy

Research Outputs

CIS in collaboration with Privacy International, UK as part of GSMA project is conducting research to understand different legal and regulatory aspects of security and surveillance in India. The following outputs have been published: Indian Law and the Necessary Proportionate Principles (Elonnai Hickok), Security, Surveillance and Data Sharing Schemes and Bodies in India (Maria Xynou and Elonnai Hickok), Export and Import of Security Technologies in India: QA (Elonnai Hickok), Regulation of CCTV's in India (Elonnai Hickok), Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) and Cross Border Sharing of Information in India (Maria Xynou and Elonnai Hickok), Composition of Service Providers in India (Lovisha Aggarwal), The Surveillance and Security Industry in India - An Analysis of Indian Security Expos (Divij Joshi), An Analysis of News Items and Cases on Surveillance and Digital Evidence in India (Lovisha Aggarwal), Policy Recommendations for Surveillance Law in India and an Analysis of Legal Provisions on Surveillance in India and the Necessary & Proportionate Principles (Maria Xynou), The Surveillance Industry in India (Maria Xynou), and State of Cyber Security and Surveillance in India: A Review of the Legal Landscape (Elonnai Hickok).

Event Organized

Cybersecurity and the Internet of Things (Organized by US Consulate Chennai, Cyber Security & Privacy Foundation and CIS; Hotel Atria, Palace Road, Bangalore; March 19, 2015).

Participation in Events

CONNECTing the Dots: Options for Future Action (Organized by UNESCO; March 3 - 4, 2015; Paris). Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.
Vox Pol Workshop on the Role of Social Media and Internet Companies in Responding to Violent Online Extremism (Organized by VOX-Pol network; March 5-6, 2015).

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

Uploaded and blocked, a daylong battle rages on the web over BBC documentary (Kim Arora; The Times of India; March 6, 2015).
India tops list of content restrictions requests, says Facebook (Neha Alawadhi; Economic Times; March 17, 2015).
If you thought India is a country where freedom of speech and expression are fundamental rights, think twice! (Business Insider; March 17, 2015).
Live Chat: Aadhaar: An identity crisis? (Hindu; March 17, 2015).
Delhi Govt Sets Up WiFi Task Force (Originally published by Press Trust of India; TeleAnalysis; March 18, 2015).
India's plan to offer citizens digital lockers poses a privacy threat, say experts (Scroll.in; March 19, 2015).
Internet becomes vernacular with relaunch of e-bhasha (Ankita Lahiri; Governance Now; March 23, 2015).
Indian Supreme Court Overturns Law Barring 'Offensive Messages' Online (Niharika Mandhana; Wall Street Journal; March 24, 2015).
Supreme Court Strikes Down Section 66A Of IT Act (Indrani Basu and Betwa Sharma; Huffington Post; March 24, 2015).
India's section 66A scrapped: Win for free speech (Prasanto K. Roy; BBC; March 24, 2015).
India's Online Freedom Advocates Hail Court Ruling on Free Speech (Anjana Pasricha; Voice of America; March 24, 2015).
Live Chat: Win for Free Speech (Hindu; March 24, 2015). Geetha Hariharan participated in the live chat.
India's Supreme Court strikes down law that led to Facebook arrests (Annie Gowen; Washington Post; March 24, 2015).
Netizens Rejoice Over SC Ruling to Keep the Net Free (Parina Dhilla; New Indian Express; March 25, 2015).
'A safe Internet and a free Internet can co-exist' (Hindu; March 25, 2015).
India High Court: No Takedown Requests On Social Sites Without Court, Gov't Order (Madhur Singh; Bloomberg BNA; March 25, 2015).
India's Supreme Court strikes down law that led to arrests over Facebook posts (Annie Gowen; Star.com; March 25, 2015).
What the experts said on live chat (Hindu; March 25, 2015). Geetha Hariharan was one of the panelists.
Indian Court Strikes Down Section of Law Punishing Offensive Posts (Nida Najar and Suhasini Raj; NDTV; March 25, 2015).
IT Leaders, Lawyers Welcome SC Ruling on 66A of the IT Act (Cio.in; March 25, 2015).
I dare you, I double dare you: Social media celebrates Sec 66A verdict (Vishakha Saxena; Hindustan Times; March 25, 2015).
Ruling in India shields Web posts (Originally published by Washington Post and mirrored in Boston Globe; March 25, 2015).
The noose tightens on freedom of speech on the Internet (Gabey Goh; Digital New Asia; March 26, 2015). This was also mirrored in Malaymail Online.
SECTION 66A: DELETE (Kumar Anshuman; Open Magazine; March 27, 2015).
SC has set a high threshold for tolerance: Lawrence Liang (Dhamini Ratnam; Livemint; March 28, 2015).
66A DEAD. LONG LIVE 66A! (Soni Mishra; The Week; March 28, 2015).
India's landmark online speech ruling is step toward greater press freedom (Sumit Galhotra; CPJ; March 28, 2015).
You can still get into trouble for online posts: Digital law experts (Kim Arora; The Times of India; March 30, 2015).
'Smack' the Trolls! (Marianne De Nazareth; Citizen; March 31, 2015).

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

Announcements

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India : CIS is inviting abstracts for essays that explore what it means to study Internet(s) in India today, the many experiences of Internet(s) in India; its histories and archaeologies; how we use it to read, write, create, relate, learn, and share. Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org.
Announcing Silicon Plateau #01 : The RAW programme is supporting a new collaborative publishing project led by T.A.J. Residency / SKE Projects and or-bits.com. The first volume of the series titled 'Silicon Plateau' will feature contributions by a group of artists, researchers, and writers, including IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Sunita Prasad, Achal Prabhala and Sreshta Rit Premnath, along with contextual writing and documentation material. Here is an excerpt from the editorial note written by Marialaura Ghidini, the co-editor of the volume.
Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; March 31, 2015). The paper 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015.

Event Organized

Digital Activism in Asia Reader (Organized by CIS; Bangalore; March 6-7, 2015). The project is a collaborative effort of CIS and the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany, which aims to bring together local knowledge, debates and conversations around Digital Activism in Asia. The Digital Activism in Asia Reader is expected to be published by the Hybrid Publishing Lab in mid-2015.

Blog Entries

Figures of Learning: The Reader (P.P.Sneha; March 24, 2015).
Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India - Section Outlines : CIS has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001-2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon.

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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:

Op-ed

Railway Takeaways for Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; March 4, 2015).

Blog Entry

TRAI-ing Times: The Story So Far (Tarun Krishnakumar; March 19, 2015).

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:

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

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

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

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts

sumandro — 2015-08-28T06:53:33Z

We received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' Here are the ten selected abstracts. The final essays will be published from June onwards.

Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights gives rise to the multitude of issues such as right to privacy, freedom of expression, accessibility. Pertinent socio-political and legal issues related to Internet which was widely debated upon in the past one year in India includes lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000. The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal accessibility to Internet and to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ law of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. Interestingly all these issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.

This paper is an attempt to understand and analyze theses issues from the human rights angle and also how they have contributed in evolving an understanding and perspective amongst the digitally conscious Indian’s to ensure the democratic nature of “Internet” is perceived. Moreover, analysis of these three issues would also help in emphasizing upon the need for a right-based approach in studying Internet in India.

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Whereas the status of the internet in India is similar to the status of the internet in similar economies with low-penetration and a primarily mobile-based future, an alphabetically diverse nation such as India has its added worries. Whereas the 1990s saw an overdomination of English given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the internet, by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.

What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multilingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English. In this essay, I shall attempt to study the effects this has on the internet population of India, some of which are as follows.

The kind of mimetic desire it causes
The degneration in spelling skills caused due to transliteration
The effacement of non-digitised Indic verbal texts

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

The first mention of the 'Internet' in the vocabulary of Indian judicial system was a fleeting reference to its radical capability to allow access to knowledge. In one of its most recent references, it expounded upon and upheld the idea of the Internet as a radical tool for free expression, announcing its constitutional significance for free speech.

The judicial imagination of the Internet – the understanding of its capabilities and limitations, its actors and constituents, as reflected in the judgements of Indian courts – plays a major role in shaping the Internet in India, both reflecting and defining conceptions of the Internet and its relationship with society, law, and public policy.

This essay is an attempt to use legal and literary theory to study the archives of judicial decisions, tracing the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and also to look at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet. It attempts a vital study of how courts in India have conceptualized and understood the Internet, and how these conceptions have, in turn, impacted the influence of the Internet on Indian society.

Ipsita Sengupta

The proposed essay will make observations of a specific kind of conversation that takes place on the social media platform of YouTube. The conclusive argument is imagined along questions of high versus low culture, as described below.

Under study are two objects- one, particular YouTube videos which play Rabindra-Sangeet, i.e. songs penned and composed in the late 19- early 20th centuries by the Bengali writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore, the body of work which today has become a genre of Indian music; and the second, comments that these videos receive from users of the site.

Visuals of YouTube song videos of Rabindra-Sangeet are of many kinds. So are renditions, with solitary or duet or band performances, and with varying pace and instrumental accompaniment.

The videos which have visuals from contemporary cinema, like images of urban youth, and the remixed renditions have often been found to receive comments which reflect/ reveal hurt sentiments of people trying to preserve some kind of sanctity of Rabindra-Sangeet, comments which state how the ethics of presenting the genre have been violated, via their notation and design, by either makers of the film in the song’s incorporation, or by the way young pop stars have been placed in particular montages.

Some examples:

In such a scenario, YouTube as medium of user-generated expression becomes interesting to analyse individual and group dynamics- given the space for commenting (below the video), and statistical data such as “Likes”, “Dislikes”, and “Views”. The debate here is that in Tagore’s “Nationalism”, when he himself is seen to have an imagination of the human race beyond patriotic groupings and consequent othering, does this apparent need to avoid “insulting” his compositions by preserving an intangible art form in a particular way, become then a type of jingoism of region or identity? And what is this Benjaminian “aura” of the “original” that listeners look for in their experience of these videos?

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Three hours after regulations governing public access to WiFi in India were changed in 2005 the first router went up in Dharamsala. It was homemade, open source, and eventually, “monkey proof.” Something unimaginable had happened: high-speed Internet access in one of India’s most difficult physical geographies. Dharamsala has also become one of India's interesting information networks and has a burgeoning, unlikely 'tech scene’. But is it so unlikely?

Since 1959 Dharamsala has been home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan people and, government in exile. This single, significant incident possibly set in motion a number of factors that made it possible for the mountain-town to become a political, global, communications. However, much like the rest of India, the region struggles for human and environmental rights against fractured ideas of 'development'. This essay will draw on archives and interviews to unpack this microcosmic tale of Internet access, its histories and economics and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Everyone around us is connected to the Internet through some or other electronic devices, phones, laptops, and tablets. However, not everyone use Internet for the same purpose. Through an ethnographic account of the usage of WhatsApp messages by the traders in three electronic bazaars in Delhi, Palika Bazaar, Nehru Place and Lajpat Rai Market, we see how Internet on the phone is used predominantly for business purpose. The paper seeks to examine how Whatsapp messages, which are for most of the users a medium for social communication, for the traders in Delhi, become a mode to establish business contact with their counterparts in China. From sharing of pictures of new tools to quoting prices of different products, Whatsapp messages become the lifeline of what many has termed as ‘globalization from below’. This paper argues what has started as economic exchanges through Whatsapp messages may start a new political alliance of similar mass markets in Asia. With the electronic bazaars in Delhi facing stiff competition from formal business actors both online and offline, the WhatsApp messages that is a space of new innovations and trade alliances could sustain the mass markets in India.

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Suddenly it seems internet data package on mobile phones is the reply to the problems in India. As mobile phones remain with us most of the time, it is as if we are ready to face the world if our mobile phones have a data package. Yes, several television commercials in India are gleefully harping on the notes of knowledge, empowerment and freedom. Moreover, internet is being identified as a virtual institution.

The essay proposes to look into those advertisements which talk about the internet to promote data packages, mobile phones or apps. Through this, the essay firstly, would like to construct the idea of the internet using the Indian citizen who is depicted as smart and almost infallible. Secondly, on the other hand, the essay would analyse how an affirmative and constructive view of using the internet in the minds of citizens has been generated by these advertisements, like the virtual world of the internet can save you from any drastic situation.

Advertisements are creative constructs, which have a strong aptitude to entice target consumers. While studying the internet in India, studying the ‘texts’ of Indian advertisements which refer to the act of ‘consuming’ the internet could result in an interesting study.

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

From the humblest mobile phones to the most sophisticated computers, the Internet is everywhere and nowhere in India. The boundaries, the contours of the space remain nebulous and opaque. When engaging with social media in urban India in particular, we are bound to the conventions of corporations which demand quantity over quality creating a new class system of the Internet: those who are “active” – and therefore a “better” user – and those who have seemingly failed to keep up with the demands of the medium, buried in the ever‐growing noise and chaos. The creation of a new class system on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, has shaped who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Based on fieldwork in New Delhi which examines the impact of the Internet on offline social movements – including the anti corruption movement in 2011 and the Delhi Rape Case in 2012 – I will argue that the study of the Internet in India can reinforce Western corporate conceptions of how to use the Internet properly among various users involved in the movements. By challenging these preconceptions, this essay will engage with issues of Western corporate notions of Internet use and how we engage with and find participants, how we evaluate what is “good” use of the Internet, and the creation of a new class system on the Internet in India.

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

In the privatised spaces of the World Wide Web and the internet, how does one make sense of speech? Should speech in such a space be understood as the product of a marketplace of ideas? Or should its role in democratic participation be recognised by contextualising the internet as part of the Habermasian public sphere? These questions have interesting implications for the regulation of speech on the internet, as they employ different principles in understanding speech. Recent scholarship has argued for the benefits of employing the public sphere approach to the internet and thus recognising its democratic potential. But taking into account that all speech is inherently made in private spaces on the internet, the application of this approach is far from simple.

This creates a tension between the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere approaches to speech on the internet in policymaking. I propose to explore how legal and regulatory mechanisms manage these tensions by creating governance frameworks for the internet: I argue that through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet. I propose that this less-than-perfect reconciliation then manages to modify the very idea of the public sphere itself in the Indian context, by infusing participation of the "other" on the internet through indirect means.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts

Figures of Learning: The Conditional Artist

Tara Kelton — 2015-11-13T05:42:25Z

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. This abstract by Tara Kelton explores the conditional artist, and the outcomes of inserting chance in the realization of art work through the use of new multimedia and digital technologies.

For five weeks George Korsmit and his assistants worked from a platform on a mobile scaffold to create this largescale mural. The corner points of each quadrilateral and the colors used to fill it in were determined within specific parameters by throwing dice.

This annotated visual essay presents the strategy in which artists provide instructions/parameters for the creation of artworks, to be executed by hired labour / users and describes how contemporary practitioners have employed this strategy across new technologies and webbased services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, YouTube and Facebook.

By inserting chance into the realization of artworks, a distance is created between the artist and the product, and the artist cannot predict a precise outcome this results in new, unexpected visual forms and potentially infinite variation. The relationship between human gesture and interface is inverted rather than using a mouse to command software interfaces, instead, computational parameters direct human gestures. The essay will also demonstrate how instructional art strategies are used as tools for critiquing systems of power, both on and offline, drawing attention to the invisible labor that powers these systems, using their own mechanisms.

Visual examples include both the historical and contemporary, from the work of early conceptual and computer artists (Sol Lewitt, John Baldessari) to present day art and design practitioners (Studio Moniker, IOCOSE).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-conditional-artist

April 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-05-31T04:29:24Z

Newsletter for the month of April below.

We are happy to share with you the fourth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (April 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

-------------------------------
Highlights
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CIS received 35 engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India'. The final essays will be published from June onwards. The ten selected abstracts can be read at http://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts/ .

CIS submitted its comments to the National Informatics Centre on April 30, 2015 bringing to notice the negligible progress on the front for making Indian government websites conform to the notified standards, and gave recommendations to take the initiatives forward.
Nehaa Chaudhari has prepared a consolidated report that tracks the development of India's National IPR Policy and the requests by CIS to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion under the RTI Act and responses elicited from the Department.

Institute of Odia Studies and Research organised 2nd National Language Conference beginning on March 30, 2015 and ending on April 2, 2015 at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar. This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. Subhashish Panigrahi presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

Sunil Abraham's article titled "Shreya Singhal and 66A" was published in Economic and Political Weekly Vol-L No.15. Vidushi Marda helped in doing the research.

Sunil Abraham in an article in DNA titled " Multiple Aspects Need to be Addressed as the Clamour Grows for Network Neutrality " tells readers that there are four violations of Network Neutrality that are considered particularly egregious.

Jyoti Panday prepared an analysis of the Supreme Court judgement in Shreya Singhal and what it does for intermediary liability in India.
In February 2015, CIS had requested DeitY under RTI Act to provide information clarifying the procedures for blocking in India. The response elicited from DeitY has been published.

CIS sent a joint response to the TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services with scholars from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The response was sent on March 27, 2015.

► Vacancies at CIS

CIS is seeking applications for:

Internship : CIS is providing opportunities for students enrolled in graduate programmes to undertake internship at its offices in Bangalore and Delhi. Eligible candidates are welcome to participate in our internship programme.

►NVDA and eSpeak

# Monthly Updates

April 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; April 30, 2015).

# Language Testing Reports

Hindi Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 10, 2015).
Gujarati Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 16, 2015).
Oriya Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 30, 2015).

►Other

# Submission

Comments to the GIGW (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 30, 2015).

# Blog Entries

Methodology: Patent Landscaping in the Indian Mobile Device Market (Rohini Lakshané; November 10, 2014). The list of standards and specifications found in sub-USD-100 Internet-enabled mobile phones sold in India" (Annexure 2 in the post) has been updated .
Conference on Standards Settings Organizations (SSO) and FRAND, NLSIU (Rohini Lakshané; April 5, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: RTI Requests by CIS to DIPP + DIPP Responses (Nehaa Chaudhari; April 15, 2015).
Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Literature Review on IPR in Mobile app development (Anubha Sinha; April 29, 2015).

Media Coverage

CIS gave inputs for the following:

One reason startups are moving out of India (Evelyn Fok and Varun Aggarwal; The Times of India; April 10, 2015). This was also mirrored in Economic Times .
Indian businesses crave IP certainty, but better patent values are tempting them overseas (IAM Magazine; April 28, 2015).

►Wikipedia

# Participation in Event

2nd National Language Conference, Bhubaneswar (Organized by Institute of Odia Studies and Research; Institute of Physics; Bhubaneswar; March 30 - April 2, 2015). This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. Subhashish Panigrahi presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

# Blog Entries

Hindustani Language: We Are Wikipedia (Syed Muzamiluddin; April 10, 2015).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଡିଜିଟାଲ ଅସୁବିଧା (Subhashish Panigrahi; April 15, 2015).
Wikipedia Campus at Oxford College (Subhashish Panigrahi; April 28, 2015).

# News and Media Coverage

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

Odia waits for Google Translate debut - Nine Indian languages available (Anwesha Ambaly; Telegraph; April 6, 2015).
Now you can search Google in Kannada, in your handwriting (Apurva Venkat; Bangalore Mirror; April 18, 2015).

►Openness

# Event Co-organized

NASA International Open Data Challenge 2015 (Co-organized by CIS and Team Indus; Bangalore; April 11-12, 2015).

►Freedom of Expression

# Articles

Shreya Singhal and 66A (Sunil Abraham; Economic and Political Weekly Vol-L No.15; April 11, 2015). Vidushi Marda helped in doing the research.
Don't Do Nothing. Take a Stand on Net Neutrality. (T. Vishnu Vardhan; NDTV; April 13, 2015).
Multiple Aspects Need to be Addressed as the Clamour Grows for Network Neutrality (Sunil Abraham; DNA; April 16, 2015).
The Hazards of a Non-neutral Internet (Geetha Hariharan; April 18, 2015). A modified version of the blog entry was published as an article titled " A must for free speech " in the Week.

# Blog Entries

The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India? (Jyoti Panday; April 11, 2015).
DeitY says 143 URLs have been Blocked in 2015; Procedure for Blocking Content Remains Opaque and in Urgent Need of Transparency Measures (Jyoti Panday; April 29, 2015).

# Event

Freedom of Expression in a Digital Age: Effective Research, Policy Formation & the Development of Regulatory Frameworks in South Asia (Organized by Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Observer Research Foundation and CIS; Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi; April 21, 2015).

# Participation in Event

Financial Express hosts #NetNeutralityDebate: 'Price discrimination can be allowed, but not for the same packet of data' (New Delhi; April 24, 2015). Pranesh Prakash participated in the discussion.

►Privacy

# Participation in Event

Privacy International Network Meeting (Organized by Privacy International, UK; April 22 - 23, 2015). Sunil Abraham attended the meeting.

►Miscellaneous

# Announcement

IIGF Recruitment : The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) conducted walk-in interviews on May 16, 2015 at NIXI Jasola office, Flat No. 6B, 6th Floor, Uppals M6 Plaza, New Delhi. NIXI sought candidates to fill the posts of Technology Analyst, Policy Analyst, Research Associate and Executive Assistants.

# Participation in Events

Global Conference on Cyberspace 2015 (Co-organized by Dutch Government, City of the Hague and One Conference; The Hague, Netherlands; April 16 - 17, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist. He also participated in an expert roundtable conference .
CII Digital India Summit (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industries; Taj Mahal Hotel and Pragati Maidan, New Delhi; April 21 and 24, 2015). Pranesh Prakash attended the summit.

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

'Smack' the Trolls! (Marianne De Nazareth; The Citizen; March 31, 2015).
The block heads (Sibi Arasu; Hindu Businessline; April 3, 2015).
Smriti Irani brings back focus on voyeurism prevailing in our country (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; April 6, 2015).
Surveillance rises, privacy retreats (Namrata Acharya; Business Standard; April 12, 2015).
People voice their support for net neutrality, say Internet a utility not a luxury (IBN Live; April 13, 2015).
Net neutrality: Trai receives over 2 lakh mails (Sandhya Soman and Jayanta Deka; April 14, 2015).
Net neutrality: Debate rages on (Surabhi Aggarwal; Business Standard; April 11, 2015)
Net neutrality debate rages (Lalatendu Mishra and Pradeesh Chandran; The Hindu; April 15, 2015).
Net neutrality: Net activism packs a punch (Sandhya Soman; The Times of India; April 19, 2015).
Net Neutrality debate in India: Here are all the arguments you need to know (Indian Express; April 23, 2015).
Freedom struggle 2.0 (Zara Khan; Hindu; April 25, 2015).
Cry, you nasty trolls (Prasun Chaudhari; The Telegraph; April 26, 2015). Net Neutrality: The argument continues (Deepak Ajwani and Debojyoti Ghosh; Forbes India Magazine; April 29, 2015).

# Blog Entries

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts - CIS received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' The final essays will be published from June onwards. These are the ten selected abstracts: Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights (by Deva Prasad); Indic Scripts and the Internet (by Dibyajyoti Ghosh); The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (by Divij Joshi); Dharmasala Networked (by Laird Brown); WhatsApp Economy (by Maitrayee Deka); Citizens and their Internet (by Purbasha Auddy); The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (by Sailen Routray); Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India (by Sarah McKeever); Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking (by Smarika Kumar).

# Submission

Response to TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-Top (OTT) Services (Pranesh Prakash; March 27, 2015). The response was sent in March but mirrored on our website recently.

► 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

► Request for Collaboration:

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

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2015-08-28T07:09:39Z

As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – and even in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore what it means to study Internet(s) in India today.

We are interested in the many experiences of Internet(s) in India; its histories and archaeologies; how we use it to read, write, create, relate, learn, and share; the data that is produced, and the data that is consumed; the spaces that are created, and the spaces that are inhabited; the forms that political expressions take on the Web; and of course, where and how should one be studying Internet(s) in India?

This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org by Sunday, April 26, 2015. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'

We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, May 01, 2015.

The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (2,500-3,000 words) by Sunday, May 31, 2015. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 5,000.

We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the Internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an argument – through text, or otherwise.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india

Announcing Silicon Plateau #01

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:59Z

We are very pleased to announce that the RAW programme is supporting a new collaborative publishing project led by T.A.J. Residency / SKE Projects and or-bits.com. The first volume of the series titled 'Silicon Plateau' will feature contributions by a group of artists, researchers, and writers, including IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Sunita Prasad, Achal Prabhala and Sreshta Rit Premnath, along with contextual writing and documentation material. Here is an excerpt from the editorial note written by Marialaura Ghidini, the co-editor of the volume.

The scope of the series is to explore the contemporary interaction between the arts and technology as informed by experiences of Bangalore (the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India). Such exploration will be guided by the perspectives of contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, national and international, who have either spent a period of time in the city or crossed paths with its communities whose work and interests — from the creative industry to law and historical research — lie at the intersection between the arts and technology. The approach we have adopted to explore how technology informs the arts and the socio-cultural environment, and how the latter affects usages and understandings of technological tools, is multidisciplinary and hybrid, and uses the city of Bangalore as the starting point for broader reflections and actions.

Advocating for the importance of thinking about digital and web technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, the series will propose across-disciplines narratives about the encounters — fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient — that artists, writers, technologists, lawyers, economists and more have had with the city. The nickname of Bangalore, Silicon Plateau, which derives from its geographical location on the Deccan Plateau in the state of Karnataka, has been used as the title of the series because we think it metaphorically highlights the contradictions inherent to our exploration. Adopting the term plateau, which indicates the reaching of a state of little change, to refer to a city that has transformed at rapid speed over the last few decades results in a linguistic combination that reflects the complexities inherent to discussing arts and technology in relation to local histories and occurrences rather than global narratives and popular beliefs.

This fist edition of Silicon Plateau #01 will focus on the way in which the city is represented in the public realm, from public spaces to those manufactured by the real estate industry. It will look at representations of Bangalore as a set of phenomena triggered by the ways in which the IT industry is reflected in the city, such as its market-driven narratives, and how passers-by and short term residents encounter them in the everyday. The contributors have been invited to reflect on how these modes of presenting and representing often lead to the creation of metaphors and cultural signs that might tell us more about discussing the interaction between the arts and technology.

Silicon Plateau #01 will be about that which lies behind first ‘impressions’ and constructed representations as determined by uses and understanding of technology, the tools and its infrastructures, existing, imagined, or projected.”

Silicon Plateau #01 will be released, in print and online, in May 2015 and launched soon after.

Image Credit: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Projections (1964/2014), photocopies on corrugated plastic and chroma key paints.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/announcing-silicon-plateau-01

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:41:15Z

My paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015. The final paper will be shared by second week of May. Here is the accepted abstract.

Where are the NGOs?

On February 04, 2013, several members of the DataMeet group <http://datameet.org/> were invited by the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Project Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU) – the nodal agency responsible for developing, implementing, and managing the Open Government Data Platform of India <https://data.gov.in/> – to share thoughts on the status of the implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), the open data policy of India, and discuss potentials for collaboration. A key proposal made by the NDSAPPMU team regarding how DataMeet can contribute to the implementation process, involved DataMeet mobilising the developer community connected to the group to build applications that use the opened up data and demonstrate the value of open government data to drive greater contribution by government agencies and greater utilisation by citizen groups. For DataMeet, a network of open data users and advocates, this invitation to collaborate sets up a slightly different problematic than that in most of the cases of free and open source software development project. The task here is to develop projects that use already available data, which may not offer significantly return to investment at present, but will accellerate the process of opening up of more valuable government data.

However, building an application that effectively utilise government data to foreground a compelling argument or story requires more than a team of developers – it also require domain experts with a deep sense of the context from which the data is emanating. With a vibrant scene of nongovernmental organisations involved in monitoring, analysis, and implementation of developmental projects, many of such domain experts in India are located within such organisations, with some being in the academic institutes too. Reporting from an open data community meeting organised by the World Bank at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on December 10, 2014, Isha Parihar asks: “Where are the NGOs?” She points out that “[t]he discussions around open data [in India] also highlight the absence of nonprofit organisations among the technologyfocused groups, entrepreneurs, and businesses [1].” This observation is especially critical as the meeting was organsied by World Bank not only to gather public responses to be presented to Government of India, but also to take stock of the open data community in India. The absence of NGOs, although, does not indicate at the lack of interest of the nongovernmental research and advocacy organisations in India to work with government data. Such organisations, on the contrary, have a long history of accessing, using, sharing, and communicating government data obtained through both proactive and reactive disclosure mechanism. While surveying such practices in a recent report, Sumandro Chattapadhyay argues [2] that the lack of a common understanding of the open data community in India emerges from both the lack of an established forum where commercial and non-commercial reusers of data discuss and articulate their requirements and demands, and the existence of an established range of actors accessing, using, and resharing government data for commercial and noncommercial purposes who are still uncertain regarding how open government data will exactly transform and augment their existing practices.

Whose Open Data Community is it?

In the context of the emerging open data ecosystem in India, thus, the notion of the open data community comes forward as both the problem – in terms of the community not yet being there to effectively take forward the open data agenda – and the solution – as the component of the ecosystem that can successfully bridge gaps between interests and capacities of various stakeholders. Given the gap and the stakeholder concerned, the open data community is expected to perform various critical functions. This paper tracks these conceptualisations of open data community in India. Based upon conversations with fourteen organisations working across four cities in India, the question of 'whose open data community is it' is explored in this paper following three pathways – (1) by documenting how the understanding of the open data community, and the location of the organisation concerned in reference to that, changes across these organisations, (2) by describing how the idea of who all are included in the open data community in India changes across these organisations, and (3) by identifying how different organisations formulate the intended audiences of the open data community in India. In doing so, I argue that a range of critical challenges being experienced by the open data ecosystem in India often gets articulated as things that can be resolved by a more active and effective open data community. This distorts the distribution of responsbilities across various kinds of stakeholders for contributing to the open data ecosystem. In conclusion, I note the need to stop using open data community as a solution-for-all-open-data-evils, and for a pragmatic approach to understand the kinds of open data challenges it can address, and those that it cannot.

Endnotes

[1] Parihar, Isha. 2015. On the Road to Open Data: Glimpses of the Discourse in India. Akvo. January 14. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://akvo.org/blog/on-the-road-to-open-data-glimpses-of-the-discourse-in-india/

[2] Chattapadhyay, Sumandro. 2014. Opening Government Data through Mediation: Exploring Roles, Practices and Strategies of (Potential) Data Intermediary Organisations in India. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/report/sumandro_oddc_project_report.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/whose-open-data-community-is-it-abstract

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:40:49Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001-2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon. The sections will discuss the activities and experiences of civil society organisations in Asia and India, respectively, in national, regional, and global Internet governance processes. The draft outlines of the sections are shared here. Comments and suggestions are invited.

In the (draft) Foreword to the Asia Internet History – Third Decade (2001-2010), Prof. David J. Farber writes:

One of the early attempts to extend the reach of the Internet to Asia was via the “Johnny Appleseed” approach. That is a set of people responded to queries by people in Asian countries asking how they could connect with the growing Internet by offering to supply tapes to key people in the requesting countries, often by physically going with the tapes, as well as providing access points to the USA Internet. The people that we, I was one of the seeders, worked, with became the leaders in their nation and founded the initial national networks that blossomed with time and often formed the basis of commercial Internets. The traditions that these network frontier pioneers established lead to the eventual spread of the benefits of Internet access to not only their nations but became models for the spread to the rest of Asia…

I am honoured to contribute to the pioneering series titled Asia Internet History, edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon, by foregrounding a range of other individuals and organisations that often worked outside but in engagement with the national governments, and technical and academic institutions that govern the connecting tapes of the Internet, to ensure mass access to and effective usages of Internet in Asia.

The two sections, to be authored me, provides an overview of ‘civil society organisations’ working across Asian countries that have played a critical role in the shaping of policy-making and discourse around Internet governance during 2000-2010, and then undertakes a closer look at the organisations working in India and their interventions at national, regional, and global levels.

Please read the draft outlines of the overview section and the section on Indian organisations, and share your comments. The comments can be posted on the GitHub page where the outlines are hosted, on this page, or over email: sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

The outlines can also be directly downloaded as markdown files: the overview and the India section.

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

Here is a tentative list of key civil society organisations from Asia that have participated and intervened in Internet governance processes during 2001-2010. Please suggest organisations missing from the list.

Bangladesh

Cambodia

China

Indonesia

EngageMedia, Australia and Indonesia
ICT Laboratory for Social Change (iLab)
Indonesian CSOs Network for Internet Governance
Indonesian ICT Partnership Association (ICT Watch)
Internet Society Indonesia Chapter [website is under construction]

India

Iran

Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Centre (ICTRC) [URL is not working]

Japan

Centre for Global Communications (GLOCOM) [Academia?]
Internet Society Japan Chapter
Japan Computer Access for Empowerment (JCAFE) [URL is not working]
Japan Computer Access Network (JCA-NET)

Kuwait

iJMA3 - Kuwait Information Technology Society (KITS)

Lebanon

Lebanese Center for Civic Education (LCCE)

Malaysia

Internet Society Malaysia Chapter

Myanmar

Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO)

Nepal

Internet Society Nepal Chapter

Pakistan

Philippines

Democracy.Net.PH
Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) [URL not working
Internet Society Philippines Chapter

Regional

Singapore

Internet Society Singapore Chapter

South Korea

Sri Lanka

Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter

Thailand

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-and-india-outlines

Figures of Learning: The Reader

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:48:57Z

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. This abstract by P.P Sneha examines the figure of the reader, and the manner in which it is redefined in as text and practices of reading are reconstituted in the digital context.

The Reader

P.P. Sneha

The reader is a common figure of learning; we are all readers of one kind or another in an abstract sense. But practices of reading and writing have changed with the advent and proliferation of the internet and digital technologies. Be it your Kindle or updates on your Twitter feed or FB page, reading and writing have both been rendered as extremely technologised processes, more so than they already were, because of the mediation of the machine at different levels. At one level it is the encounter with the screen in our daily lives, the changing materiality of the text and how that determines the practices of meaning-making. At another, we can also connect this to larger questions of textuality itself, and the nature of the ‘digital text’. So is there a new kind of reader being constructed through these changing technologies of reading and writing? Within the varied and multi-layered space that is the ‘digital’, we can revisit the understanding of reading and writing as technologised processes through an exploration of the reader as a figure of learning. This brief sketch will examine the reader as a figure of learning, and her transition to the machine reader in the digital context.

Particularly in the age of big data and excess information, and with the introduction of methods such as speed reading, machine reading, distant reading, and not reading, we are in essence being taught or forced to read a certain way. An immediate concern for a lot of traditional humanists is the loss of criticality, as they see the sudden influx of new technologies as taking away from more accepted and conventional methods of reading, such as close reading for example. But what are the practices of reading engendered by the digital? The little variations in text, tagging, marginalia, errata or the glitch that now take precedence in the way one interprets or reads a text; do they add on, fundamentally change or produce a shift in the process of meaning-making is a question to contend with. Reading as a social or collective process is one prominent aspect of this change. The sociality of reading is more pronounced in the digital context; but at the same time it also strangely obscures this with the increasing portability and customisation of devices to suit different kinds of reading needs. The role of affect in the process of reading then becomes prominent.

Questions about authorship and authority over meaning would be more than relevant in this instance too, as the individual reader slowly gets replaced by more collective methods of reading and knowledge production. Online knowledge repositories such as the Wikipedia and a several dynamic archives have fostered and actively encouraged processes of collaborative knowledge production. In a reiteration of the classic debate on the death of the author, one now finds the role of reader in the traditional sense becoming more diminished, as the text itself takes precedence in the determination of meaning, and calls for a different kind of competence from the reader. Most importantly, it also suggests a change in the understanding of text and textuality in the digital space, with the possibility of innumerable readings with the help of algorithms emerging as a new textual practice. The possibility of reading data as text also hints towards a new kind of ‘machine reader’, or reading practice completely mediated by or reliant on the machine and unverifiable by the human subject. The emergence of new fields of scholarship such as the Digital Humanities also suggest these changes, and it may be worthwhile to examine how the text and practices of reading are constituted or reconstituted in such a space.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-reader

Digital Activism in Asia Reader: Announcement

sneha-pp — 2015-10-24T14:22:39Z

The CIS-RAW programme organized an editorial workshop on March 6-7, 2015, as part of its project on a Digital Activism in Asia Reader. The project is a collaborative effort of the Centre for Internet and Society and the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany, which aims to bring together local knowledge, debates and conversations around Digital Activism in Asia.

The proposed reader on Digital Activism in Asia will combine stories in multiple forms, including academic essays, case-studies to grey literature from public discourse that reveals and points to the debates around digital activism that have emerged in this particular context. Most of the audience will consist of academics, practitioners and policy actors internationally.

One of the main goals of this reader will be to challenge the prevalent notion in the discourse of Digital Activism of universality and uniformity across contexts and cultures. The focus is on new actors (like digital natives), processes, movements, and networks that such digital activism has engendered.

The editorial workshop was conducted towards completion of the Reader, to better contextualize the material through peer annotations and supporting information. Over the course of two days, a total of six participants worked on two articles each, which had been circulated beforehand, to annotate those using different kinds of material and close reading the texts.

The workshop was structured in the form of presentations and discussion sessions in the morning, followed by a writing sprint in the afternoon. Apart from a larger discussion around digital activism itself, its modes, approaches and forms, the materials were also categorized along four axes – activists using digital tools, activism around the digital, digital shaping activism and activism shaping the digital – which helped structure the discussions and the process of writing. The suggested annotations took different forms – from introductory paragraphs to references for further reading. Participants were also expected to bring in and build on their own practices, experiences and contexts in discussing the articles.

The Digital Activism in Asia Reader is expected to be published by the Hybrid Publishing Lab in mid-2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader-announcement

Figures of Learning: The Pornographer

namita — 2015-11-13T05:32:58Z

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. This abstract by Namita Malhotra examines the figure of the pornographer, as a mixed media figure entrenched in various networks of knowledge production, circulation and consumption.

Making Methods for Digital Humanities (2M4DH) project seeks to make specific interventions around methods in the larger debates and practices of Digital Humanities, which includes producing content within the field, building a living repository of knowledge content by developing methods as well as interfaces, platforms and knowledge infrastructure, and bringing together a range of practitioners, performers and researchers from different disciplines who are not necessarily only working on the digital. As part of this project two consultations were held in Bangalore, around figures of learning in the digital context. The following is a series of abstracts for a proposed journal issue, that perform multi-media writing, bringing in artistic practice, video, sound and theoretical concepts to describe a particular practice of learning and knowledge in India and focus on a specific body, figure or person that is at the centre of that knowledge practice.

The Pornographer

Namita A. Malhotra

The figure of the pornographer is deeply embedded in a network, and this allows for a rhizomatic appearance of other figures. Like the figure within the pornographic video, image or text, which is usually a woman since there is most global circulation of heterosexual pornography (as deduced from statistics from Youporn). This feminized figure in the pornographic video is vulnerable to our intrusive gaze, receptive to our desires, subject of urban legends; s/he is a fictionalized character in a Bollywood film (Devdas, Love Sex Dhoka, Ragini MMS) or a celebrity with a cloud account like Jennifer Lawrence. In the Indian and broadly Asian context where there is wide circulation of amateur porn, s/he could be anybody, an ordinary person whose semi-nudity or nudity is what makes the video extraordinary and watchable.

The pornographer also inevitably leads us to figure of the police and the judge, those who often invisibilize the pornographer. Pornography is a phenomenon that engulfs and occasionally excuses the particular crime of the pornographer, even as it exposes how treacherously pornographic we all are. The pornographer on the network is a slippery figure, their transactions are unfixable and their actions are often transferred to the next node on the network (Nishant Shah, Subject to Technologies [i]). Other figures also appear around whom the regulation of the internet is configured - such as the child whose innocence must be protected and whose curiosity is the market, or the adulterer whose affairs and online sex addiction threaten the institution of marriage.

Ontology in the digitalscape is also about the object that is being looked at, whether video or image or text. Can we know what this object looks back at even as it is lusted for by the pornographer, hunted down by the police and examined by the judge? Can we understand the experience of the object since it moves, feels, responds much like we do (Barker, The Tactile Eye [ii]) Other intriguing non-human figures also populate the pornographic scape, like the humanized yet robotic Gif caught in a repetitive loop that regardless of the imagery produces a delight and frisson, like a surprisingly responsive toy. Which perhaps would remind us of similar figures like the Bot that behaves and acts as a human, consumes bandwidth, promotes websites, rollseyes and follows and unfollows. Both figures and objects occupy the field that we want to understand.

Returning to the figure of the pornographer, they have the habits of a knowledge seeker though different from that of the scholar in an archive that is looking for history, narrative and depth. The pornographer skim reads, rapidly going from one link to the next, rejecting, choosing, enjoying fragmented pleasures and moving on. The relationship is tactile but brief, a surface encounter. The pornographer is a creator, consumer and distributor; sometimes contributing stories from their personal history to websites like Savita Bhabhi so that they can be inspiration for new comics, making amateur porn videos with cell phones and uploading them, commenting and linking to content, selling phones preloaded with pornography. The pornographer is a pirate, caught in the same discourse of criminalization, and often if the crimes of one are not convincing then one stands in for the other in legal and public discourse.

The pornographer can also be likened to the parasite as a figure that produces disorder and generates a new order (Michel Serres, The Parasite [iii]), or that it stores (sucks) energy and then redirects it (Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons [iv]). A vivid description of how pornographers are the points of conversion is as follows - "Netporn converts libidinal flows into money and daily siphons a huge bandwidth on a global scale. Netporn transforms libido into pure electricity: exactly as file-sharing networks are reincarnated as an army of MP3 players, Free Software helps to sell more IBM hardware and Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as the average Brazilian." (Pasquinelli)

The pornographer is self-taught, exiled, ashamed, an inveterate collector, insatiable, a bundle of shame and energy, all wires within lit and chasing. The pornographer is a criminal, a voyeur, a seducer and con artist. The pornographer is a godman caught in the act, a shaman of conversions in the digital, a gluttonous leader of digital consumption.

Figures can offer insight into a social formation, but also do figures dominate the scape and erase the particular and the subjective? The pornographer leads to an array of other figures and these offer insights into networks of illegality and exchange, into legal and technological mechanisms of control. As easily as these pornographic objects float to the surface of the digital scape, the pornographer (and also others like the pirate) are spectral presences who can only be deduced and whose trails can be followed. The pornographer is then a sort of mixed-media figure, an amalgamate of different assumptions and readings in public discourse, in the law, in networks of the circulation of pornography, in movies that are about their imagined back-stories, and in the ways in which children are warned about risks online.

[i] Nishant Shah, 'Subject to Technology: Internet Pornography, Cyber-terrorism and the Indian State', Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:3, 2007, pp.349 - 366.

[ii] Jennifer Marilyn Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, University of California Press, 2009.

[iii] Michel Serres, The Parasite: Posthumanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

[iv] Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Series Editor: Geert Lovink), NAi Publishers, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-pornographer

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India'

praskrishna — 2016-01-10T08:05:30Z

Dr. Nishant Shah will give a talk on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the Centre for Internet and Society's office in Bangalore on March 6, 2015 at 6 p.m. Please join us for tea and coffee before the lecture at 5.30 p.m.

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

Introducing the first research initiative at the Researchers at Work programme in the Centre for Internet and Society, Professor Nishant Shah wrote:

“Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India... We wanted to first propose that the Internet is not a monolithic object that exists in the same way across geographies and social borders. It is necessary to approach the Internets, as plural, available in different forms, practices and experiences to people from different locations and sections of the society... The second proposal was that while the digital and Internet technologies are new, they do not necessarily only produce new things. There is a need to map the histories and pre-histories of Internets.”

The Researchers at Work programme is initiating the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures will address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes, as foregrounded by Nishant above. The lectures will also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

It gives us immense pleasure to invite Nishant to present the first lecture of the series on Friday, March 06, 2015. The title of the lecture is "Once There was the Internet: Of Stories and Histories of Internet in India."

Dr. Nishant Shah

Nishant is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

In his varied roles, he has been committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which emergence and growth of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu. He edited a series of monographs on “Histories of Internet(s) in India” that looks at the complicated relationship that technologies have with questions of gender, sexuality, body, city, governance, archiving and gaming in a country like India. He was also the principal researcher for a research programme that produced the four-volume anthology “Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?” that examines the ways in which young people’s relationship with digital technologies produces changes in their immediate environments.

His Ph.D. thesis titled “The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace” builds a framework to examine the technosocial identities that are produced at the intersection of law, digital technologies and everyday cultural practices in emerging information societies like India. Nishant was an Asia Research fellow looking at the cost and infrastructure of building IT Cities like Shanghai. He is the author of a recent thought-piece titled “Whose Change is it Anyway? – Towards a future of digital technologies and citizen action in emerging information societies” that seeks to revisit the debates around digital activism and change in the global context. His current interests are in critically intervening in debates around Digital Humanities and conditions of change mediated by technologies.

More: http://cdc.leuphana.com/people/#nishant-shah

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah

Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:33:30Z

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. This abstract by Tejas Pande examines the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking.

The Visual Designer

Tejas Pande

Mapping is the visual articulation of a living complex system, and locates itself at the nodes that allow for exchanges of knowledge from diverse disciplines. Over the course of history, it has come to represent exchanges of information of a very diverse nature. Commonly associated with representations of physical spaces, maps have since accommodated a growing need to chalk out relationships between spaces (physical, or temporal), ideologies, and institutions. This expanded notion of mapping has affected the way creators of maps regard the practice of mapmaking itself. Armed with a growing arsenal of tools (offline and web-based) to map such networks with, mapmaking has opened up to a host of professionals, amateurs, and anyone else with a desire to express spatial-temporal relationships.

In such contexts, it is worthwhile to ask ourselves what is the role of traditional scientists, cartographers, and visual designers, who have been responsible for assimilating knowledge and making it visually palatable for wider audiences. The role of such mapmakers is further complicated by the expanded view of the craft of designing itself. For instance, graphic designer Aris Venetikidis began appearing on social media feeds in 2012 after his contribution to TEDx Dublin as the mapmaker genius behind the redesigned prototype of the Dublin Bus system. The new visualisation was met with critical praise, but interestingly his design process had steered the original mapmaking effort into that of quasi-transportation planning. Traditional mapmakers are being forced to intimately understand flows that constitute systems they wish to represent for others. Visual studies have historically emphasized decoding information embedded in collectively-generated syntax. Increasingly, multi-disciplinary practices have forced traditional designers to refashion their role in larger processes of production. What if their role was framed in the context of not only the rules of design process and problem definition, but the institutions within whom they operate, as well?

In my opinion, these figures have come to serve as facilitators in a process of knowledge creation and sharing, and use mapmaking as their primary visual tool to form networks of exchanges. Examples drawn from emerging planning practices, especially in the urban sphere, will be used to examine the role of a mapmaker, too.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer

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

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.

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

December 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-01-12T16:56:54Z

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

Highlights

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

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

Accessibility and Inclusion

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Update

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

Events Organized

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

Upcoming Event

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

►Other

Blog Entry

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

Participation in Event

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

Media Coverage

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

Access to Knowledge

►Pervasive Technologies

Blog Entries

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

►Other

Blog Entries

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

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

Participation in Event

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

Media Coverage

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

►Wikipedia

Newspaper Article

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

Blog Entries

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

News and Media Coverage

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

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

Event Co-organized

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

Participation in Events

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

►Openness

Blog Entry

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

Participation in Events

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

Internet Governance

►Privacy

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

White Papers

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

Blog Entry

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

Upcoming Events

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

Event Organized

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

►Free Speech

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

Blog Entries

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

►Other

Participation in Event

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

Blog Entries

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

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

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

Telecom

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

Newspaper Column

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

Digital Humanities

Blog Entry

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

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