Centre for Internet and Society

Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T09:14:55Z

The Goa University, on Thursday, re-launched the four volumes of Konkani Vishwakosh (Konkani encyclopedia), and announced its ambitious plan to upload the same on Wikipedia – a free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software – so as to build the Konkani Wikipedia.

This article was published in Navhind Times on September 27, 2013. T.Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

The university has entered into a 3-year memorandum of understanding with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), for building up the Konkani Wikipedia.

Vice Chancellor of Goa University Dr Satish Shetye, speaking during the event held at the university said that Wikipedia is a global phenomenon and a platform to bring people together for making creative activities possible, which in fact, has challenged the monopoly of publishers and created a movement in order to put together knowledge, further making it accessible to public.

“This platform will bring together Konkani speaking people of the world, besides providing an opportunity to learn about digitisation, and write Konkani of global standard.”

Dr Shetye, who incidentally noticed large number of volumes of the Konkani encyclopedia stacked in the Goa University premises, decided to take them to maximum people through their re-launch and upload on the Wikipedia.

The work for the Konkani encyclopedia project was commissioned during the tenure of vice chancellor Prof B Sheik Ali, and was carried out by various people from Dr Manoharrai Sardesai to Dr Tanaji Halarnakar, with the aid of the Konkani department at the university.

The four volumes of the 3,632 page Konkani encyclopedia are being re-released under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0 to support the movement of open knowledge and open access. The programme director for the Access to Knowledge Programme of the Centre for Internet and Society, Vishnu Vardhan, speaking on the occasion said that the process of uploading the four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia on the Wikipedia would be complete in six months time, and includes processes like scanning, digitisation and creating articles as per the requirement of Wikipedia. He also stressed on the need to rewrite some of the articles in Konkani encyclopedia so as to contemporarise their contents.

Vardhan also informed that relevant training programme would be specially co-designed by the CIS as well as the university to put up the content on the Wikipedia.

Goa University is the first university in the country to re-license copyright of its content, and hence can be termed as the ‘Champion of open knowledge’, he observed. Registrar Prof V P Kamat and head of Konkani department Priyadarshini Tadkodkar were also present on the occasion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/navhindtimes-goa-news-september-27-2013-goa-university-announces-plan-to-upload-konkani-encyclopedia-on-wikipedia

Global Knowledge Can Only Save a Language: Pavanaja

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T04:09:40Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, a NGO funded by Wikimedia Foundation has started a mission for the revival of Wikipedia sites of Tulu and Konkani under its "Access to Knowledge" project. As a part of it the NGO had organised a demonstration on the use of wikipedia, here on Saturday.

A scanned version of the report of the workshop is reproduced below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-6-2014-global-knowledge-can-only-save-a-language

GLAM in India: 10 tips for successful GLAM projects

subha — 2014-05-27T09:13:42Z

GLAM initiatives work as a gateway to unleash knowledge, decode archived documentation to build modern wonders and also educate people about their past cultural and scientific journey.

This was published in OpenGLAM on May 22, 2014.

In 2012, India celebrated its first GLAM project on Hindi Wikipedia at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi. This museum houses a vast majority of Indian crafts - Pattachitra from Odisha, Bidri from Karnataka, colorful and intricate Banarasi sari from northern India and Saura art from indigenous tribes of Eastern India to name a few. It is also a workshop and home to many artisans and folk artists who live, paint, carve, sell, sing, perform and make a living being based in the museum as resident artisans.


A weaver weaving a shawl using handloom (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

For this project, Wikimedia India and the India Program were roped in to plan, design and have the Wikimedia community train staffers on how to document Indian crafts, from royal lineage to folk. This resulted in the creation of many Indian craft-related articles in the Hindi Wikipedia and English Wikipedia as well as images on Wikimedia Commons.

Based upon my first hand experience of working closely with the staffers and the Wikimedia community during this project, I would like to share a few tips that might help you while planning and implementing a GLAM project:

1. Show what is it in for them

Large, public entities like museums, archives and libraries can be hesitant to open their doors for free public access. While discussing the potential of a GLAM project, it is wise to explain how the project will bring popularity, highlight the work that institutes are doing and will in turn benefit the government in preserving the state’s culture. Give examples of other such GLAM institutions which have gained public attention by adopting open strategies or by holding public events.

2. Show the institutions the big picture

Institutions often see their success in terms of number of visitors, number of media mentions or the number of sales (if they have some publications or a sales desk selling handicrafts or postcards for example). Tell them how an online presence could bring them local, national as well as international visitors, especially when they have an online presence in popular sites like Wikipedia or Wikitravel.

3. Push beyond your limits

Institutions operate in their own ways and often you might feel like you get stuck. Working with new staffers in a new institution is a big challenge and the pace of work cannot be smooth. What really matters is how much you impart your knowledge among the staffers and educate them about things that will be beneficial for the institution for continuing more GLAM projects in the future.

4. Track work-in-progress

It is always crucial to have smart trackers. These could be as simple as a spreadsheet (Excel, Google, …) or a wiki table for a team’s online tracking. You can of course always design your own. A database containing participant details with different colours for indicating progress in a project is a great way for assigning work, knowing strengths and learning about areas for improvement. Evaluating work internally by making use of smart charts and keeping deadlines is a must when there is a set of activities to be done.

5. Start with claps, swags in the middle, award at the end

Mobilizing volunteer contributors, especially government staffers, is always challenging. Outreach coordinators play a key role in keeping a group motivated enough to work collaboratively for a GLAM project. Participating staff members need to be given special attention during In real life meetups and gatherings, as well as specific guidance during training sessions. Fun games and activities that engage people help breaking communication barriers and build friendship. Swags also excite people to join. When a project starts rolling, keep different levels of excitement by giving different kinds of customized swags like caps, pens, stickers and buttons etc. Printed handouts that work like cheat-sheets are also useful. Creating levels to achieve and awarding the best achievers is another way of keeping people excited. Recognition drives!


Staff being trained by GLAM coordinators (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

6. Bring media attention towards the middle of the project

When a significant amount of work is done, break it to the media. Regional and national media coverage and few blog posts covering a project gives a lot of visibility to the institution and the people involved. This is in fact the best way to get internal administration level support for implementing a project. Interview some of the achievers, put them up on the project page and blogs and show those posts to them. Many people love to see audio-visual and printed news, and showing the participants their video interviews and published blogs is another way of letting them know about their great contribution.

7. Fail fast, think long term

If a GLAM project does not result in substantial success or sustains for long, it is essential to realize the fact that it is not an easy task to make changes to the system that is set over centuries. It takes time to mobilize and be brave to admit the failure. But it is also never really a failure when there is plenty of learning which others could benefit from before starting similar projects. Starting a new GLAM project is always an investment for the future. Milestones and even scars caused during the course of mobilizing an institution to open up its treasures for the public count and they, over time become parameters others consider.

8. Exit with a few leaders and chuck out way forwards

While working with a group of people, seek out for people who could lead a group and do specific work. This will not just reduce your workload, but will help to have a more decentralized focused work.

9. Document the flow

It is really really essential to document the work in a human manner. If resources permit, bring a professional to take candid shots, shoot a few interviews and B-rolls. You can also be frugal or hire a professional from the open source community for free and do the same. Documentation of learning, challenges and tips for others are essential things that you, as a good samaritan-community member could bring other GLAMers.

10. Empathy is the key

Over and above, empathy is the only key while dealing with real people in a real space. Connect to every person in a group, put yourself in their shoes and try being one of them: nothing works better in implementing a huge project. Knowledge transfer is a subset of the process of building a cordial relationship. Not all GLAM institutions have a system in place to educate their staff about technical aspects of archiving or renovating or developing skill-sets in general. Your presence should leverage the learning and knowledge that you would acquire from multiple levels.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-may-22-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-glam-in-india-10-tips-for-successful-glam-projects

GI-tagged products to get Wiki pages

praskrishna — 2016-01-27T16:33:47Z

Ever realised that the famous, red hot Naga Mirchi (a special variety of chilli from Nagaland) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?

The article by S. Anandan was published in the Hindu on January 26, 2016.

And that Cannanore Home Furnishings — textile home furnishings from Kannur — is a brand with geographical indication (GI) registration? Wiki, which is an open and free repository of knowledge on the Internet, does not have pages, in English and other recognised Indian languages, on most GI-tagged Indian products.

The Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge — popular as CIS-A2K— which is a not-for-profit movement to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development, launched an India Edit-a-thon for seven days from January 25 to generate Wikimedia pages in English and Indian languages on Indian products recognised by the GI Registry of India.

“Kerala alone boasts 23 products, mostly agricultural, with the GI tag. But Malayalam Wiki doesn’t have information on all of them. Besides the Aranmula Kannadi, none of the other GI-tagged products from Kerala have Wiki pages in English. Nationally, there are about 213 GI-tagged products and we know nothing of most of them. There isn’t a single article on many of them even in English. It’s in this context that the Edit-a-thon becomes extremely relevant. It’s being held to celebrate the Republic Day,” says Wiki activist Manoj Karingamadathil.

13 pages already

The campaign, launched on Monday, has evoked enthusiastic response from Wiki activists who have begun to create pages on most of these products. At the time of going to press, 13 GI-tagged Kerala products have got Wiki pages and editors are at work to generate content for these products in English.

Apart from existing Wiki editors, freshers may also be part of the campaign. “All they have to do is to create a Wiki account before sending in researched content,” points out Mr. Manoj. The campaign will be on till January 31.

Seven-day India Edit-a-thon begins; Wiki activists begin creating pages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-hindu-s-anandan-january-26-2016-gi-tagged-products-to-get-wiki-pages

Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2016-01-26T15:19:56Z

Between 25 January and 31 January 2016, CIS-A2K is organizing an edit-a-thon to celebrate India's republic day. The goal of this edit-a-thon is to create and improve Geographical Indications articles.

Expectations

We expect that if you participate in this edit-a-thon, you'll create or expand at least 3 articles. However you may work on as many as articles you want.

Rules

For an article to be considered as part of this Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon, it must adhere to the following rules

The new article must be created between 0:00 UTC on 25 January 2016 and 23:59 UTC on 31 January 2016.
Creation/Expansion rule: If you are creating a new article the new article must have a size of at least 3,500 bytes and a minimum length of roughly 300 words (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.), If you are expanding an existing article, you need to expand this article by at least 3000 bytes, (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.)
The articles should not copyvio content and should follow verifiability and other important policies of Wikipedia.
The articles should have decent references;
The article must not be purely machine translated.
There should not be any maintenance tags in the articles
The article must have a direct relation to Geographical Indications in India (see Proposed articles).

Participants

Please add your username below. If you can not find your community name, please add a section using level 3 header (eg. === Ukrainian Wikipedia ===). We also encourage you to start an event page on your Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/geographical-indications-in-india-edit-a-thon

Gender Equality in the Workplace

Admin — 2017-11-26T03:12:49Z

The workshop was conducted by Samvada at the Centre for Internet & Society's office in Bengaluru on November 15, 2017.

Why is it important for a workshop on sexual harassment to address the larger question of gender equality in the workplace? And how does an understanding of equality help prevent and address sexual harassment?

At this moment in time, we are witnessing an unprecedented “outing” of incidents of sexual harassment and the men who are responsible for them. The worlds of filmmaking and academia are reverberating with discussions on the nature of the workplace and what women have had to suffer in silence because of the ways in which power is distributed between genders.

Now more than ever it’s important for us to understand what sexual harassment is, the structures that support it, the experiences that surround it, and ways of addressing it within our workplaces, so that we don’t lose ourselves in the following: a) a flattened and ahistorical idea of how power functions within our daily work; b) polarisations between men and women that denies all dialogue and self-reflection; and c) purely legalistic ideas on what harassment is and how to deal with it. The 1-day workshop will do the following:

Encourage the staff of CIS to understand how power functions in relationships within the organisation
Offer historical, social and legal understandings of sexual harassment at the workplace
Set up participatory discussion on the experiences of both men and women within the workplace
Help carve out a way forward in both prevention and redressal of SH

The sessions will take the form of participatory discussions and activities, that will draw on the experiences, opinions and histories of the CIS staff.

Anita Ratnam is the Founder and Executive Director of Samvada (Bangalore), an organisation that has been working with youth on issues of social justice and sustainability since 1990. The organisation runs 6 Youth Resource Centres/Yuva Samvada Kendras in different parts of Karnataka, and also established Baduku Community College in Bangalore in 2007, as an effort to build alternative livelihoods for youth. She is also Co-founder and Partner at Anekataa, an organisation that works on gender diversity at the corporate workplace. In the last 30 years she has written and taught on a range of issues related to youth rights, gender justice, crafts and traditional occupations, communalism and pluralism, and sustainable development. Her publications include “Traditional occupations in a modern world: Career Guidance, Livelihood Planning, and Crafts in the Context of Globalization”, in Handbook of Career Development: International Perpsectives (eds. Gideon Arulmani, Anuradha J Bakshi, Frederick TL Leong and AG Watts) and a host of media publications on issues ranging from garment industries, caste and development, the ban on night shift work for women, sex education, racism and rape, and gender and religion. She has also contributed to and helped shape the emergence of many organisations that work on human rights-related issues in Karnataka and elsewhere in India.

Nitya Vasudevan is currently working at Baduku Community College (Samvada) as Convener of Centre for Wellness and Justice. She also co-coordinates the project on “Strengthening Gender and Sexuality Education” (AJWS) within Samvada, and conducts workshops with students on gender, marriage, relationships and sexuality. Her publications include “The State of Desire and other flights of fantasy: Sexuality, Pornography, Technology”, in Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law (co-authored with Namita Aavriti, eds. Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta), “’Public Women’ and the ‘Obscene’ Body: An Exploration of Abolition Debates in India”, in The Sexual History of the Global South: Sexual Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America (eds Saskia Wieringa and Horacio Sivori), “Between Ooru, Area and Pettai: The Terms of the Local in Tamil Cinema of the 21^st Century”, in the journal Positions (Rice University, upcoming issue); and a set of columns for TimeOut Bengaluru. She is also a co-organiser of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival along with a team of eight others who work on the festival simply out of a mad love for good cinema, performance and art.

Together, both have coordinate and conducted (along with other Samvada staff) a series of workshops at all the offices of Greenpeace India International, on “Gender Sensitivity and Diversity at the Workplace” (2016).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/gender-equality-in-the-workplace

FUEL GILT Conference 2015

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:03:15Z

Subhashish Panigrahi will be speaking at the FUEL GILT Conference 2015 to be held at Tamil Virtual Academy, Anna University Campus, Gandhi Mandapam Road, Kottur in Chennai from November 20 to 22, 2015. Subhashish will also be participating in the Mozilla L10N hackathon.

Subhashish's proposed talk "Consensus in localization in a multi-stakeholder community: Wikimedia as a case study" was accepted by the screening committee of FUEL GILT conference 2015.

About the FUEL GILT Conference

FUEL is one of the rare projects which emanated from India and is now associated with various various language communities and organizations across the world. FUEL GILT Conference is an annual event which gives opportunity to its participants to listen to experts on various topics related to localization. This conference is all about showcasing efforts being taken by Individuals and open communities at different places on topics including but not limited to Translation, Localization, Internationalization and Globalization. This is one of the largest events across globe specifically on Localization. So if you are associated with any of these industries, you are at the right place. By attending this event you will benefit in a major way.

This is the third conference, first two were conducted in 2013 and 2014, both of them were in Pune, India. This year Mozilla Corporation, Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC), Pune and Red Hat are the main organizers of the event. Tamil Virtual university is hosting the event at their premises. We are sincerely thankful to all the organizations for supporting us continuously.

Mozilla Localization Hackathon

We are also happy to announce that Mozilla localization hackathon will be conducted as a part of FUEL GILT Conference 2015 on 21st and 22nd November 2015. This will be a great opportunity for all the localization community members to share the issues and challenges in continuing localization efforts, talk about current status of the work, plan for future work in coordination with localization drivers and how to grow the localization community. This hackathon, is however open for invited-only members. If you or someone known to you is associated with localization efforts of Mozilla projects and products, you may ask them to contact their locale leaders.

For more details about the event, visit here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2015

Free Software

praskrishna — 2013-07-31T08:50:41Z

To spread awareness on free software and its philosophy, Free Software Movement of Karnataka (FSMK) in partnership with Jnana Vikas Institute of Technology, Bidadi, organized a 9-days workshop between July 20 and 28 at the Institute campus near Bidadi to focus on free software is real freedom to compute.

Click to read the news by M.K. Madhusoodan published in the Times of India on July 20, 2013. For more pictures, click here

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the workshop and made a presentation about Wikipedia for the participants on July 24, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/free-software

Free Knowledge and Indian Government Work

tito — 2017-06-28T10:02:00Z

Indian Government works are not available under free and open licenses. On the other hand a large number countries such as Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Israel, Macedonia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela etc. have adopted the Creative Commons and other free licenses. The works by the US Federal Government automatically go into public domain. This article promotes the idea that the Government works should be freely licensed, wherever possible and applicable.

Part 1: Free Knowledge

Free knowledge movement is a worldwide movement that creates and tries to get works under free and open licenses. It claims that knowledge is a common human property, and must be easily, freely accessible.

While discussing the topic "Access to knowledge: a basic human right", American scientist and researcher Jack Andraka feels:

Access to knowledge is, you know, a basic human right. Knowledge should not be commoditized; it wants to be free.

The Open Definition defines the term “Open Knowledge” in Open Definition 2.0 as:

"Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness."

All open content must be a) available under free licenses, b) accessible as a whole, and c) should be in open format (see more details)

A big name in the world of free content is (of course) Wikipedia, where you can use, share, remix content from the site under the Creative Commons licenses. There are many organizations, networks and groups working to get more and more content under free and open licenses such as Creative Commons (text, audio, video, image), Free and Open Source Software or FOSS (software), Open design principle (machine, engineering), Open Access (academic works) etc.

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights suggests that education should be free. Right to information is also a human right and Article 27 of the declaration states:

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

These are just not possible unless knowledge /information is easily and preferably freely accessible to everyone without restrictions. If the first barrier is accessibility, i.e, not having enough digital content or information or content behind paywall, then the second barrier is its openness. Just having access to some web pages is not enough, it also requires rights like free using, sharing, remixing, Unrestricted content can be utilized in the best way.

Part 2: Indian Government Work

Indian Government websites are not freely licensed. In section 2(k) of Indian Copyright Act, 1957 the meaning of “Government work” is explained:

"Government work" means a work which is made or published by or under the direction or control of—
(i) the Government or any department of the Government;
(ii) any Legislature in India;
. . .

Read Indian Copyright Act, section 2(c) here.

Indian Copyright Act section 17(d) informs about the “First owner of copyright” of a Government work:

in the case of a Government work, Government shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright therein;

Read section 17(d) here.

Section 28 is about “Term of copyright in Government works”. It states:

In the case of Government work, where Government is the first owner of the copyright therein, copyright shall subsist until [sixty years] from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the record is first published.—In the case of Government work, where Government is the first owner of the copyright therein, copyright shall subsist until [sixty years] from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the record is first published."

Read section 28 here

Section 52 of the act allows some “fair use” and informs how content can be used for research, education, review, criticism and some other purpose. The lengthy copyright section may be read here. However, it does not make the content free. You are not allowed to remix the work or use for commercial purpose. You can not freely use, modify, distribute it.

Now let’s have a look at a few Government websites and their license details pages.

Indian Prime Minister’s official website

(http://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/website-policies)

In this website the copyright policy page informs:

Material featured on this website may be reproduced free of charge. However, the material has to be reproduced accurately and not to be used in a derogatory manner or in a misleading context. Wherever the material is being published or issued to others, the source must be prominently acknowledged. However, the permission to reproduce this material shall not extend to any material which is identified as being copyright of a third party. Authorisation to reproduce such material must be obtained from the department/copyright holder concerned.

A screenshot may be seen below:

Here-

“Wherever the material is being published or issued to others, the source must be prominently acknowledged.” -- this part of the policy is similar to the Creative Commons licenses, where the owner or author of a work must be given attribution.

but,

“has to be reproduced accurately” -- it prohibits remix or modification works,
“not to be used in a derogatory manner” -- it is unclear that what is “derogatory manner”! Can it be used for criticism?

Indian Vice President’s official website
(http://vicepresidentofindia.nic.in/website-policies)

This is similar to the Prime Minister’s website policy and does not allow remix, commercial use etc. See screenshot:

Indian President’s official website
(http://presidentofindia.gov.in/copyright-policy.htm)

Although the Vice President’s website allows some fair use, the Indian President’s official web portal’s license is different and does not allow to reproduce the work “partially or fully”. The copyright policy states:

This contents of this website may not be reproduced partially or fully, without due permission from The President of India, If referred to as a part of another publication, the source must be appropriately acknowledged. The contents of this website can not be used in any misleading or objectionable context.

We have shown 3 example above, but it is more or less similar in all government web portals.

Part 3: Government works — Worldwide

It might be interesting to note that unlike India, a large number of countries publish their Government works under open licenses or public domain. We’ll discuss only a few here:

United States

The works by the US Federal Government automatically go into public domain.
The White House website and third party content such as text or speeches by the first lady are licensed under CC SA 3.0 US license. U.S.
On 18 June, 2013, Barack Obama and other G7 leaders endorsed the Open Data Charter. Open Data Action plan is licensed under CC0.
Several other works such as works created by New York State Senate, works created by the State of Virginia are also under different creative commons licenses. Details may be seen here.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, Open Government License (OGL) is used for Crown Copyright works published by the UK government. Since 2001, some works by the UK government were available under the Click-Use license. This license was replaced by OGL in 2010. The first version of OGL was released on 30 September 2010. OGL is compatible with the CC licenses. OGL allows to:

copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information,
adapt the Information,
exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application.

However,

Attribution must be given to with source link, which is similar to the creative commons licenses.
Some documents such as the British passport, military insignia, property rights, including patents, trademarks, and design rights, personal information in data don’t come under OGL.

More about the Open Government License may be seen here.

France

France government’s website http://www.gouvernement.fr/ is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 FR license. The English version of the policy page may be seen here.
France government’s cultural department’s website http://www.culture.fr/ is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 FR.
The Culture Communication website http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/ is also licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 FR.

Russian Federation

Content of the website http://kremlin.ru are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. License policy page may be seen here. Many other Russian government works are under different open licenses, details may be seen here.

Netherlands

The Dutch government official website http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/ is licensed under CC 0. All content of this website is under public domain, unless any other license is specified.

Bulgaria

The President of Bulgaria’s official website https://www.president.bg/ is licensed under CC BY ND 2.5 Bulgaria.

Croatia

Croatian Government website http://otvorenikod.nsk.hr/ is licensed under CC BY SA 3.0 Croatia.

The Long list

More than 30 countries have adopted and publishing their works under the Creative Commons and other free licenses. Other the above mentioned countries, the list include countries like Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Israel, Macedonia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, Venezuela etc. Other than the counties, several international organizations such as the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) endorsed the free license concept and have adopted the same. See a long list of countries using free licenses here.

Last line

It is unfortunate that the Indian Government works are not under free licenses, however it would be great if the Government rethinks and relicense their general content under the free licenses. This will help not only the movement, but the content itself can be utilized in a much better and broader way.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/free-knowledge-and-indian-government-work

Four volumes of Kannada Encyclopaedia digitised

praskrishna — 2014-07-14T05:49:48Z

The content is available online under Creative Commons License.

The article by R. Krishna Kumar was published in the Hindu on July 12, 2014, Dr. U.B.Pavanaja is quoted.

Articles from the Kannada Encyclopaedia (Kannada Vishwakosha) of the University of Mysore can now be accessed online under the Creative Commons License. The move to make content of the Kannada Vishwakosha accessible is part of the ongoing effort to enrich Kannada content on Internet.

The University of Mysore is working with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) to digitise encyclopaedic publications for which the copyrights are owned by the varsity, and to re-release them under the Creative Common License.

U.B. Pavanaja of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, who is promoting Kannada content on the Internet, told The Hindu that of the 14 volumes, digitised content of the first four volumes has been uploaded.

And, the CIS is awaiting the release of the revised edition of the other two volumes. “Each volume has about 900 pages and hence over 3,600 pages of the Kannada Vishwakosha can now be accessed. What is significant is that people seeking quality information in Kannada can now access reliable content. It is also subject to editing in real time and hence will remain updated,” according to Mr. Pavanaja. The content was digitised and uploaded with the help of students who were interning with the CIS and included three boys and five girls, said Mr. Pavanaja.

The permission for digitising the content has been accorded for the first six volumes. However, the CIS has sought permission from the varsity for digitising the content of the other volumes, including Subject Encyclopaedia.

The Centre for Internet and Society signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the University of Mysore in February. The varsity issued a certificate to publish the work under the Creative Common License in May.

As per the plan, the digitised content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia, Wikisource and this is expected to enhance digital literacy in Kannada language while helping in free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to students, academics, researchers and the general public. As of now, the articles have been uploaded on Wikisource and will shortly be migrated to Wikipedia also.

Besides, the CIS is trying to hold talks with Kannada University, Hampi, on digitising the Janapada Vishwakosha and make it available under the Creative Common License, said Mr. Pavanaja.

Niranjan Vanalli, Director of EMMRC of the University of Mysore, said digitisation of Kannada Vishwakosha has given a new lease of life to publications. “The 14-volume Kannada Vishwakosha was not available to everyone earlier and was confined to research institutions or libraries. But now that the content is available online, it is accessible to all those who are interested. And, what it is more is that most articles, especially those pertaining to history, art and culture, will be of reference quality and that will act as a major boost to the cause of Kannada language,” he added.

Meanwhile, the University of Mysore and CIS will celebrate World Open Knowledge Festival on July 15 at the Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies from 11 a.m. to commemorate the event.

Those interested to access the Kannada Vishwakosha online can log on to: http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-12-2014-r-krishna-kumar-four-volumes-of-kannada-encyclopaedia-digitised

FOSS, Wikimedia and Mozilla Under One Roof at GNUnify 2013, Pune

subha — 2013-07-17T06:55:43Z

GNUnify 2013 organized in the campus in Pune from February 15 to 17, 2013. The event was organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group (PLUG) and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research (SICSR). Subhashish Panigrahi reports the outcomes in this blog post.

GNUnify is an annual gathering consisting of Free and Open Source software workshops, talks, seminars and BOFs (Birds of a feather). This was hosted by the Pune Linux User Group and the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India.

Day 1: February 15, 2013
The first day of the event had many parallel tracks including talks on KDE, Firefox OS, FUEL Project, Wikimedia Localization, OpenSSL, Discussions on Creative Commons, OpenStack and few technical workshops.

Day 2: February 16, 2013
Few of the full day events includes several talks and discussions about Mozilla and Firefox, Internationalization, Localization and Indic language input method related talks and workshops by the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team (More details on mediawiki.org), Drupal and workshop and talks on Python. Wikipedians, translators from various languages, A2K team members Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish had an open conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team.

Day 3: February 17, 2013
The final day of GNUnify had 3 major parallel day long events; Mozilla India community meetup, Wikipedia translation sprint and Wikipedia gadget workshop. At the end of all the events participants gathered for a group photo and socialized.

Videos

Podcasts

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/foss-wikimedia-under-one-roof-gnunify

For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language

praskrishna — 2013-09-30T05:13:34Z

With many local dialects on the brink of extinction, Joanna Lobo meets the language conservationists who have taken it upon themselves to preserve Goa's official language.

The article by Joanna Lobo was published in DNA on September 29, 2013. Nitika Tandon is quoted.

Social networking site Orkut may have lost its lustre but digging through its remnants throws up a group called Aamchigele Bindaas Community (ABC). It was started to bring together Konkani-speaking people across the world.

The group is now active on Facebook under the name Broad Minded Konkanis (BMK), where people post queries about Konkani words and phrases. "This group has helped members understand the language to a great extent,” says Rajanikanth Shenoy Kudpi, founder and one of the administrators of the 160-member group. BMK has members from Saraswat, Catholic Christian, Bunt, Navayat Muslim, Jain and other communities, who speak Konkani.

“Konkani as a language will definitely be rejuvenated if contemporaries and scholars put in consistent efforts,” says Kudpi.

One such effort was a recent four-day workshop organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Access to Knowledge (A2K) for the students of Goa University and St.Xavier’s College. “We want to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia,” says Nitika Tandon, programme manager, CIS-A2K.

Tandon quotes the Census Department of India 2001 figures that puts Konkani speakers at 24 lakh but adds that limited documentation is available online.

However, opinion is divided over the language's fate. “I don’t think it's dying,” says Roshan Pai, founder, savemylanguage.org. Pai started the website, a Konkani dictionary that documents the language spoken by the GSB community in and around Mangalore, in 2005.

The site is dependent on volunteer contributions — people send in meanings of various words that are validated by others, who also put in different uses or meanings of the words. All the 17,528 words collected (belonging to GSB dialects in Mangalore, Goa, Kerala and Cochin) are stored online.

One of the major factors behind people talking about saving a language has to do with its links to culture. “It is the essence of life and contains a lot of information that has been passed on through the generations,” says Gurudath Baliga, assistant director at World Konkani Centre, Mangalore.

The centre works towards preserving the language by empowering the community that speaks it through tech-related grassroot activities, documenting folklore, appointing teachers in different schools and publishing books. The centre is now working on Konkanverter.com, an in, catholic Christian, ter script translator, and World Konkani Archives, that will serve as a repository for all data and text. With such initiatives, the language is in safe hands.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dnaindia-september-29-2013-joanna-lobo-for-the-love-of-konkani

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

nitika — 2013-10-30T09:17:31Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T03:15:22Z

WikiConference India and its productive hackathon

The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.

A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.

As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:

WikiSpeak with native language (web and Android): Speaking the text of Wikipedia articles
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Android)
Audio file upload to Wikidata (Android): Assists users in uploading small files that demonstrate the pronunciation of lexical items
A layer that shows local Wikipedia articles on a Google Map
Optical character recognition for Hindi and Malayalam
Communication platform [WebRTC] (Web Application): Santosh wrote this app himself; hackathon participants used it to communicate
Notifications: browser notifications for Wikipedia functions such as recent changes

Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.

Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.

He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.

The conference generated a number of media reports. P

Indian state of Tamil Nadu adopts Creative Commons license

The state of Tamil Nadu on the subcontinent

Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".

The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.

Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.

An example of the distinctive Tamil script

“

Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork.

”

Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).

"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.

A rare Tamil-language book in an archival exhibition

There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.

The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T

In brief

Mobile app provides offline access to 8,000 medical articles in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Spanish: The apps, which supplement a popular English language app, were announced by the WikiProject Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland. More language editions are planned.
Wikimedia Foundation appoints five volunteers to its Board Governance Committee: Newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv announced the selection of the advisory group. Board governance issues have been the subject of much discussion since the tumultuous events at the WMF over the last year. The four members of the BGC are Tymkiv (chair), Kelly Battles, Christophe Henner, and Dariusz Jemielniak.
WikiConference North America will take place October 7–10, 2016 in San Diego. Scholarship applications are open until August 23; conference submissions until August 31.
WikiConvention Francophone will take place in Paris August 19–21.
New help page takes aim at common newbie obstacle: Many articles carry banners, to flag problems with the articles. New contributors often lack an understanding of how to go about removing the banners, if they address the underlying issues. In recent months, Fuhghettaboutit created a help page to explain the process, and advocated for linking to the page from the templates. The help page now gets several thousand views per day, suggesting that it is filling a significant gap.
Machine-assisted translation of Wikipedia articles, which has increased with the introduction of the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Translation Tool (covered by the Signpost in a June 2015 op-ed, in June 2016, and in various other pieces), has sparked a controversy in recent weeks. See here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT.
Wikidata RfC on defining data quality underway: Alessandro Piscopo, a guest of Wikimedia Germany, asserts that: "to achieve high quality, it is important to define first what data quality is on this knowledge base." Join the discussion: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Data quality framework for Wikidata. P

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-signpost-august-18-2016-pete-forsyth-and-tony-focus-on-india

First Urdu Wikipedia Workshop at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad

syed — 2014-04-07T01:06:31Z

During the second week of February, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore received a call from Dr Faheemuddin, Assistant Professor, Department of Translation Studies, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad requesting an Urdu Wikipedia Workshop in University. We were informed of special interest of Dr Zafaruddin , Head, Department of Translation studies in holding the event as any effort aimed at expanding the Urdu Wikipedia will benefit the Urdu language community across the world.

The event was covered by Taemeer News, Aalami Akhbar, and Firokhabar on March 5, 2014.

During the course of discussion and further communication, CIS agreed to hold a day-long workshop for about 20-30 students. The day-long workshop was scheduled on March 4, 2013 for 28 students. These students came from different levels such as MA, M Phil and Ph D offered by the Department of Translation Studies. All the participating students had opened their accounts on Urdu Wikipedia prior to the event. They were well-versed in the Unicode typing for Urdu.

Prof. Mohammed Zafaruddin said during the inaugural session that the Dept. of Translation Studies wants its students to impart training for writing material for Urdu Wikipedia so that Urdu could be made compatible with the modern technology. Later, Mr. Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge, addressed the students through Skype. He told that Wikipedia has become an important source of communicating information. Millions of people throughout the world are getting information through Wikipedia in 287 languages. Urdu is an important language of the world, the speakers of which are spread all over the world. In view of its importance, it is obligatory on the part of Urdu speakers to preserves their language and culture by using and contributing to Urdu Wikipedia.

The initial session of the workshop included a general introduction to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedic content it showcases and the ways in which the students can contribute. This was followed by a practical demonstration round. For this purpose, the students witnessed the creation of the article on the famous Urdu poet and Bollywood lyricist Kaif Bhopali. It was pointed out that while the English Wikipedia already had article on the poet, Urdu Wikipedia got its version only during the current workshop. The students were later surprised to see that in the context of many Urdu poets, more content was available on Wikipedia in English than in Urdu. In the case of some of the famous poets, even an article entry is missing in the Urdu Wikipeda while English Wikipedia has full length articles.

During the hands-on session, each of the students was given a bitly link of an Urdu Wikipedia article. The students were asked to edit the article and expand the content. The students enthusiastically participated in the event with some of them creating their own articles. They also asked questions pertaining to an advanced level of editing such as uploading images. A student named Mohammed Asif had taken pictures of the event which he later uploaded on Wikimedia Commons (http://bitly.com/urduworkshop).

The departmental staff present on the occasion included Dr. Mohammed Khaled Mubbashir-Uz-Zafar, Associate Professor, Dr. Mohammed Junaid Zakir, Dr. Khakashan Lateef (Asst. Professors), Prof. Syed Khwaja Moinuddin and Dr. Shaik Sadi Arshad (Translator). Convener of the workshop, Dr. Faheemuddin Ahmed, proposed vote of thanks.

Video

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