Centre for Internet and Society

Nineteen Books Published by Ama Odisha Relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0

subha — 2014-12-07T03:35:46Z

Odisha's most circulated newspaper Sambad has collaborated with CIS-A2K to relicense 19 books published by its sister concern "Ama Odisha".

These books consists of books starting from biographies of notable personalities to historical research. Yesterday Sambad's chairman-editor Soumya Ranjan Patnaik signed a copyright migration document to help the Odia Wikisource community to enrich the project. In an interview to me he expresses, "technology should be used as a tool to take our language to masses". Mr Patnaik is joining "Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014", a launching event of Odia Wikisource co-organized by Odia Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K on November 28, as chief guest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/nineteen-books-by-ama-odisha-relicensed

More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource

subha — 2014-11-04T13:58:48Z

Speakers of Odia will soon have mountains of books to read online in their mother tongue, following the launch of the Odia Wikisource, which will make accessible many rare books that have entered the public domain.

The article by Subhashish Panigrahi was published in Global Voices on October 18, 2014 and thereafter mirrored on the Wikimedia Blog on October 21, 2014.

Authors and publishers are also invited to donate their copyrighted work, possibly bringing open access to large volumes of books and manuscripts, creating a vast archive of educational resources. And everything will be in Odia.

One of the biggest advantages of Wikisource is that all its books are available in Unicode, meaning that Google's search engine indexes the texts’ entirety, and readers are able to copy easily what they wish. (Most conventional archival systems lack this feature.) A volunteer community administers Wikisource. To upload a book's content, volunteers either retype the books word-for-word, or, when possible, use Optical Character Recognition (commonly known as “OCR“), which converts scanned images into editable text. Available at or.wikisource.org, Odia is Wikisource's eleventh Indic language.

There are more than 40 million native Odia speakers in the world. Most live in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states, but there is a large diaspora in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and across South and East Asia. Despite being spoken by so many people, Odia's online presence is relatively small.

As of October 2014, Odia Wikipedia hosted 8,441 articles. The state government's websites have Odia-language content, naturally, but none of the text is in Unicode, making the materials invisible to search engines and difficult to share. Thanks to individual and organizational efforts, some Odia-language websites have recently emerged with Unicode content.

With support from the non-profit organization Pragati Utkal Sangha and the National Institute of Technology Rourkela, a Bhubaneswar-based outfit has digitized about 740 books through the Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB) project. Most of these texts were published between 1850 and 1950. The OAOB project is the largest existing digital archive of Odia literature, but the archived books are only available as scanned PDFs, restricting readers’ ability to search within the texts.

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource underwent a long approval process, after running as an active incubator project for nearly two years. Both the Language Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation's Board reviewed and endorsed the project.

Odia Wikisource has already digitized and proofread three books entirely. In collaboration with the Wikimedia-funded Centre for Internet and Society‘s Access to Knowledge, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) has partially digitized another book, as well. KISS is also busy digitizing another Nine books by Odia-language author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were relicensed to CC-BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

In response to posts on Twitter and Facebook, four new contributors recently joined Wikisource to help digitize “The Odia Bhagabata,” a literary classic compiled in the 14th century. “Content that have already been typed with fonts of non-Unicode encoding systems could be converted by converters which was the case of Odia Bhagabata. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping the text, as the book was already available on a website Odia.org and is out of copyright”, says Manoj Sahukar, who (along with yours truly) designed a converter that helped to transcribe “Bhagabata”.

Rising Voices contacted some of those whose efforts made this happen.

Mrutyunjaya Kar (MK), Long time Wikimedian who has proof-read the books on Odia Wikisource
Rising Voices (RV): Youre there with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
MK: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

Nihar Kumar Dalai (NKD), Wikisource writer
RV: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata. How you want to get involved in future?
NKD: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

Nasim Ali (NA), Oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer
RV: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
NA: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

Pankajmala Sarangi (PS), Wikisource writer
RV: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
PS: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

Amir Aharoni (AA), Wikimedia Language Committee member and Software Engineer at the Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation
RV: What you feel Wikisource could do to a language like Odia with more than 40 million speakers?
AA: In schools in Odisha, are there lessons of Odia literature? If the answer is yes, then it can do a very simple thing – make these lessons more fun and help children learn more! Everybody says that in Kerala this worked very well with Malayalam literature.

Clearly, strong passions motivate Odia Wikisource's volunteers, like Nihar Kumar Dalai, who writes on Facebook:

Hindi and English are fine, but our native language it bit more special! Who of us does not now about the art, culture, noted personalities, tourist spots and festivals of Odisha? But if you search online about all of these then there is very little available. There comes a simple and easy solution Odia Wikipedia. Like Odia Wikipedia, Odia Wikisource is another great place and this is my small contribution to bring Odia Bhagabata on Odia Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-october-18-2014-more-than-400-million-people-await-launch-of-odia-wikisource

KIIT University to lead building free knowledge repository initiative

praskrishna — 2014-02-03T09:57:50Z

Centre for Internet and Society is a Bangalore based Non profit organization which works primarily in the broader domains ofinternet and policy research, accessibility, open knowledge and open education.

The blog post was published by India Education Diary.com on January 20, 2014.

Its Access To Knowledge program is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and works in fostering the volunteer Wikimedia community that contributes in enhancing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Its primary mandate is upbringing Wikipedia editors by outreach, creating primary resources for sources of reference in multiple ways that lead to enrich Wikipedia.

From a technical institution, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology has grown to a multidisciplinary world class University. KIIT University is a world class university spread over 25 sq. km. of land accommodating 20 sprawling wi-fi campuses with 10 million sq.ft. built up area. The university has 25 constituent schools offering more than 100 programmes. Being accredited by NAAC of UGC and NBA of AICTE, KIIT has 20,000 students pursuing under graduate and post graduate studies in the fields of Engineering, Computer Application, Management, Rural Management, Law, Biotechnology, MBBS, M.D., BDS, Nursing, Fashion Technology, Cinema & Media Studies and Languages. KIIT stands out as one of the finest universities in India declared under section 3 of the UGC Act of 1956. KIIT educational conglomerate is unique in offering a wide spectrum of academic programmes from kindergarten to postgraduate level, earning it a place in the Limca Book of Records.

Wikipedia has a critical stand in academia when it comes to peer academic research. But on the other side students ofter access and use Wikipedia for their assignment work despite of the non acceptance of Wikipedia content by the teacher community. The primary reason of Wikipedia's factual errors in many Indic related articles being Wikipedia's low contribution from the global south needs more contribution. Academicians and subject experts who are in charge of building the infrastructure of providing free knowledge to everyone often were stuck because of this setback.

This led to an conjugation of subject experts and Wikimedia contributor communities to set up a system called Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) where editing, correcting and enhancing Wikipedia articles become part of the curriculum.

To begin with the students in different schools at KIIT University the local Wikipedia community with the support from CIS-A2K is going to conduct classroom Wikipedia workshops to pilot Wikipedia contribution. KIIT University would be one of world's few universities to pilot student Wikipedia contribution as part oftheir curricula in any regional language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-education-diary-january-20-2014-kiit-university-to-lead-building-free-knowledge-repository-initiative

JP Das's Books to be Made Available Free on Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:18:51Z

Noted Odia-language author and art historian Jagannath Prasad Das's works will be available on Wikipedia for free.

A scanned version of the article published on October 16, 2015 is below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/jp-dass-books-to-be-made-available-free-on-wikipedia

Introducing Odia Wikipedia to students of Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

Sailesh Patnaik — 2016-05-20T10:52:41Z

A four-hour-long workshop was organised at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha on February 25, 2016 for the students of Master of Computer Applications (MCA) and Master in Arts, Department of Odia-language.

70 participants consisting of 35 male and 25 female students from the two departments joined in this workshop. Three active Wikimedians; Mrutyunjaya Kar, Subas Chandra Rout and Jnanaranjan Sahu supported in mentoring the new editors. Two other Wikimedians; Chinmayee Mishra and Rajalaxmi Mishra, who are students in the university, organized the event.

During the introductory session, we introduced the students about Odia Wikipedia, the Wikimedia community, and the Bhubaneswar WikiTungi, a local user collaborative in the city of Bhubaneswar. Mrutyunjaya Kar, administrator of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource presented about the Odia Wikimedia projects, how the students enhance their skills while contributing to these projects and introduced the Wikipedia policies to the new editors. “Even though we announced that students can leave by 2 pm, most students stayed back over an hour. Even in a conservative expectation, there will at least be 3-4 students who will be actively contributing in the future. As Chinmayee is associated with us from before, she could lead the local activities in the university”, he adds. Jnanaranjan Sahu who has been active in building several tools and software for Odia Wikimedia projects introduced about Mediawiki and the Optical Character Recognition and its application in growing Odia Wikisource. He also suggests for regular follow-up outreach in the university so that the new editors get constant support and this enthusiasm does not stop here.

Out of the 70 participants, more than 50 participants managed to create their accounts and even made more than 200 edits during the workshop. They selected articles of their own interest and edited. Four faculty members from the MCA department participated in the workshop and were eager to learn how Wikipedia editing works. Rajalaxmi Mishra, who always wanted to edit but never edited Odia Wikipedia made her debut edit this day. She elaborates, “Chinmayee being a batchmate and a good friend always talked about Odia Wikipedia but I personally never did much beyond reading the English Wikipedia article. This workshop was more of a real starting point for me and I started writing about many renowned women like Annie Besant, Kalpana Chawla and Sudha Chandran. Being a student of Computer Science, I am also planning to write more articles in my own subject area. I have just finished writing about a popular bird of Odisha Chinmayee is my batchmate, was helping her”.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/introducing-odia-wikipedia-to-students-of-utkal-university-bhubaneswar

Intellectuals stresses on need for revival of Bhagabat Tungi in Odisha villages as knowledge hub

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T07:03:49Z

Odia Intellectuals stresses on need for revival of Bhagabat Tungi in Odisha villages as knowledge hub. This was expressed by the intellectuals at a seminar organized by ‘The Intellects’ at Tyagaraj Nagar Jaggnath Mandir, New Delhi.

The article was published in Odishadiary on April 22, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

It should be noted that The Intellects a Delhi based organization of Odia intellectuals and Shree Jagannath Mandir & Odisha Art And Cultural Center have come together to organize a seminar on the subject “Relevance Of Bhagabat Tungi In The Evolution Of Odia Language From Budha Era To Digital Age”.

The conference was about the discussion over creative platform for future development of Odia language and literature. Delegates were drawn from diverse areas to provide more interdisciplinary insight in to issues and challenges that are in from of Odia language to march ahead in the new age of computer.

The seminar was attended by Rajya Sabha MP Baisnab Parida, Dr. Subash Pani, Dr. Bhagaban Prakash, researcher Subrat Prusti, writer and lawyer Biraja Mohapatra, journalist and Odiakart.com founder Sahasranshu Mahapatra, Subhashish Panigrahi- Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society and The Intellects chairman Shri Devendra Rout.

The program was attended by who is who of Delhi Odias like OdiaRadio Founder, Sitanshu Mohapatra, Journalist Asit Ranjan Mishra, OdishaDiary (www.orissadiary.com) founder Prachee Naik, The Intellects members Smrutidhara Rout, Anasuya Sahoo, Aditya Mohanty, Nirmal Dhal, Sangram Dhar, Sanjaya Parida, Pankajamala Sarangi, Premanda Swain, lawyer Sanjeeb Kumar Mohanty, Tarun Samantray, Dr. Anita Panda, Prof. Saudamini Barik, Jayaram Samal, Indubhushan Lenka, Kamdev Biswal of Tyagraj Nagar Jaggnath Temple and others.

This program was attended by nearly 600 Odias living across the national capital region. The Intellects also organsing 7-days BHAGABAT SANDHYA will also be organized at the premises of Shree Jagannath Mandir, Tyagraj Nagar, New Delhi from 21st April to 27 April 2014 in an effort to spread the noble principles of the SHREEMAD BHAGABAT.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/odisha-diary-april-22-2014-intellectuals-stresses-on-need-for-revival-of-bhagabat-tungi-in-odisha-villages-as-knowledge-hub

Imperial College Orientation Program, Bargarh

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-16T19:51:29Z

An Odia Wikipedia workshop was conducted at Imperial College, Bargarh on 12 February, 2017.

An Odia Wikipedia orientation workshop was conducted at Imperial College, an affiliate of Sambalpur University, on 12 February 2017 for 60 undergraduate students of the College. The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Odia Wikipedia while also giving them a broad overview of the global free knowledge movement. This workshop was conducted as part of CIS-A2K's ongoing efforts to expand the reach of Odia Wikipedia in Western Odisha in conjunction with the Odia Wikipedia community members.

The students were also introduced to the process of digitisation and how digitisation was fundamental to the preservation of language and local knowledge. The students also showed an interest in the digitisation sprint for the Dadhivamana Temple's Pothi digitisation project, an ongoing effort to digitise 250 ancient palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhivamana Temple in Bargarh.

The meta page for this event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/imperial-college-orientation-program-bargarh

Government of Odisha adopting Creative Commons License to Promote Transparency and Access to Knowledge

Sailesh Patnaik — 2018-01-18T01:22:40Z

This year started with an astonishing announcement by the Government of Odisha towards the free knowledge movement. On the Public Domain day, which is celebrated every year on 1st January, The Government of Odisha continuing its collaboration with the Odia Wikipedia community has announced to release the content of its two major departments under Creative Commons license.

Last year, the Government of Odisha became the first state government in India to release their social media content under free license and released the content of its 8 social media accounts and the website of 2017 Asian athletics Championships under CC-BY-4.0 international license, which has overall helped in adding 207 distinct images into various Wikipedia projects.

The decision about the relicensing of the content was announced to the public in a tweet by the twitter account of the Information and Public Relations department (I&PR) which says “On the occasion of Public Domain Day, the website and social media feeds of I& PR Department are being licensed under Creative Commons which means all content on the website and social media accounts are now free for public usage. That includes photographs, videos, government publications and much more. This is in continuation with State Government’s principles of Teamwork, Transparency & Technology for bringing about Transformation.”

The two departments announced by the state Government to be the part of the collaboration are Information and Public Relations department; that informs the public on the plans, policies and Programmes of the Government. The I&PR department also publishes 2 state magazines, Utkala Prasanga, a state magazine published in Odia language and Odisha Review, a 72 years old state magazine published in English language. Also the ST&SC Development department; which works for the welfare of the backward and minority communities in Odisha. This department holds a major source of information in the form of Adivasi journal and research papers on Indigenous community of Odisha from its Research and Training institute. Most importantly, the social media accounts along with the websites are released under the Creative Commons license. Social media channels are updated on a daily basis and provides fresh content everyday about different collaborations of the Government.

In near future, the Government of Odisha is also planning to release content of some major departments under open license for people to access the information for free.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/government-of-odisha-adopting-creative-commons-license-to-promote-transparency-and-access-to-knowledge

Font problem hits Odia

praskrishna — 2014-07-25T08:04:20Z

Focus on search for solution to lack of compatibility.

The article by Bibhuti Barik was published in the Telegraph on July 7, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi gave his inputs.

The available Odia fonts that could be used for digital publications have compatibility problems. The fonts, which number around 10, have been developed for specific purposes and cannot be used in all applications.

Computer application researchers, linguistics, information technology experts and educationists, who met at a workshop here today, urged the state government and the IT industry to ensure the smooth use of Odia fonts.

These fonts are available on different software tools, but if one purchases one of them to install on his or her computer, it fails to open in another system. Since this happens due to lack of compatibility, it also discourages users to use Odia fonts in official work and day-to-day life.

“I think the use of Odia language in computers is restricted only to desktop publication (DTP). As the compatibility factor has come as a major handicap, the use is becoming more restricted in day-to-day life. The state government should come forward to facilitate a software so that the fonts can be used through a uniform system,’’ said linguist and founding director of the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages, Debi Prasanna Pattanayak.

Subhashish Panigrahi, a Bangalore-based IT professional who is now working on a project for Wikipedia Foundation, said: “Different fonts in Odia came to existence quite late and all were based on the skeleton of Latin fonts so that when one types an English font on the keyboard, the screen shows an Odia font. Later, unicode fonts were developed, which were not only compatible to the Internet, but had elements common with other Indian languages as well.”

Odia publishers did not agree to use the unicode fonts as they were using customised softwares. For this reason, the published books and literature fails to reach the Internet.

In 2011, Srujanika, a city-based organisation, developed a converter to use fonts from other categories to unicode type.

Sujata Patel, chief operating officer of Pune -based Tech Z Solution, said: “The affordability of Odia tools and fonts is a major concern. As they are developed by non-Odia professionals, the aesthetic aspect of Odia fonts and characters are not being taken into consideration.”

Subrat Prusty, member secretary Institute of Odia Studies and Research, said: “Odia is yet to come to the computer screen on different software tools which are used for tables, Internet applications, medical, engineering and business applications.”

“Despite having hundreds of engineering colleges, two technical universities and 10 universities we are yet to use Odia in computers,” Prusty added.

Researchers from US, Singapore, IITs, central universities, IT professionals, linguists, artistes, educationists and students of computer applications took part in the workshop that was organised at the computer science department of the Institute of Technical and Education and Research of Sikhya O Anusandhan University.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-telegraph-july-7-2014-bibhuti-barik-font-problem-hits-odia

El idioma oriya ama a Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T05:14:26Z

Este post es de Rising Voices, un proyecto de Global Voices que ayuda a difundir los medios ciudadanos en lugares que normalmente no tienen acceso a ellos.

The following is a Spanish version of the news that was already published in English on Rising Voices. The Russian version can be read here.

El oriya (odia) es una lengua con una antigüedad de 2,500 años nativa de la región de Odisha (antes conocida como Orissa). La lengua obtuvo recientemente el estatus de lengua clásica de la India.

Recientemente, la comunidad Wikimedia Oriya se reunió para celebrar el nuevo estatus de la lengua en Bhubaneswar.

A continuación un extracto de un artículo [en] reciente en el blog de la Fundación Wikimedia, por Subhashish Panigrahi [en], compartiendo información sobre la comunidad Wiki en Oriya:

14 libros con derechos de autor se han relicenciado bajo la licencia Creative Commons y el proyecto de digitalización en Odia WikiSource [or] fue formalmente iniciado por una institución educacional indígena, la Institución Kalinga de Ciencias Sociales (KISS por sus siglas en inglés) [...] La KISS digitalizará algunos de estos libros y los pondrá a disposición en Odia Wikisource.

Una fuente OpenType Unicode en oriya, “Odia OT Jagannatha [en]” diseñada por Sujata Patel de Odialanguage.com [en] fue publicada bajo la licencia OFL. Es la primera fuente OpenType para oriya que la comunidad ha probado activamente.

Una nueva herramienta para la escritura en oriya sin necesidad de estar en línea llamada “TypeOdia” [en], por el wikipedista Manoj Sahukar [or] también se publicó para su distribución. DVD's con la fuente, la herramienta de escritura, diccionarios en la lengua oriya, la Wikipedia oriya fuera de línea en Kiwix, la guía de edición de Wikipedia [en], un convertidor de fuentes ISCII a Unicode, varias paquetes de software libre y de fuente abierta y el sistema operativo Ubuntu [...]

Una gran mayoría de las publicaciones en oriya no se encuentran en Internet y los usuarios carecen de fácil acceso. (El dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak) discutió el proceso de digitalización para preservar libros valiosos que ya no se imprimen y viejos manuscritos en hoja de palma [...]

Las fuentes en oriya pueden ser descargadas gratuitamente [en]. Los desarroladores de la fuente dicen [en]:

Abogamos por el uso de la lengua oriya de verdadero espíritu, en el campo de la administración diaria, en la justicia, además del campo de la educación. Además, hemos tomado el proyecto para desarrollar un léxico en oriyia, incluyendo versiones en oriya típicas de palabras técnicas, para evitar la dependencia de la lengua inglesa.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/rising-voices-april-12-2014-el-idioma-oriya-ama-a-wikipedia

Documentation and Wikipedia Contribution — A One Day Workshop

praskrishna — 2013-11-12T04:20:37Z

On November 14, the CIS-A2K team is organizing a one day orientation workshop on 'Documentation and Wikipedia Contribution' at the Kalinga Institute of Social Studies (KISS), Bhubaneswar from 10.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ ରୁ

ଭୁବନେଶ୍ୱରସ୍ଥିତ ଆଦିବାସୀ ଆବାସିକ ଅନୁଷ୍ଠାନ KISS (କଳିଙ୍ଗ ଇନଷ୍ଟିଚୁଟ ଅଫ ସୋସିଆଲ ଷ୍ଟଡିଜ)ଠାରେ ଏଠାକାର ଶିକ୍ଷକ ଓ ସ୍ନାତକୋତ୍ତର ଛାତ୍ରଛାତ୍ରୀମାନେ ଆଦିବାସୀମାନଙ୍କର ଭାଷା, ଚଳଣି ଓ ଜନ‌ଜୀବନ ବାବଦରେ ଅନେକ ଗବେଷଣାଭିତ୍ତିକ ପ୍ରସଙ୍ଗ ଏକାଧିକ ଭାଷାରେ ଲେଖିବାର ଏକ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରାଯାଇଛି । ପ୍ରାରମ୍ଭିକ ପର୍ଯ୍ୟାୟରେ ଏହି ନ‌ଥିକରଣ ତିନୋଟି ଭାଷାରେ (ଓଡ଼ିଆ, ଇଂରାଜୀ ଓ ହିନ୍ଦୀ)ରେ କରାଯାଇ KISS ୱେବସାଇଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ କରାଯିବ । ଏହି ପ୍ରସଙ୍ଗସମୂହ ଜ୍ଞାନ‌କୋଷ ପରିସରରେ ଥିବାରୁ ଏସବୁକୁ ଉଇକିକରଣ କରି ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ପ୍ରସଙ୍ଗସବୁକୁ ସମୃଦ୍ଧ କରିବା ନିମନ୍ତେ ଏହି ଏହି କର୍ମଶାଳାର ଆୟୋଜନ କରାଯାଇଛି । ନ‌ଭେମ୍ବର ୧୪ (ଗୁରବାର‌) ଦିନ ସକାଳ ୧୧:୦୦ ରେ ଅନୁଷ୍ଠିତ ହେବାକୁ ଥିବା ଏହି କର୍ମଶାଳାରେ ୧୨ ଜଣ ଶିକ୍ଷକ ଓ ୩୨ ଜଣ ସ୍ନାତକୋତ୍ତର ଯୋଗଦେଇ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ ଟାଇପ କରିବା ଓ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ ବାବଦରେ ତାଲିମ ଗ୍ରହଣ କରିବେ ।

Click to read the full details published on the Wiki meta page here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/documentation-and-wikipedia-contribution

Cultural knowledge needs to be more open

praskrishna — 2015-03-12T16:41:05Z

Subhashish Panigrahi is an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is currently working at the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program where he builds partnership with universities, language researchers, and GLAM organizations.

The blog post by Jen Wike Huger was published on the website of OpenSource.com. It can be read here.

Their goal is to bring more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses. During his work at the Wikimedia Foundation's India Program, Subha was involved in designing community sustaining and new contributor cultivation models.

For his effort to share and spread open source far and wide, this year he was awarded a 2015 Opensource.com People's Choice Award.

His most recent articles include: Digitize any book in the public domain, on his work to with Indian poetry important to the culture. Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons, about news from the Wikimedia Foundation. Mozilla brings Indian communities together, about the Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014. And, Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language, on his work to preserve his native culture.

The Basics

Name: Subhashish Panigrahi ("Subha")
Opensource.com username: psubhashish
Location: India (Bengaluru and Odisha)
Occupation/Employer/Position: Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society
Favorite open source tool or application: Audacity
Favorite Opensource.com channel: Education

Open up to us

I was away from home for my studies and was longing to read and write more in my native language of Odia. That led me to co-found eOdissa.com, a portal to tell stories to the rest of the world about my language, history, and cultural heritage. I was a sporadic editor on Wikipedia; anonymously since 2006. Then, in 2011, I was introduced to editing for Odia Wikipedia by my mentor Shiju Alex and friend Asutosh Kar.

That was my entry point to the free software movement. And it was a trap I could never get out of!

I thankfully began a full-time job with the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 for its India Program. The program is now housed with their Indian movement partner, Centre for Internet and Society, under the Access To Knowledge program. I work in the Bengaluru office but mostly travel to work with the communities. I work on building capacity for the Indian language Wikimedia communities, building institutional partnerships for long term outreach engagement, negotiating with publishers and copyright holders to bring more content relicensed under Creative Commons licenses, and taking part in policy level discourses around open access and enforcing free software for governance.

What open tools and data help you get things done?

For my day job, I solely rely on Wikimedia Stats to collate data related to Wikimedia projects. I use some Python programming, jQery.ime, and JavaScript for other data-related work. But, I am a people's man and my interaction is mostly with humans rather than tools.

What do you wish were more open?

GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and many other cultural institutions have historically been the keepers of cultural knowledge. But I see possessiveness in not opening up their archival for public consumption. I wish more policy level negotiations and open collaborations were happening to open up cultural data.

What are the biggest challenges to openness that you encounter, either at work or in your life?

Community and its growth. Working in a developing nation with historical, cultural, economic, and political hindrances pulls volunteerism down. It's is a huge challenge for me. Tapping into many existing networks and communities, and leveraging ongoing activities for the betterment for the free and open source movement, is something I am struggling for.

Why choose the open source way?

I would like to quote a good friend and activist Michelle Thorne who says, "Human civilization has everything free and open from the beginning, but slowly the problems of restriction start beginning." Furthermore filmmaker Nina Paley says, "Knowledge is not created by us, rather shared by us."

If we are here to share knowledge, why to restrict its free flow?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-feburary-18-2015-jen-wike-huger-cultural-knowledge-needs-to-be-more-open

Community Capacity Building Workshop at KIIT University

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T05:22:17Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team is organizing a workshop for community capacity building at KIIT University on March 30, 2014.

Experienced Wikimedians and Subhashish Panigrahi from CIS-A2K mentored the community about community building strategies and outreach. They had a discussion about the further steps with students (graduating batch) of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal who took part in the Odia Wikipedia Education program. Finally there was a discussion on CIS-A2K's Odia language work plan for Wikipedia and WikiSource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/community-capacity-building-workshop-at-kiit

Classical Odia Language in the Digital Age

subha — 2014-07-28T07:41:51Z

The essay was published in the June edition of Odisha Review, a magazine published by Government of Odisha's Department of Information and Public Relations.

Click to read the original article published in Odisha Review here.

Odisha’s documentation and archival history dates back to the pre-Kalinga civilization that existed more than 5,000 years back in which today’s Odisha was a major part of it. It, later was more vibrant when Kalinga kingdom and was widespread from Ganga to Godavari, geographically consisting of modern day Odisha entirely and partly Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattishgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana and part of Tamilnadu and Kerala. The epigraphs of cave painting in Gudahandi and stone inscriptions of Hatigumpha in Udayagiri complex are a few examples of the early documentations that the ancestral Kalingan tribes had made. Furthermore, the early Buddhist poets of Kalinga (popularly known as 64 Sidhapada) wrote “ doha ” (spiritual verses) in Pali language. Pali is the language of all of the Buddhist literature and predecessor of modern Odia, Maithili, Bangla and Assamese language and has deep impact on many other Indic languages. Odia has travelled through a long journey of “Tambapata ” (bronze plate inscription), “Talapatra” (palm leaf manuscripts), printed books since early 18th century and e-books in the modern days. Years of history that have perished during invasions by foreign invaders could have told more about this civilization. Modern Odisha state, so far has been able to uphold the pride of having the largest number of palm leaf manuscripts (over 20,000 manuscripts) in the world. Odia printing and publication industry is spread across all the 30 administrative districts of Odisha and other Indian cities like Kolkata and New Delhi and to some extent in some parts of Surat. A few million books would have been printed starting from the first book “New Testament ” that got printed in 1809.[1]

In this chronology there comes the new age reading tools “e-books” or electronic books less formally initiated in the eighties by students of Regional Engineering College, Rourkela (Now National Institute of Rourkela) and now crossed a decade.[2]

Odia got classical status on 20 February this year after 5 other Indian languages on the basis of its literary heritage of over three millennia. Interestingly, it is older than most of the most spoken languages in the world. Like many other mighty civilizations, traders of this region conquered places and took their language and culture to their occupied colonies. Early traders of Kalingan Sadhabas were trading silk and spices with South Asian countries. With them travelled Kalinga’s language and culture. When all of the other language’s have been able to have a strong presence on the Internet, online content available in Odia is way limited compared to even other Indic languages. It has been almost a decade since Odia support is available in most computers across operating systems. But, the digital desktop publishing (DTP) published resources are still not available in a searchable manner – not on internet or in a computer locally. Currently, the Odia publication industry uses proprietary standard fonts for Odia typing. Akruti, LEAP office, Shreelipi are name to few. All of these were the only means for printing books using desktop publishing at one point of time. But, these encoding systems are out-of-date. The major drawback of these fonts is, they have regular Latin characters replaced by Odia characters. If a document is typed using one such fonts is sent to someone it is difficult to even read or reuse if the person in the receiving end does not have the exact font used for typing. As already mentioned the fonts are commercial and proprietary and it is mandatory to buy them to use. In reality most of the users do not buy and use pirated versions of the software for work.

The printed documents typed in one standard is not compatible with the other one. To avoid this problems, an advanced universal standard called “Unicode” was released in early 2000. Unicode has both Odia and Latin characters in a font that allows both the scripts to be displayed correctly at the same time. It is universally compatible and all the operating systems have Unicode fonts installed in the computers. This takes the pain of installing multiple fonts to access any typed text. Searching any text typed in Unicode is as simple as googling something in English. Moreover, documents typed using one Unicode font could be read using another Unicode font. Unfortunately, none of the Odia newspapers have their publications in Unicode at this moment.

This, practically does not allow any reader to search, access, reuse and quote any content. Same is the case for all other published resources like books and magazines. More than 80 per cent of the published content are not even released online and also not archived.

Many publishers, intimidated of online content plagiarism have been protecting their publications. Unfortunately, copyright laws in India are not stringently practiced unlike the west. This has given rise to a parallel piracy market for the movies and music over the years. Interestingly, books are not of that much demand as music and movies are. As a result of the lingua-cultural shift to English from native languages regional language publications are not widely sold in the post-colonial Indian book market as compared to the English publications. The case of the use of Odia language as a language of governance is still not put in place. Odia is still to be used as a medium for official communication in all of the government offices. English medium educational Boards have been domineering over the Odisha state Board. Despite of these challenges, number of Odia dailies is slowly growing. There are around 100 newspapers published daily from various regions of Odisha. It is essential to note that news archives, unlike literary writings have much of any kind of high commercial value. So is in the case of scholarly and research publications. If all of these publications could be made available online in digital form that will take Odia literature to the global audience. This triggers the need of A) making sure the forthcoming publications are not just typed in Unicode but made available online, B) digitization of published books and making them available free on internet.

It is essential to take measures to ascertain the forthcoming publications use Unicode standard and digitizing published matter and publishing them online. Online content could be made available in Unicode and has trillion times reach than printed matter. As a vast number of the users use Microsoft’s Windows XP they could either upgrade their operating system or move to completely free and open source and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu. At this moment, Odia has far less content on internet.

Odia Wikipedia tops the list of Odia Unicode content websites and is the largest Odia online encyclopaedia with over 8,000 articles. Available for free on or.wikipedia.org, Odia Wikipedia is a community project where any user could create, edit and modify content. The articles being encyclopaedic and referenced from other reliable sources has some level of authenticity. As this is a small project and is developing it needs more voluntary contribution to grow to a larger project that could serve the purpose of an Open Educational Resources (OER) for students. There are a handful of web and news portals maintained by individuals and organizations that have Odia content in Unicode. The other upcoming project is Odia Wikisource which is an online library. Odia books that are useful for the Odia speaking community like classical literature, religious scriptures, dictionaries and lexicons, journals and research papers and manuscripts could go online on this platform. The most important thing about these two projects is that they both have only volunteers as contributors and anyone and everyone could contribute. Any individual or organization who is interested could add a lot of value to Odia language by contributing the process of digitizing content and making them available for free. These projects, additionally are released under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses that allows free reuse, modification and commercial reproduction of content. Many valuable books could also be part of Odia Wikisource.

Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar based organization in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Rourkela and Pragati Utkal Sangh, Rourkela has scanned over 760 Odia books. Out of these, over 200 books are hosted in a non-profit project “Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB)” and hosted at: oaob.nitrkl.ac.in. Organizations like Manik-Smrutinyas and Institute of Odia Studies and Research have re-licensed books of noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty and Dr. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty respectively to Creative Commons licenses for free, commercial distribution. Majority of the resourceful magazines like The Utkal Prasanga could be also made available in Unicode standard by changing its copyright terms to Creative Commons licenses. Larger debates are also needed to convince authors and knowledge and information producing organizations/departments like universities and government’s departments (e.g.Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education and Department of Statistics.) to migrate from proprietary copyright restrictions to reusable licenses like Creative Commons licenses. This will not only will help for more public-private collaboration and knowledge production but also taking language resources to masses which is discontinued because of lack of updated technological advancement like use of Unicode font and digitizing valuable content. Government portals need Odia localization in Unicode standard so public get access to information in Odia language and this could make e-governance much more easier. Government notifications that often are released publicly are found to be released in image formats. Many such public and private information could just be released in plain text that will increase the searchability, accessibility and reusability million times.

Footnotes:

[1].Pattnaik, Pushpashree. Presentation on digitization of Odia books in Utkal University (21 February 2014).

[2].Mohanty, Jagadish, eSabada. eOdissa.com (2009 - 2010).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odisha-review-june-2014-classical-odia-language-in-digital-age

CIS-A2K, KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences sign MoUs

subha — 2014-02-03T06:24:18Z

KIIT University, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) for furthering Odia Wikipedia.

Dr.Achyuta Samanta, Founder-Chairman of KIIT and KISS inaugurated both the collaborations formally. Dr. Sasmitarani Samanta, Registrar, KIIT and Surjya Kanta Mohanty, Chief Operating Officer, KISS signed the MoUs of KIIT and KISS respectively whereas T. Vishnuvardhan, Programme Director, CIS-A2K was there to sign in both the MoUs on behalf of CIS along with Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, CIS-A2K. Odia Wikipedians Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Shitikantha Dash, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Sailesh Patnaik, senior faculty and management members; Prof. Parthosen Gupta, Professor-KIIT School of Management, Sucheta Priyabadini, Joint Registrar, KIIT Santosh K. Pani, Dean-KIIT School of Electrical Engineering and other staff members from KISS were there for this event.

The event was held on January 11, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-a2k-kiit-university-kaling-institute-of-social-sciences-mou