Centre for Internet and Society

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

Article by Malvika Tegta in Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 8 March 2009

Artists, academicians, tech heads and lawyers have come together to give the country a voice in technology, study, polity and discourse, says Malvika Tegta

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The Internet has changed lives in ways we haven't stopped to grasp — the real feeding into the virtual and the other way round. Also, how the Internet interacts with individuals varies across cultures and societies. Narratives on the medium originating in the West cannot size up the complexities of the developing world. In the absence of a voice from the "global south" in affecting the direction of the Internet, technologies continue to be designed for a certain kind of end user, with underlying assumptions. "That apart, as the Internet grows, it doesn't necessarily always grow for the better, with things like cyber terrorism, cyber bullying, pornography, identity theft, gambling, internet addiction, being the by-products of the information revolution," says Nishant Shah, director-research and one of the brains behind the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), initiated in August 2008, set up to take note of what we passively allow to direct our lives.

These are the issues that led Gibraltar-based Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, parent company of online poker site PartyPoker.com, to think that "the time had come for India to have a voice in technology study, polity and discourse, as we quickly find ourselves becoming an Information Society". He, along with Alternative Law Forum's legal theorist Lawrence Liang, Shah and Sunil Abraham, brought CIS into being, pooling in the finest minds from the field of arts, academia, law and technology. CIS, since, has set out to produce local and contextual histories of the Internet to make voices "emerging out of Asia more visible in international dialogues around technology".

Their approach: research, awareness and advocacy. Their goal: to make sense of how the Internet is changing the world around us, with India at the heart.

CIS looks at, among other things, the way copyrights, closed standards and an absence of public policy in certain areas have affected access, innovation and kept the Internet from being less democratic and vibrant. "Copyright law is kind of a monolithic thing, like a 'one size fits all' kind of solution for encouraging creativity. It doesn't really work especially when you look at an equitable system of access," says programme manager Pranesh Prakash. He adds: "Copyright proves to be a huge barrier to promotion of accessibility, and in the Indian context needs some kind of relaxation." Programme manager at CIS, Nirmita puts this in perspective, in the particular case of internet access for the visually impaired and those with cognitive disabilities. "A blind person cannot read the written word, so you record an audio cassette or you have an e-version of it and a screen reader reads it for you. That inverts the conversion of a format, which is not permitted legally under the copyright law in India. Every time you want to convert it, you need to take permission of the copyright holder. So what that is essentially doing is depriving you of your right to read," she says. "Our country should have a law that is universal. We have signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that says that everything on the Internet should be in accessible formats, but it's not binding and we don't have a law on it."

In the area of science and academics, copyrights pose another challenge, that of impeding innovation by keeping from the taxpayer, results of at least the research that is funded by tax a notion CIS has been pushing for. "Scientific literature is propounded on the principles like everyone is allowed to review it and that knowledge spreads to a number of people," says Prakash. Both the scientist and the reader want that. But what we see today is that a few publishers control most of all scientific literary output, so most of it is not accessible because a month's subscription sometimes amounts to the entire library budget of an institution. That is especially a big problem for developing countries.

By the end of this year, CIS hopes that individual institutions take up open access policy. "It may not always have to be a top down approach," he says.

In the realm of governance, CIS identifies use of closed standards software as not only unwise strategy, but also socially and ethically a bad decision, and is looking at policy change in the area. Explains Sunil Abraham, director-policy, in his paper: "If I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires." He adds that governments have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values. "In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors," he writes.

They are also exploring bridging digital divides without ignoring the "complex interplay, in the case of India for instance, of caste, language, affordability, education, literacy, and in some cases, even religion" and how the Internet is changing the landscape of higher education in India.
As Shah puts it: "Internet technologies are now becoming tools that we think with. We cannot write without the cursor blinking on an empty screen, we cannot talk in public without the aid of a digital presentation..."

It's about time, then, that we thought about the one thing that's becoming one of the bigger movers in our lives and build a discourse around it.

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To read the article in DNA's e-paper, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/getting-the-net-out-of-its-web

From Taboo to Beautiful - Menstrupedia

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:25:59Z

On this post, we take a look at 'menstrual activism' -a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism, remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism. We interview Tuhin Paul, the artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world.

CHANGE-MAKER: Tuhin Paul, Aditi Gupta and Rajat Mittal
ORGANIZATION: Menstrupedia
METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling and comics
STRATEGY OF CHANGE: To shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding
 menstruation, by delivering accessible, informative and entertaining 
 content about menstruation through different media.

Most of us think we know what menstruation is; except...we don’t. Many of my male friends still cringe at the mention of the phrase “I’m on my period”, or use it as a derogatory justification for my occasional cranky mood at the office: “It’s that time of the month, isn’t it?” Poor menstruation has been the culprit of femininity; always bashful, tiptoeing for five days straight, trying its best to remain incognito. The social venture Menstrupedia is committed to change this. Aditi, Tuhin and Rajat want to shift how we look at menstruation and remove the stigma that haunts the natural, self-regulation process women undergo to keep their bodies healthy and strong to sustain life in the future.

Now, if you are already wondering what menstruation has to do with internet and society, just wait for it. This post manages to bring art, punk, menstruation and technology together, all within the scope of the Making Change project! Before though, we shall start with some definitions. Let us first lay conceptual grounds about menstruation and Menstrupedia, to then locate and unpack their theory of change.

What is menstruation?

It can be defined as:

Menstruation is the periodic discharge of blood and mucosal tissue (the endometrium) from the uterus and vagina. It starts at menarche at or before sexual maturity (maturation), in females of certain mammalian species, and ceases at or near menopause (commonly considered the end of a female's reproductive life).

And it looks something like this:

But, I believe, most women will agree the following are much more accurate depictions of the spectrum of thoughts, emotions and sensations that menstruation spurs:

The Beauty of RED

My Periods: A Blessing or a Curse

By Naina Jha

My periods
Are a dreadful experience
Because of all the pain.
Myths and secrets make it a mystery
What worsens it most though, are members of my family
Especially my mother, who always make it a big deal
They never try to understand what I truly feel
I face all those cramps and cry the whole night long
None of which is seen or heard or felt by anyone.

Instead of telling me, what it is,
They ask me to behave maturely instead.
Can somebody tell me how I am supposed to
Naturally accept it?
My mother asks me to stay away from men
And a few days later, she asks me to marry one!
When I ask her to furnish
the reason behind her haste
She told me that now that I was menstruating,
I was grown up and ready to give birth to another.

I don’t know whether to feel blessed about it
Or consider it to be my curse.
For these periods are the only reason for me to be disposed.
Since my childhood, I felt rather blessed to be born as a girl
But after getting my periods now,
I’m convinced that it’s a curse...

Find it in Menstrupedia's blog.

Despite all this, it is still perceived as a social stigma in society. There is clearly a dissonance between the definition, experience and perceptions around menstruation, that calls for a reconfiguration of the information we are using to define it.

Stigma as a Crisis

However, re-defining 'menstruation' is no popular or easy task. The word belongs to a group of contested terminology around womanhood and is the protagonist of its own breed of feminist activism: menstrual activism. [1] Although I would consider many of the stigmas surrounding menstruation to be quite self-explanatory (we've all experienced and perpetuated them in one way or another -and if they are not, then you are the product of an obscenely progressive upbringing for which I congratulate your parents, teachers and all parties involved), I will still outline the main reasons why menstruation is a source of social stigma for women, and refer to scholarly authority on the subject to legitimize my rant.

Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan Chrisler use Goffman's definition of stigma [2] on their paper: The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as a Social Stigma to explain the misadventures of menstruation:

Stigma: 
stain or mark setting people apart from others. it conveys the information 
that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their 
appearance or identity

Among the various negative social constructs deeming menstruation a dirty and repulsive state, this one made a particular echo: “[menstruation is] a tribal identity of femaleness”. Menstruation is the equivalent of a rite of passage marking the lives of girls with a 'before' and an 'after' on how the world sees them and how they see themselves. From the dreaded stain on the skirt and the 5-day mission to keep its poignant color and smell on the down low, to having to justify mood and body swings to the overly inquisitive; menstruation is imagined as inconvenient, unpleasant and unwelcome. As Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler point out: the menstrual cycle, coupled with stigmas, pushes women to adopt the role of the “physically or mentally disordered” and reinforce it through their communication, secrecy, embarrassment and silence (Kissling, 1996).

Why does it matter?

Besides from strengthening attitudes that underpin gender discrimination and attempting against girls' self-identity and sense of worth, there are other tangible consequences for their development and education. I'm going to throw some facts and figures at you, to back this up with the case of India.

An article published by the WSSCC, the Geneva based Water supply and Sanitation Council, shows the Menstruation taboo, consequence of a “patriarchal, hierarchical society”, puts 300 million women at risk in India. They do not have access to menstrual hygiene products, which has an effect on their health, education (23% of girls in India leave school when they start menstruating and the remaining 77% miss 5 days of school a month) and their livelihoods.

In terms of awareness and information about the issue, WSSCC found that 90% didn't know what a menstrual period was until they got it. Aru Bhartiya's research on Menstruation, Religion and Society, shows the main sources of information about menstruation come from beliefs and norms grounded on culture and religion. Some of the related restrictions (that stem from Hinduism, among others) include isolation, exclusion from religious activities, and restraint from intercourse. She coupled this with a survey where she found: 63% of her sample turned to online sites over their mothers for information, 62% did not feel comfortable talking about the subject with males and 70% giggled upon reading the topic of the survey. All in all, a pretty gruesome scenario

Here's where Menstrupedia comes in

The research ground work attempted above was done in depth by Menstrupedia back in 2009 when the project started taking shape. They conducted research for one year while in NID and did not only find that awareness about menstruation was very low, but that parents and teachers did not know how to talk about the subject.


							Facts about menstruation awareness in India. Video courtesy of Menstru pedia Youtube channel.

Their proposed intervention: distribute an education visual guide and a comic to explain the topic. They tested out the prototype among 500 girls in 5 different states in Northern India and the results were astonishing.

A workshop conducted by MJB smriti sansthan to spread awareness about mensuration.
Find full album of Menstrupedia Comic being used around India on Menstrupedia's Facebook page.

"To my surprise, they [the nuns] all agreed that until they read the information given in the Menstrupedia comic, even they were of the opinion that Menstruation was a ‘dirty’ and 'abominable' thing and they wondered 'why women suffered from it in the first place'? But after reading the comic book, their view had changed…now they felt that this was a 'vital' part of womanhood and there's nothing to feel ashamed about it! The best part was while this exercise clarified their ideas, beliefs, concepts about menstruation, it also helped me to get over my innate hesitancy to approach such a sensitive issue in ‘public’ and boosted my confidence for taking this up as a 'mission' to reach out to the maximum possible girls across the country."

Ina Mondkar,
on her experience of educating young nuns about menstruation.

Testimonial after a workshop held in two Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh.

Their mandate today reads: ‘Menstrupedia is a guide to explain menstruation and all issues surrounding it in the most friendly manner.’ They currently host a website with information about puberty, menstruation, hygiene and myths, along with illustrations that turn explaining the process of growing up into a much friendlier endeavour than its stigma-ladden alternatives.

Snipbit of the first chapter. Read it for free here.

Through the comic and the interactions around it, Menstrupedia strives to create a) content that frame menstruation as a natural process that is inconvenient, yes; but that should have no negative effects on their self-esteem and development; and b) an environment where girls can talk about it openly and clarify their doubts.

Technology's role in the mix

"We want to reach out to as many girls as possible”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

The role of digital technologies basically comes down to scalability. Opposite to The Kahani Project's views on scaling up, Menstrupedia makes emphasis on using technology to reach a larger audience. Currently they have a series of communication channels enabled by technology that include: a visual quick guide, a Q&A forum (for both men and women), a blog (a platform of self-expression on menstruation), a you tube channel (where they provide updates on their progress) and the upcoming comic.

Upon the question of the digital divide and whether this expands the divide between have and have nots, Tuhin was very set on the idea of producing the same content in both its digital and print form. “parents or schools should be able to buy the comic and give it to their daughters, so whenever they feel like it, they can refer to it”. The focus is on making this material as readily available as possible, in order to overcome the tension between new and old information: “workshops are conducted but the moment they go back home, their mothers impose certain restrictions. It becomes a dilemma. But if you provide [The girl] with a comic book, she has something she can take home and educate her mother with”

And here's why it works

More than the comic book itself, what is truly remarkable about Menstrupedia is Tuhin, Rajat and Aditi’s guts to pick up such a problematic theme in the Indian social imaginary and challenge the entrenched, stubborn beliefs surrounding the issue. The comic book, asides from being appealing to the eye and an accessible format of storytelling (a method we have unpacked in previous posts), fits right into the movement of menstrual activism and what it stands for.

“We thought of creating something: a tool that can help girls understand menstruation without having to rely on anybody else”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

First, it is a self-reliant resource. Once the comic book leaves Menstrupedia's hands and lands on those of kids and adults, it takes its own journey. The format of the comic is accessible enough for someone to pick it up and learn about menstruation without the intervention or the support of a third party. This makes Menstrupedia's comic highly flexible and mobile. It can be shared from teacher to child, from mom to daughter, from peer to peer: “[it should teach] how to help your friends when they get their period” (Tuhin) However, it has the autonomy to also take roads less travelled: from mom to dad, from child to teacher, from boy to girl. The goal at the end of the day: a self-reliant, solidarity-based community where information circulating about menstruation highlights its capacity to give life and overshadows its traditional stigmatized identity.

This self-reliance is characteristic of previous manifestations of menstrual activism. Back in the 80s, the feminist movement, tightly linked to punk culture, embraced the do it yourself movement,[3] that enabled women to materialize personalized forms of resistance. They published zines promoting “dirty self-awareness, body and menstrual consciousness and unlearning shame” through “raw stories and personal narratives” (Bobel, 2006). According to Bobel using the self as an example is a core element in the “history of self-help” within the DIY movement. The role of the Menstrupedia blog is then crucial to sustain the exposure and production of “raw narratives”. Tuhin adds: “We don't write articles on the blog. It is a platform where people from different backgrounds write about their experiences with menstruation and bring in a different perspective”: For example,

Red is my colour by Umang Saigal

Red is my colour,
To make you understand, I endeavour,
Try to analyse and try to favour.
It is not just a thought, but an attempt,
To treat ill minds that are curable.

When I was born, I was put in a red cradle,
I grew up watching the red faces for a girl-children in anger,
Red became my favourite,
But I never knew,
That someday I would be cadged in my own red world.

Red lover I was,
All Love I lost,
When I got my first red spots,
What pain it caused only I know,
When I realized, Red determined my ‘class’

I grew up then, ignoring red,
At night when I found my bedsheet wet,
All day it ached,
All day it stained,
And in agony I would, turn insane.

At times I would think,
Does red symbolize beauty or pain?
But when I got tied, in the sacred knot,
I found transposition of my whole process of thought,
When from dirty to gold, Red crowned my bridal course.

As I grew old,
All my desires vanished and got cold,
My mind still in a dilemma,
What more than colour in itself could it unfold?
What was the secret behind its truth untold?

Is Red for beauty, or is it for beast?
It interests me now to know the least,
All I know is that Red is a Transition,
From anguish to pride
Red is a sensation.

Red is my colour, as it is meant to be,
No matter what the world thinks it to be,
No love lost, one Love found,
Red symbolizes life and also our wounds,
I speak it aloud with life profound,
That red is my colour, and this is what I’ve found.

Submission to the Menstrupedia blog

'Self-expression' is not a concept we usually find side by side with 'menstruation'; however, if we look at what has been done in the past, we find that Menstrupedia is actually contributing to a much larger tradition of resistance. For instance, Menstrala, by the American artist Vanessa Tiegs. Menstrala is the name of a collection of 88 paintings “affirming the hidden forbidden bright red cycle of renewal”.

Another interesting example is American feminist Gloria Steinem's[4] text If Men Could Menstruate.

“What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear:
Menstruation would become an enviable, boast worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed- for proof of manhood,with religious and stag parties.”

Gloria Steinem
[excerpt]

Opportunities like these, enable Menstrupedia's community to actively participate in the reconfiguration of 'menstruation' as a concept and as an experience. By exposing new narratives and perspectives on the issue and by disseminating menstrual health information, the community is able to crowd source resistance and dismantle the stigma together.

Making Change through Menstrupedia

The case of Menstrupedia reminds us of Blank Noise because of its approach to change. Both locate their crises at the discursive level and seek to resolve them by creating new forms of meaning-making. They advocate for a reconsideration of 'givens', for a self-reflection on our role perpetuating these notions and for resistance against conceptual status quos: be it socially accepted culprits like 'eve-teasing', or more discrete rejects like 'menstruation'. Both seek to dismantle power structures that give one discourse preference over others, and both count with a strong gender dynamic dominating the context where these narratives unfold. They are producing a revolution in our system of meaning making, yet only producing resistance in the larger societal context they inhabit.

On the question of where is Menstrupedia's action located, Tuhin replied by pinning it at the individual level: “if a person is aware of menstruation and they know the facts, they are more likely to resist restrictions and spread awareness”. However, they still acknowledge the historicity behind menstrual awareness (as knowledge passed down from generation to generation) that precedes the project. While the introduction of Menstrupedia, to an extent, does shake up household dynamics in terms of content, it also provides tools and resources to sustain the traditional model of oral tradition and knowledge sharing within the community.

In terms of their role as change-makers ,Tuhin stated that the possibility to intervene was a result of their socio-economic status and the resources they had at hand as “educated members of the middle class with access to information and communication technologies”. Is this the role the middle class should play? I asked. To which he gave a two fold answer: First, in terms of responsibility of action: “it is a role that anyone can play depending on what kind of expertise they have. It comes to a point where [intents of change] cannot be sustained by activism if you want to achieve long term impact” And second, in terms of setting up a resilient infrastructure: “I believe we can create an infrastructure people can use and create models that can help low income groups overcome their challenges and become self-sustainable.” Both answers highlight the need for sustainability in social impact projects, hinting a retreat from wishful thinking upon the presence of technology and a more strategic allocation of skills and resources by middle class and for-profit interventions.

As far the relationship between art, punk, menstruation and technology goes; that was just a hook to get you through the unreasonable length of my blog post, but if anything, it represents an effort to portray the importance of contextuality and interdisciplinary we have been exploring throughout the series. Identifying the use of various mediums and language systems, such as different art forms and modes of self-expression, as well the acknowledgement of the theoretical and social contexts preceding and framing the project, as is feminist activism and the cultural and religious backdrop in India, contribute immensely to fill gaps in the stories of how we imagine change making today; especially at the nascence of new narratives, as we hope is the case for menstruation in a post-Menstrupedia era.

Sources:

Bhartiya, Aru: “Menstruation, Religion and Society” IJSSH: International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. Volume: Vol.3, No.6.

Bobel, Chris. "“Our Revolution Has Style”: Contemporary Menstrual Product Activists “Doing Feminism” in the Third Wave." Sex Roles 54, no. 5-6 (2006): 331-345.

Johnston-Robledo, Ingrid, and Joan C. Chrisler. "The menstrual mark: Menstruation as social stigma." Sex roles 68, no. 1-2 (2013): 9-18.

Footnotes

[1] Refer to Chris Bobel's work including New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. Access it here

[2] Johnston Robledo and Chrisler made reference to Erving Goffman's 1963 work: Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. "According to Goffman (1963), the word stigma refers to any stain or mark that sets some people apart from others; it conveys the information that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their appearance or identity Goffman (1963, p. 4) categorized stigmas into three types: "abominations of the body” (e.g., burns, scars, deformities), “ blemishes of individual character” (e.g., criminality, addictions), and “tribal” identities or social markers associated with marginalized groups (e.g., gender,race, sexual orientation, nationality)".

[3] For a short run through on DIY as part of the Punk Subculture, refer to Ian P. Moran's paper: Punk - The Do-it-Yourself culture."Punk as a subculture goes much further than rebellion and fashion as punks generally seek an alternative lifestyle divergent from the norms of society. The do-it-yourself, or D.I.Y. aspect of punk is one of the most important factors fueling the subculture." Access it here.

[4] Gloria Steimen is a journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970. Visit her official website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/menstrupedia-taboo-beautiful

From Health and Harassment to Income Security and Loans, India's Gig Workers Need Support

Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Aayush Rathi (CIS), and Ambika Tandon (CIS) — 2020-05-19T06:57:36Z

Deemed an 'essential service' by most state governments, and thereby exempt from temporary suspension during the COVID-19 lockdown, food, groceries and other essential commodities have continued to be delivered by e-commerce companies and on-demand services. Actions to protect workers, who are taking on significant risks, have been far less forthcoming than those for customers. Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Aayush Rathi (CIS) and Ambika Tandon (CIS) spoke with the leaders of four workers' unions and labour researchers to identify recommended actions that public agencies and private companies may undertake to better support the urgent needs of gig workers in India.

Originally published by The Wire on April 29, 2020.

Nearly two weeks ago, news broke that a Zomato delivery worker tested positive for COVID-19 in New Delhi.

As many as 72 families in the south Delhi neighbourhood where he made deliveries have been quarantined, along with 17 other people he worked with. With the luxury of social distancing not extended to delivery workers, the incident further fuelled the apprehensions and uncertainties that they already were contending with. This was only a matter of time.

Deemed an “essential service” by most state governments, and thereby exempt from temporary suspension during the lockdown, food, groceries and other essential commodities have continued to be delivered by e-commerce companies and on-demand services including Swiggy, Zomato, BigBasket, Dunzo, Housejoy and Flipkart.

In choosing to continue operations, these companies have then rushed to enforce measures to put customers at ease. Such measures have included no-contact deliveries, card-only payments, and displaying temperature readings of workers.

Uber and Ola Cabs suspended services in most areas, and announced that in places where they are providing essential services, workers have been instructed to wear masks and observe hygiene standards.

Swiggy and Zomato announced they were communicating with workers about safety and hygiene standards. Zomato has more recently announced that the company is making the Aarogya Setu app mandatory for workers to receive orders.

Relief funds have been set up— donations to these funds continue to be solicited from the public and company executives have made grandiose gestures of contributing their salaries to these funds.

Stark reality

The situation on the ground, however, tells another story. Actions to protect workers, who are taking on significant risks, have been far less forthcoming than those for customers. Workers are also bearing the brunt of arbitrary surveillance measures, like being asked to download the Aarogya Setu app, in addition to scrutiny they are placed under regularly. No such surveillance measures have been placed on customers. The priorities of on-demand service companies are clear: protect the bottom line at the expense of vulnerable workers.

In the absence of any concerted support from the companies, service workers could have looked to the state for relief. None has been forthcoming. Government action has pegged the targeting of relief works and services to those currently eligible for welfare programs and registered under its various schemes. Most gig workers, if not all, are ineligible as a result of the arbitrary conditions underlying these schemes.

We spoke to the leaders of four unions — including the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and the Ola and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)– who represent gig workers across the country about the risks and vulnerabilities that they are having to contend with.

The precariousness characterising gig work could not be starker. A summary of the discussions can be found here, while the recommendations emerging from these discussions have been shared with government officials and company representatives and can be found in full here.

Below are some of the key recommendations that emerged from these discussions.

Health

Many on-demand service companies have not provided workers with any personal protective equipment (PPE), not even to delivery workers who face heightened risks of exposure to the coronavirus at nearly every step of the delivery process.

Some unions had to take to distributing masks, while many other workers continue to incur repeated costs to safeguard their own health. At a later stage, Swiggy announced that workers would be reimbursed for these purchases, but the process is so tedious that workers have found it untenable.

In addition, health awareness campaigns regarding safety measures and risks were also launched very late into the crisis, and then were not in vernacular languages and could not be comprehended by most workers.

In terms of insurance, most platforms have announced financial assistance for workers who test positive for COVID-19. This is aimed at covering their hospital expenses, as well as providing a daily stipend for a limited period. However, these come short as there are no provisions for OPD consultations or even for the cost of going and getting tested (losing one day’s work and then potentially one more before the results come in).

Additionally, the difficulty and expenses of obtaining a test could place an additional burden on workers — as without proof of a positive test, workers will be unable to access this fund in the first place. This is far from the robust health insurance that must be provisioned to ensure workers’ health and safety. Some platforms have made telemedicine services available for workers and while this is a step in the right direction, it must be backed by more tangible protections like covering part of the costs incurred for treatment.

Unions demand that companies provide adequate PPE to workers free of cost —masks, gloves, hand sanitisers, and soap. If platforms continue to ask workers to log in at significant risks to themselves and their families, provision of safety equipment is the basic minimum requirement that must be met immediately. This should also include a plan to ensure workers’ access to clean and hygienic sanitation facilities, as they may not have access to these on their delivery routes.

In addition, platforms must provide health insurance cover in addition to accident insurance coverage and hospitalisation cover for COVID-19. This should include OPD consultations.

Income security and social protection

With services suspended or demand really low, gig workers have either lost their income or seen it fall drastically — delivery workers’ daily earnings are as low as Rs 150-Rs 300 for a full day’s work.

Almost a month into the lockdown, there is little clarity as to who is eligible for the funds that companies have raised, and in what manner and or what purposes it will be disbursed.

Ola Cabs has offered interest free loans to drivers for relief in the short term, while some Uber drivers have received a Rs 3,000 grant from the company. If disbursed universally this would ensure availability of some liquidity for workers, although at this stage it remains unclear if all drivers are eligible to receive the grant.

Workers and unions are afraid that this grant might only be accessible for workers with high ratings, or those who have logged longer hours especially through the course of the lockdown period. This would effectively penalise workers for going to their homes for the lockdown, or being otherwise unable to work. Unions have estimated that not more than 20 percent of workers continue to remain active through the lockdown period.

Moreover, research has shown that workers are not necessarily aware of the protections made available to them as a result of the legalese that companies couch these terms in.

To ensure income security, platforms must make direct cash transfers to all workers who have logged in for at least two weeks between January and April 2020. This should be fixed according to minimum wage standards for skilled work in each state or at Rs 1,000 per day of the lockdown, and will have to be enforced with retrospective effect.

The former should be treated as an entitlement of workers while a portion of the latter can be asked to be repaid by the workers over the course of the next year. The fiscal responsibility for the cash transfers can be shared with governments. Governments can request the data held by these companies for the transfers.

Rent and loans

Some states have announced moratoriums on house rent but again there is no explicit mention of gig workers being included in this — and in states where such a move hasn’t been announced, gig workers must continue to pay house rent without having a source of income to rely on.

On the issue of loan repayments, the RBI allowed lending institutions to grant a three-month moratorium on retail loan repayments as a part of its COVID-19 regulatory package. On the one hand, availing of the moratorium will significantly increase the loan tenure and total amount to be repaid. On the other, several gig workers have reported that the enforcement of the moratorium itself has been piecemeal outside of public sector institutions.

Here again they have to make a Faustian bargain. The government should enforce the RBI’s directive strictly so gig workers get some relief.

Further, several companies themselves have leased vehicles to workers, for which payment of EMI must be ceased through the months of March to May to allow workers some relief without requiring the return of vehicles. Currently, EMIs have only been stalled on the condition of returning vehicles.

Harassment

Workers have been subject to harassment and discrimination by the police and customers alike, making it difficult to continue work. Despite the categorisation of delivery as an essential service, companies are finding it difficult to get easy access to movement passes in bulk, which implies that workers are penalised by being unable to work even if they are available. Companies have come out to allege harassment despite clear directions to allow movement of delivery workers, which points to gaps in enforcement.

Further, frequent barricading has implied that workers are not able to complete orders without diversions despite having passes for movement. Meanwhile, companies continue to mandate door-to-door delivery so as to ensure that customers are not inconvenienced at all. In some cases, this has implied that workers have to travel on foot in barricaded areas to deliver orders.

We recommend that companies urgently set up a helpline for workers to address such issues that may arise in delivery. We also recommend that companies proactively work with the government to map hotspots and containment zones and cease delivery in such areas. Thus far, there is no indication of any such measures by companies.

Post-lockdown revival

The lockdown brings to the fore just how vulnerable gig workers are.

This is a direct consequence of the gig work arrangements structured as disguised employment. Deeming workers as independent contractors and self-identifying as technology providers, on-demand service companies have washed their hands of the responsibility of providing labour protections and social security measures despite exerting extensive control over the conditions of work (such as wages, incentives) and the manner of its dispensing (such as the standard of work, hours of work).

Governments, too, have done little to recognise gig workers although they have been added as a category of workers in the draft Social Security code. Relief measures announced by the government exclude them. However, the government needs to intervene urgently in the current situation.

Platforms are likely to recover once the lockdown is lifted —home delivery services like BigBasket and Grofers have already seen their businesses skyrocket.

However, there is an urgent need to rebuild on-demand work as one that isn’t merely in the service of capital. A first step to that would be to reduce commissions to 5% for at least 6 months so that workers can recover financially. The unencumbered spending to capture market share at the expense of workers needs to be curbed. Enforcing these recommendations will require a coordinated effort between governments and on-demand service companies. As consumers, it is also our responsibility to question companies that do not take on the moral responsibilities of extending adequate worker protections.

With unemployment in the country skyrocketing, it may be the case that on-demand work opens up avenues to securing work. It then becomes imperative to ensure any future of work is one that is inclusive and accounts for the systemic changes that are now impossible to ignore.

While social distancing is a choice truly available to a privileged few, we need to ensure that social protection isn’t.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/gig-workers-need-support

From Archive to Application (and Back): A Workshop with Pad.ma

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:08:36Z

The first workshop Open House and Participation will be held on Friday, 16th July at 6.30 p.m at 1, Shanti Road, Bangalore. This will be followed by weekend workshops at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 17 and 18 July, 2010.

For about two years now, Pad.ma has been running as an online archive of digital video with text annotations. During this period, the focus has been on gathering materials, annotating densely, and building an archive. At present, pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 "events". Almost all of this material is fully transcribed and is often mapped to physical locations. Essays have been written over videos, and narratives created across different clips in the archive. The focus has been on pulling material into the archive.

What are ways to start thinking about pulling material out of pad.ma? From the onset, pad.ma has had an API, a programming interface that allows you to pull out videos, perform searches, seek to exact time-codes in any video, fetch transcript and map data, and display all this however you please. Also Pad.ma's General Public License is designed specifically for the reuse of the material on pad.ma. Through the experience of running the archive, there have been various imaginations of multiple and layered forms of time-based annotation over video, including for: pedagogical tools for learning and discussion; presentation tools that combine text and video in new ways, essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and context-specific media.

At this workshop, we hope to explore some of these ideas for video on the web, and video's new qualities as a result of online practices. We invite video-makers, coders, writers, artists, students, and other enthusiasts to participate. Considering the term "application" in a broad sense, we invite video material, texts or software that, combined with existing materials and tools in pad.ma, can become innovative kinds of "output", or new forms. These would also then feedback into the archive, and how we imagine its future.

After a hands-on introduction to pad.ma and its possibilities and tools, the workshop will break up into streams for content and code. On day two, these streams come back together.

In the content stream, participants could:

bring in their own footage, clips from popular or unpopular cinema, science or lab videos, ads or news, artworks or documentary films, to assemble into new forms, using pad.ma's tools.
bring together shots, scenes or sounds from fiction or non-fiction films, and make a new 'movie' or create a 'running commentary' alongside.
write over video in pad.ma critically or creatively: theorise or contextualise footage, write collaborativey, or weave fiction and/or poetry with moving images.
create teaching units or illustrated lectures using pad.ma
begin a research project or map a phenomenon through video and text.

In the code stream, participants could:

devise new ways in which video and text can speak to each other, and to an online audience

For developers, this 2-day workshop is an opportunity to experiment with the newest web-video technologies. Concretely, we will cover some background and history of HTML 5 <video>, understand how the pad.ma website works with time-based annotations, server-side seeking of video, etc. and finally work on hacking on applications / prototypes using the pad.ma API. The developer track of this 2-day workshop is open to all, but knowledge of HTML, CSS and / or javascript would be useful.

By end of day 1, we hope to have interesting content and application projects that could be developed (individually or in groups) through the night and following day. Planning ahead will help, so: video-makers, artists, writers, researchers and coders, may write to pad.ma with a one-line bio and project idea, and a confirmation of your participation at pad.ma@pad.ma.

For more information, visit the following links:

http://pad.ma/newsletter/2010-05-26.html

http://pad.ma/texts/10_Theses_on_the_Archive.html

http://files.pad.ma/beirut/Archive_Reader/

How to use pad.ma guide: http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/HowTo

Pad.ma API : http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API

About Pad.ma

Pad.ma is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma creates access to material which is easily lost in editing processes, in the filmmaking economy, and in changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike Youtube and similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and reference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/pad.ma-workshop

Financial Speculation as Urban Planning

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:36:21Z

Talk by Prof Michael Goldman

A talk by Michael Goldman followed by an open discussion organised by a group of concerned citizens and the Centre for Internet and Society, about the roots of the US financial crisis and related dynamics in "world city" planning, such as that here in Bangalore.

Speaker Bio

Michael Goldman
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology
Univ of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
McKnight Presidential Fellow

Interest Areas: Transnational, political, environmental, and development sociology; Sociology of knowledge and power; Transnational institutions (international finance, expert networks).

Current Research: Neoliberalism and its discontents; the making of a world city: Bangalore, India; “Water for All”/ water privatization policies; development and environment in North-South relations.

Recent Publications

“How ‘Water for All!’ Became Hegemonic: The Power of the World Bank and its Transnational Policy Networks.” 2007. Geoforum special issue on global water policy, 38(5): 786-800.
“Under New Management: Historical Context and Current Challenges at the World Bank.” 2007. Brown Journal of World Affairs, special issue on Wolfowitz’s Bank, Vol. XIII: 2, Summer 2007.
“El neoliberalismo verde.” 2006. Chapter in Las Politicas de la Tierra, Alfonso Guerra and Jose Felix Tezanos, eds. Madrid: Editorial Sistema.
Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. 2005. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Yale UP paperback edition, 2006; India edition, Orient Longman Press, 2006; Japanese edition, Kyoto University Press, 2008.
“World Bank.” 2005. Entry in Encyclopedia of International Development, Tim Forsyth, ed., London: Routledge.
“Tracing the Routes/Roots of World Bank Power.” 2005. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, special issue on global water policy, 25(1/2): 10-29.
“The Birth of a Discipline: Producing Authoritative Green Knowledge for the World (Bank).” 2005. Chapter in Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance, Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
“La tragedia della recinzione dei beni comuni.” 2005. Beni Comuni: Fra Tradizione e Futuro, Giovanna Ricoveri, ed., Rome: Editrice Missionaria Italiana.
“Eco-governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World Bank.” 2004. in Liberation Ecologies 2nd ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds. London: Routledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/financial-speculation-as-urban-planning

Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:33:30Z

As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Tejas Pande examines the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking.

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

The Visual Designer

Tejas Pande

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

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

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

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

Figures of Learning: The Reader

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:48:57Z

As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by P.P Sneha examines the figure of the reader, and the manner in which it is redefined in as text and practices of reading are reconstituted in the digital context.

The Reader

P.P. Sneha

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

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

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

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

Figures of Learning: The Pornographer

namita — 2015-11-13T05:32:58Z

As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of 'bodies of knowledge' which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Namita Malhotra examines the figure of the pornographer, as a mixed media figure entrenched in various networks of knowledge production, circulation and consumption.

The Pornographer

Namita A. Malhotra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figures of Learning: The Conditional Artist

Tara Kelton — 2015-11-13T05:42:25Z

As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Tara Kelton explores the conditional artist, and the outcomes of inserting chance in the realization of art work through the use of new multimedia and digital technologies.

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

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

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

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

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

Feminist Design Practices

Aayush Rathi, Akash Sheshadri and Ambika Tandon — 2022-04-16T03:34:51Z

Aayush Rathi and Akash Sheshadri and Ambika Tandon co-authored a research paper on 'Feminist Design Practices' which was published in a special issue of Apria, a peer-reviewed journal hosted at ArtEZ University. The special issue "Feminist by Design" highlights the work of the Feminist Internet Research Network and its contributions to building an equitable internet through design interventions.

Abstract

Feminist and design justice principles can be adopted into research praxis to make knowledge less extractive and more accessible. These principles include making research and outreach more participatory, translating academic knowledge into more accessible forms, and channelling research into action that can challenge patriarchy and other systems of domination.

This paper focusses on the outreach and communication of policy research to outline its potential for producing radical change and translating knowledge across communities. The authors reflect on their experiences of producing research for domestic workers and workers’ collectives in India to highlight challenges and ways forward for accessible research forms.

To access the full article published in Apria, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/artez-platform-aayush-rathi-akash-sheshadri-ambika-tandon-feminist-design-practices

February 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-09T07:48:11Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet and Society newsletter! In this issue we bring you the updates of our research, events, media coverage and videos of the events organized by us during the month of February 2012!

Accessibility

Around 70 million disabled persons in India are unable to participate in information societies as lack of compliance with accessibility standards make interfaces impossible to use, and retrograde copyright and patent policies make it impossible to access knowledge. Accessibility is denied in banking services, web and mobile interfaces, etc. Material for the disabled therefore needs to be converted into accessible formats. The programme has resulted in outputs such as Web Accessibility Policy Making, Making Mobile Phones and Services Accessible for Persons with Disabilities, Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective, e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities, Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: A Global Survey of Policy Interventions and Good Practices, etc.

Featured Research

Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective: G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society are pleased to announce the publication of a new, improved edition of the Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective. The report published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation provides an updated synopsis of the many policies that governments have implemented around the world to ensure that the Internet and websites are accessible to persons with disabilities.

Event

ITU Tutorial on Audiovisual Media Accessibility (India International Centre,New Delhi, March 14 to 15, 2012): At the invitation of the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with the ITU-APT Foundation of India, International Telecommunication Union is organizing a two-day Tutorial on Audio Visual Media Accessibility. The Tutorial will be preceded by the fourth meeting of the Focus Group on Audio Visual Media Accessibility on March 13, 2012. The meeting will take place in the same venue and will be hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in cooperation with the ITU-APT Foundation of India.

Access to Knowledge

With the emergence of digital technologies and the unprecedented growth of the Internet and other related technologies, intellectual property rights (IPRs) the questions of ownership and control of information have become crucial. The programme focuses on the inequitable distribution of IPR, royalty, outflows, and beneficiaries of intellectual property regimes, the lack of balance in current IPR regimes [local, national and international] between consumer rights and IPR-owners’/corporation’s rights. The programme has produced analyses such as WIPO Treaty for the Print Disabled, WIPO Broadcast Treaty, Copyright Amendment Bill and Parallel Importation of Books.

Blog Entry

Analysis of Copyright Expansion in the India-EU FTA (July 2010) by Snehashish Ghosh.

Video

Recently, the Centre for Internet and Society organised a public lecture in its office, the video is now online.

Gandhi, Freedom, and the Dilemmas of Copyright: (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, January 30, 2012). Prof. Shyamkrishna Balganesh from the University of Pennsylvania gave a lecture on Gandhi, Freedom, and the Dilemmas of Copyright.

Openness

The advent of the Internet has radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. Even the Internet is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. The broad rubric of the ‘Openness’ programme focuses to provide evidence based research that will help inform policy and practice of the local, national, regional, bilateral and international policies and practices around Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Video, Open Standards and Free/Libre/Open Source Software. The programme has resulted in reports such as Open Government Data Study, Online Video Environment in India, a reader on the Wikipedia titled Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader and a film titled People are Knowledge – Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia.

Comments

Comments on Technical Standards for Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (Phase II), submitted to the e-Governance Standards Division.

Event Report

Francis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World, (Sambasivan Auditorium, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, February 14, 2012). The award function was organized by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam gave the welcome address. View the video of the award function.

Interview

An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth: The Centre for Internet and Society conducted an email interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth, recipient of the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World.

Events

Free Arduino Workshop (For Beginners): (Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, March 3, 2012). The Centre for Internet and Society organised the Arduino workshop in Bangalore.

Internet Governance

Governments and private corporations are engaging in human rights violations online. Many different rights are impacted by internet governance policy changes. The growing phenomenon of illegal electronic surveillance by state and non-state actors and censorship of speech online are some specific problems that the Internet Governance programme seeks to address by providing evidence based research that will help inform policy and practice of the local, national, regional, bilateral and international privacy regime in the interests of the public in sectors key to information societies with a particular focus on information technology, privacy and freedom of expression. The programme has resulted in outputs such as Banking, Telecommunications, Consumer Protection, IT Act, Limitations, Copyright, Internet Protocol, Media, Sexual Minorities, UID and policy submissions such as, NIA Bill, IT Act, National Policy on Electronics, Cyber Café Rules, Security Practices Rules, and Intermediary Due Diligence Rules.

Featured Research

Privacy India in partnership with Privacy International, UK, the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon is pleased to bring you the draft chapters of its book on Privacy in India. These include the Country Report, Telecommunication and Internet Privacy, E-Governance Identity and Privacy, Finance and Privacy, Health and Privacy, Transparency and Privacy. The chapters are an early draft which is in the process of being reviewed and updated. We greatly appreciate your comments and feedback:

Privacy in India — An Early Draft.

Media Coverage

Personal Data, Public Profile: “Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is rapidly being Googlised”, writes Nishant Shah in the Financial Express, February 13, 2012.
Do we need the Aadhar scheme?: “Decentralisation and privacy are preconditions for security. Digital signatures don’t require centralised storage and are much more resilient in terms of security”, writes Sunil Abraham in the Business Standard, February 1, 2012.

Event Reports

The High Level Privacy Conclave (Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens, New Delhi, February 3, 2012): India is in dire need of privacy law; experts say government is ironically creating huge national security risks in attempts to prevent crime and terrorism. The event was organized by Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Privacy International, UK and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon. Sunil Abraham was a Conclave Advisor and the moderator for the session on Internet and Privacy, Malavika Jayaram moderated in the panel on National Security and Privacy, and Elonnai Hickok spoke in the session "The Way Forward".

All India Privacy Symposium: (India International Centre, New Delhi, February 4, 2012): Experts gathered in Delhi for a public symposium on privacy, transparency, e-governance and national security in India. The event was organized by Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Privacy International, UK, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon. The webcast of the event is online. Sunil Abraham was a Symposium Advisor and moderated in the panel on Privacy and Transparency. Elonnai Hickok gave the welcome address and spoke in the session, “The Way Forward”. Prashant Iyengar was the moderator for the panel on Privacy and Banking. Malavika Jayaram spoke in this panel.

Event Hosted

GeekUp with Erica Hagen (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 1, 2012). HasGeek organized a GeekUp with Erica Hagen of the GroundTruth Initiative. Erica gave a lecture on the theme: "From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation.

Blog Entry

Unique ID System: Pros and Cons, by Natasha Vaz.

Other Events

Cartonama Workshop (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 2 and 3, 2012). HasGeek organized a hands-on training for managing and building location based services. The Centre for Internet and Society was a partner for this event.

Climate Change and Controversy Mapping (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, March 19 to 21, 2012). The workshop is being organised in collaboration with the Devechia Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Bruno Latour, Dean for Research at Sciences Po, Paris will speak in this event.

Videos

View the videos of some of the recent events organised by us:

All India Privacy Symposium, (India International Centre, New Delhi, February 4, 2012). Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Privacy International, UK, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, organized the event.

Whose Data is it Anyway?, (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, January 24, 2012). Centre for Internet and Society and Tactical Tech co-organised the second round of discussions of the Exposing Data series. Siddharth Hande and Hapee de Groot spoke in the event.

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the "Right to Privacy Bill", (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay). Privacy India in partnership with International Development Research Centre, Canada, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the Godrej Culture Lab, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and the Centre for Internet and Society organised this event.

Free Speech Online in India under Attack?, (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, December 22, 2011). The event was co-organised with the Internet Democracy Project. Achal Prabhala, Lawrence Liang and Anja Kovacs gave a lecture on freedom of expression online in India.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. The programme has resulted in reports such as India's untapped potential: Are a billion people losing out because of spectrum?, India Study Tour - Report: The South African Telecommunications Sector: Poised for Change and the Unlicensed Spectrum-Policy Brief for Government of India NTP '11.

Featured Research

Unlicensed Spectrum-Policy Brief for Government of India NTP '11 by Satyen Gupta, Sunil Abraham and Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: The research paper aims to recommend unlicensed spectrum policy to the Government of India based on recent developments in wireless technology, community needs and international best practices, and seeks to demonstrate the need for and importance of unlicensed spectrum as a medium for inexpensive connectivity in rural/remote areas, as well as catalyzing innovation by being a barrier-free and cost-effective platform for the testing and implementing of new technologies.

Interview

An Interview with Stephen Song: Yelena Gyulkhandanyan interviewed Stephen Song, the founder of Village Telco, an initiative to bring practical and inexpensive communication network infrastructure to rural and remote areas. He spoke about factors that catalyzed the initiative, the benefits of the network, some challenges, and the Mesh Potato.

Job Announcement

Content Developers/Trainers: The Centre for Internet and Society is looking for a content developer/trainer to work on an upcoming project Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policies in India. This is a full-time position. To apply, please email your curriculum vitae along with three writing samples to yelena@cis-india.org.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by the Centre for Internet and Society, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and internet technologies, in emerging information societies. The programme has resulted in a four-book collective titled Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and reports such as Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report and Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers.

Events

Digital Natives Video Contest: Twenty-one candidates have been shortlisted, videos will be online soon. Voting begins from March 10, 2012. The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising the video contest with Hivos, Netherlands.

Essay Review: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause: The monthly essay review for the four book collective of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? was held from February 17 to February 26, 2012. The Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the “Essay Review” with Hivos, Netherlands.

Book Review

How to Put Up a Facebook Resistance: “The current discussion about Facebook's timeline is only the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of a larger conflict that lurks behind it: how much direct marketing are Facebook users willing to take? How many drastic top-down changes of the user's Facebook experience are possible unless they understand that their presence on this site and what they do there is in tension with the company's goals that provides this digital environment?”, Oliver Leistert reviews Marc Stumpel’s essay, "Mapping the Politics of Web 2.0: Facebook Resistance", in Digital Alternatives with a Cause Book 2: To Think, pp.24-31.

Privacy, Piracy and the Wiki Way of Web: “Privacy is about having more control over the personal information that we have disclosed. As we disclose more information online, we must ask who might access it and why.” Nishant Shah in the Digital Natives Newsletter, volume 9, issue 2.

News and Media Coverage

What is Stewardship in Cyberspace?: The second annual Cyber Dialogue forum takes place March 18-19, 2012 in Toronto, Canada. Sunil Abraham is a panelist in the session on Plenary Panel and Discussions.

Secure IT 2012 — Securing Citizens through Technology: The event was co-organised by DST and NSDI, Govt. of India in partnership with Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd. on March 1, 2012 at Claridges in New Delhi. Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the event.

Digitisation is making e-learning simple: “Learning should not be restricted to the Internet and interactive classroom sessions but should be made available on mobile phones through audio files as mobile penetration is much higher compared to Internet reach”, Sunil Abraham in Deccan Herald, February 13, 2012. The article was written by Shayan Ghosh.

India debates limits to freedom of expression: “The government’s proposals on Web censorship would kill the vibrancy of the Internet in India”, Sunil Abraham in the Washington Post, February 13, 2012. The article was written by Simon Denyer.

Developing location-based services, Hindu, February 26, 2012.

Grooming the geek: “Children have to learn fine motor and social skills; tablets and other technology hinder the development of these skills”, Sunil Abraham in LiveMint, February 24, 2012. The article was written by Gopal Sathe.

FUEL Kannada - Workshop on Kannada Computing Terminology: A two days workshop on the standardization of Kannada computing terminologies was organized on January 28 and 29, 2012 at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore under the FUEL project. The workshop was organised by Sanchaya and sponsored by Red Hat.

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?: “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country”, Subbiah Arunachalam in the Hindu, February 19, 2012. The article was written by Vasudha Venugopal.

Research papers will be available in public domain: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone”, Subbiah Arunachalam in the Hindu, February 15, 2012. The article was written by Vasudha Venugopal.

OurSay: how India’s technology is cutting into corruption: “Print and cinema reflected the views of citizens and informed them of the visions and changes that the country was going through”, Nishant Shah in Crikey, February 17, 2012. The blog post was written by Gautam Raju, co-founder and creative director, OurSayAustralia.

India won't censor social media: Telecom Minister: “Glad that Sibal does not believe in censorship and that companies operating in India should follow local laws.” “But on the other hand he has asked them to evolve new guidelines and actively monitor user content which is not legally sanctioned. This makes him look two-faced”, Pranesh Prakash in the Tribune. The article written by Salil Panchal was originally published by AFP and reproduced in the Tribune on February 14, 2012.

Govt set to gain ‘back-door’ access to corporate email: “There are no allegations of terrorists using BES or any indication that any of the 5,000 enterprises have any links to terrorists or other banned outfits in India”, Pranesh Prakash in LiveMint, February 14, 2012. The article was written by Shauvik Ghosh.

Indian law caught in web: “The Internet needs regulation but it cannot be treated as a gigantic newspaper or media channel”, Pranesh Prakash; “In liberal democracies like India and the US, information was taken for granted and not perceived as central to the understanding of society”, Nishant Shah. Nishant and Pranesh are quoted in an article by Moyna published by Down to Earth magazine.

Prometheus bound and gagged: The article by Adarsh Matham was published in the New Indian Express on 20 January 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

Internet Curbs: Sunil Abraham’s article “The Quixotic Fight to Clean Up the Web” which was published in Tehelka is referred to by Rishi Majumder in this article also published in Tehelka, Vol. 9, Issue 07, February 18, 2012.

Tweeple say it pithily with hash tags: “Our social networking sites and writing platforms are performances of a certain kind... they allow us to convert our everyday lives into games — with rewards, actions, punishments or rules”, Nishant Shah in the Hindu, February 11, 2012. The article was written by Deepa Kurup.

New Bill to decide on individual’s right to privacy: “Tesco, a major retail chain in England, is now into E-banking… There are numerous examples of such private banking entities sharing customer information with insurance policy firms. These details are often used as markers for the kind of premium that will be set for a person”, Malavika Jayaram in Tehelka, February 6, 2012.

A new domain name, but concerns remain the same: “The rhetoric is that the Internet is global, but we've been seeing [governments say] how this information has to be regulated”, Nishant Shah in the Hindu, February 5, 2012. The article was written by Karunya Keshav.

Common man as crusader: “The movement targeted at the middle-class for whom corruption is a big issue was also the first middle-class movement in a long time.” Nishant Shah in the Hindustan Times, February 4, 2012.

5 things you need to know about online privacy policies: “India needs to have a broad and horizontal law that establishes online privacy as a right. Unlike in European countries, India doesn't have a privacy commissioner who can state the principles, interpret the data and question the online providers”, Sunil Abraham in the Economic Times on February 6, 2012. The article was written by Indu Nandakumar.

India needs an independent privacy law, says NGO Privacy India: “India doesn't have a privacy law, but there are provisions for it in different laws. During the course of the research, we found that the Indian judiciary has not been very strict in overseeing the implementation of the privacy clauses in various laws,”, Prashant Iyengar in the Economic Times, February 2, 2012.

Privacy, speech at stake in cyberspace: “The clampdown on online free speech and the roll-out of a multi-tiered blanket surveillance regime via the draconian IT Act and its associated rules in India is part of a global trend”, Sunil Abraham in LiveMint, February 3, 2012. The article was written by Leslie D’Monte.

Freedom of Expression in Community Media and on the Internet Understanding Connections, Finding Common Ground: A meeting co-organised by the Internet Democracy Project (Delhi) and Maraa (Bangalore) with the support of the Community Radio Forum in New Delhi on 3 February 2012. Pranesh Prakash participated in this event. Anja Kovacs gave the welcome address and spoke in the session on “The Internet and Freedom of Expression.”

Google move is not good for netizens, say experts: “Google is doing what is good for shareholders. This is not positive for netizens,” Sunil Abraham in the Hindu Business Line, January 31, 2012.

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Join the CIS group on Facebook

Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/feb-2012-bulletin

February 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:16:29Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects have been published online for public review:

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

Digital Natives

CIS has interest in developing Digital Identities as a core research area and looks at practices, policies and scholarships in the field to explore relationships between Internet, technology and identity. The Digital Natives project is funded by Hivos, Netherlands. CIS involvement has resulted into these:

Columns on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following articles were published in the Indian Express recently:

Pull the Plug [published in the Indian Express on February 20, 2011]
A FLASH of Change [published in the Indian Express on February 6, 2011]
Wiki changes the world [published in the Indian Express on January 23, 2011]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project took place in Santiago, Chile, from 8 to 10 February 2011. Samuel Tettner wrote a report about the workshop:

Digital Natives with a Cause? —Workshop in Santiago — an Afterthought

Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is doing Masters on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause? framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The new ones are:

Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Coordinator in the Digital Natives project. He has written one blog entry:

Computer Science & Society – The Roles Defined

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

New Blog Entry

The Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010: Does it exceed its Mandate in Including Provisions Relating to Other Disability Legislations?

Intellectual Property

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entries

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software, its latest involvement have yielded these results:

New Blog Entries

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralised authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has taken the following shape:

Announcement

Google Policy Fellowship Program: Asia Chapter

New Blog Entries

Privacy

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24^th March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Blog Entries by Elonnai Hickok

Elonnai Hickok is a Programme Associate in the Privacy in Asia project. She has published a series of Open Letters to the Finance Committee regarding the UID:

Other New Blog Entries

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Spectrum auctions - 'Jhatka' or 'Halal'? [published in the Business Standard on February 3, 2011]

Forthcoming Events

CIS is holding some conferences/workshops in the month of March in Delhi and Bangalore:

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Electronication: Ragas and the Future (March 6, 2011 Jaaga, Bangalore)
Design!publiC (March 18, 2011, Taj Vivanta, New Delhi)

Staff Update

Deepti Bharthur

Deepti Bhartur is a Research Intern at CIS. She did her BA (Hons) in Journalism from Lady Sriram College, University of Delhi and completed her Masters in Communication from Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. Deepti joined the Accessibility team of CIS and is working on accessibility in telecom policy in India.

News & Media Coverage

Growing cyberspace controls, Internet filtering (Hindu, February 20, 2011)
2(m) or not 2(m) (Business Standard, February 19, 2011)
Can the twitterati change the world? (The Times of India, February 12, 2011)
Can the mouse be a tool of revolution in India? (DNA, February 12, 2011)
Social Network Suicide (Bangalore Mirror, February 6, 2011)
New Kids on the Blog (Indian Express, February 6, 2011)
Procuring books in Indian libraries (Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange, February 4, 2011)
What Are You Accused of? Find Out Online (Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2011)
One among the clan of Wikipedians (Hindu, January 27, 2011)
Digital Wrongs (Forbes India, January 24, 2011)

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

Looking forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to write to us for any queries or details required. If you do not wish to receive these emails, please do write to us and we will unsubscribe your mail ID from the mailing list.
CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2011-bulletin

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2011-10-21T08:24:19Z

Facebook designing your online identity is like designing your rooms with furniture from the bazaar. The only individuality lies in your family pictures standing on the shelves. On Saturday, April 2, 2011, CIS is organising a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

In the Web 2.0 world, most users of technology are reduced to being mere ‘users’. We are offered almost an endless number of choices but do not have the freedom to go against the ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ of the system we operate in. Take Facebook for example. Have you ever wondered if you can change the way Facebook works? Sure, we can start campaigns and mobilize people to impact some of the policies but we never think about the very design of Facebook and the laws that govern it.

What if you could change Facebook’s laws? In this workshop we begin modifying Facebook.com for ourselves, using the unique concept of “browser-hacks”. The aim is to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook’s software to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts. We further want to explore, how this creative intervention can also be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Facebook Resistance is a research initiative accepting the status quo of Facebook being the dominant social identity management system, researching on the ways to change its rules and functionality from inside the system. Facebook sets the rules of how-to behave, so we’re asking: Are we happy with their interface, features and rules or do we want to change them? A change can be as trivial as adding a background-image. As initiator Tobias Leingruber (@tbx), puts it: “Facebook designing your online identity is like IKEA designing your apartment. The only individuality lies in the family pictures standing in your BILLY shelves.”

While early online networks like Geocities.com encouraged its users to entirely modify their online presence, Myspace.com and Web 2.0 have steered this “User Generated Content” into a commercially valuable structure. Facebook has finalized this “evolution” by disabling the user to do anything but feeding the system that gives Facebook it’s estimated value of 50 Billion US$. Facebook is taking over the social web, and its design follows Mark Zuckerberg’s ideals. To quote Lawrence Lessig: “The code is law. The architectures of cyberspace are as important as the law in defining and defeating the liberties of the Net.”

Trainer

Marc Stumpel (@Zuurstof) is a privacy/user-control advocate, holding a MA degree in New Media and Digital culture. He has recently discussed browser hacks in his thesis:

‘The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance’, and continues to elaborate on this type of resistance while travelling in India. Several Facebook Resistance workshops already took place in Europe, organized by initiator Tobias Leingruber (@tbx) a famous artist and free communication designer working in viral media, popular culture, amateur aesthetics and browser apps.

Example Ideas

Dislike Button
Graffiti Wall (based on GML/webmarker.me)
Auto-comment generator (e.g. LOL or Kanye West speak)
Custom background images and visual css styling for your visitors
Themes, e.g. change your Facebook’s colour: pink, yellow…

Skill-set participants

It would be great to have a few people with some web development experience (html/css/javascript), or Photoshop skills, but also people who can write good (philosophical) texts are very welcome. In the end everyone who really uses web 2.0 will fit in, so just come and join us!

Information and registration

We have place for 20 people. You can register by sending an email to digitalnatives [at] cis-india.org. The workshop takes place at the the Centre for Internet and Society on Saturday, April 2nd from 11.00 to 17.00 hr. There is no charge for taking part in the workshop, but make sure to bring your laptop or mobile computing devices with you.

If you have questions please contact Marc Stumpel: m.stumpel[at]gmail.com.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance

Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:33:15Z

This working paper by Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster draws from the field study undertaken by Ritam Sengupta, and is published by the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. The field study was commissioned by the CIS, with support from the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.

Download the working paper: PDF

Abstract

This paper presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in “Stelcorp”; a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data.

Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some – albeit constrained – value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management.

A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power – resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks – are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.

Cross-posted from University of Manchester.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india

Experimental Economy Camp

radha — 2011-04-05T04:27:19Z

Experimental Economy Camp continued at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Nov 22nd, '09 from 10.30am to 5.30pm.

Experimental Economy Camp continued at CIS (http://www.cis-india.org/) which will combine a hackathon, inviting more local people to get
involved, with a 'camp' of presentations, live and via Skype (maybe you?), which discuss and brainstorm the Open Call, former a greater,
more discursive context. (without giving away any answers and not including people's proposals).

Shadow Search

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/experimental-economy-camp-1

Centre for Internet and Society

Getting the net out of its web

From Taboo to Beautiful - Menstrupedia

What is menstruation?

The Beauty of RED

My Periods: A Blessing or a Curse

Stigma as a Crisis

Why does it matter?

Here's where Menstrupedia comes in

Technology's role in the mix

And here's why it works

Making Change through Menstrupedia

Sources:

Footnotes

From Health and Harassment to Income Security and Loans, India's Gig Workers Need Support

From Archive to Application (and Back): A Workshop with Pad.ma

About Pad.ma

Financial Speculation as Urban Planning

Speaker Bio

Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer

The Visual Designer

Tejas Pande

Figures of Learning: The Reader

The Reader

P.P. Sneha

Figures of Learning: The Pornographer

The Pornographer

Namita A. Malhotra

Figures of Learning: The Conditional Artist

Feminist Design Practices

Abstract

February 2012 Bulletin

Accessibility

Featured Research

Event

Access to Knowledge

Blog Entry

Video

Openness

Comments

Event Report

Interview

Events

Internet Governance

Featured Research

Media Coverage

Event Reports

Event Hosted

Blog Entry

Other Events

Videos

Telecom

Featured Research

Interview

Job Announcement

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Events

Book Review

Newsletter

News and Media Coverage

Follow us elsewhere

February 2011 Bulletin

Researchers@Work

Digital Natives

Columns on Digital Natives

Workshop

Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina

Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Accessibility

New Blog Entry

Intellectual Property

New Blog Entries

Openness

New Blog Entries

Internet Governance

Announcement

New Blog Entries

Privacy

Blog Entries by Elonnai Hickok

Other New Blog Entries