Centre for Internet and Society

April 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-05-31T08:07:38Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the fourth issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.

Celebrating 5 Years of CIS
We at the Centre for Internet and Society celebrate 5 years of existence with an exhibition showcasing our work and accomplishments over this time. The exhibition will be held concurrently at both our Bangalore and Delhi offices from May 20 to 24, 2013, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Google Policy Fellowship
CIS is inviting applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India fellow who will be selected by July 1, 2013. Fellowship focus areas include Access to Knowledge, Openness in India, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, and Telecom Send in your applications for the position by June 15, 2013.

Jobs
CIS invites applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org. CIS also invites applications for the post of Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge, Pilot Projects). To apply for this position send your resume to vishnu@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan:

The Himachal Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).
Goa Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).
The Jammu & Kashmir Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).
The Rajasthan Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, April 30, 2013).

Note: All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Events Organised

Girls in ICT Day (April 25, 2013, Mitra Jyothi Auditorium, HSR Layout, Bangalore). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk on Social Media and Kannada Language for Women with Disabilities. Sara Morais wrote an event report.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 9, 2013, TERI, Southern Regional Centre, Domlur, Bangalore).

Announcement

CIS Gets ITU-D Sector Membership: CIS has become a sector member of ITU-D.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Wikipedia
Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of four members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi, and one team member Dr. U.B. Pavanaja who is working from Bangalore office. Noopur Raval, Programme Officer has left the organisation. April 24, 2013 was her last working day.

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages.

Blog Entries

Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain, April 29, 2013).
Analysis of Konkani Wikipedia: Facts & Challenges (by Nitika Tandon, April 30, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia: Needs Assessment (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 30, 2013).

Event Organised

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (April 29, 2013, Govinda Pai Research Centre, MGM College Udupi). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.

Events Co-organised
The following events were organised in the month of March but reports were written during the month of April. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi held meetings with wikipedians:

Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Kolkata Wiki Community, March 14, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Cuttack, March 16, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia – Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Bhubaneswar, March 17, 2013).

The following event was organised in the month of April. We will be publishing the report soon:

Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (organised by Telugu Wikipedia Community and CIS, Hyderabad, April 9 – 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan was one of the trainers at the Wikipedia Academy at Centre for Good Governance on April 9, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the Access to Knowledge work in one of the sessions of Wikimedia Meeting with Media Heads on April 10, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on A2K’s plans for the growth of Telegu Wikipedia in 2013-14 at the Telegu Wikipedia general meeting on April 11, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan also gave a talk about Access to Knowledge in the digital era at the Wiki Chaitanya Vedika on April 11, 2013.

Other Access to Knowledge Updates

WIPO

CIS Intervention on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at SCCR/SS/GE/2/13 (Geneva, April 18 – 20, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in the session and spoke about the rights of the visually impaired.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with Privacy International, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.

Information Technology

IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69A Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison (by Jadine Lannon, April 27, 2013).
Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, 419A Rules and IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69 Rules (by Jadine Lannon, April 28, 2013).
IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69 Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison (by Jadine Lannon, April 30, 2013).
IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69B Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison (by Jadine Lannon, April 30, 2013).

Resources
The below rules were published recently:

Newspaper Column

Off the Record (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, April 6, 2013).

Privacy

India´s ´Big Brother´: The Central Monitoring System (CMS) (by Maria Xynou, April 8, 2013).

Events Organised
Maria Xynou gives an overview of the discussions and recommendations from the privacy round tables held in Delhi and Bangalore:

A Privacy Round Table in Delhi (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013).
A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).

Announcements

2nd Expert Committee meeting on draft 'Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012': The Department of Biotechnology has constituted an Expert Committee to discuss various issues of this Bill in detail. Sunil Abraham has been nominated as one of the members of this Committee. A meeting of this Expert Committee has been scheduled for May 13, 2013 under the Chairmanship of Dr. T. S. Rao, Adviser, DBT.
Chinmayi Arun is one of the international experts supporting the Internet & Jurisdiction project, a global multi-stakeholder dialogue process.

Upcoming Events

A Privacy Round Table in Chennai (co-organised with Data Security Council of India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Residency Towers, Sir Thyagaraja Road, T Nagar, Chennai, May 18, 10.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.).
Consilience – 2013 (National Law School of India University, Bangalore, May 26 – 27, 2013).

Other Event Hosted

Or-bits.com — A Talk by Marialaura Ghidini (CIS, Bangalore, April 19, 2013). Marialaura Ghidini gave a talk abou the creation and activities of or-bits.com, a web-based curatorial platform that she founded in 2009.

News and Media

Clarify and define terms in IT rules, panel tells govt. (by Prashant Jha, Hindu, April 1, 2013).
India takes its first serious step toward privacy regulation – but it may be misguided (Privacy Surgeon, April 9, 2013).
Regulating Social Media: Unrealistic, Impossible, Necessary? (NDTV, April 11, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in a discussion on social media aired on NDTV.
Social media may influence 160 LS seats in 2014 (by Zia Haq, Hindustan Times, April 12, 2013).
Vote: Will Social Media Impact the Election? (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2013).
Untangling the web of India's 'ungovernable' Net (Deutsche Welle, April 15, 2013).
CIS in GNI Annual Report (April 25, 2013). CIS gets mentioned in GNI Annual Report. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.
Is free speech an Indian value? (by Satarupa Sen Bhattacharya, India Together, April 27, 2013).

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: www.internet-institute.in.

Upcoming Event
We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” with the support of Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details have been announced.

The following units have been published:

Internet Infrastructure (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, April 30, 2013).
Internet Service Provider – Introduction (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, April 30, 2013).

Telecom

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

Newspaper Column

Prioritizing Communications & Energy (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot, April 4, 2013).

Blog Entry

From Open Citizen Radio Networks to the Race for .RADIO gTLD (by Sharath Chandra Ram, April 30, 2013).

Event Participated

Broadband Policy Course (organised by Lirne Asia, Bangalore, April 5 – 6, 2013). Nirmita Narasimhan and Snehashish Ghosh attended the course.

About CIS

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

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Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

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

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

Are India’s much-lauded startups failing their women workers?

Abhishek Sekharan and Ambika Tandon — 2021-12-06T16:24:36Z

Recent protests outside Urban Company’s head office highlight the gendered nature of work in the country’s digital economy.

On October 8, more than 100 women beauty workers gathered outside the head office of Urban Company in Gurgaon to protest against their work conditions. The firm, an on-demand platform for home-based services, initially responded by clamping down on protesters, threatening to block their IDs and inviting police action on them.

After continued pressure from workers and media, the company reaffirmed its commitment to “giving a voice to the voiceless” and eventually announced some measures to partly meet workers’ demands.

This was arguably the first widely-reported instance of women working with digital platforms publicly organising to take collective action. A deeper look at their demands sheds light on the gendered nature of work under India’s much-lauded tech startups.

Women’s labour market decisions are structured around trade-offs between paid work and unpaid care work at home. They also face constraints around physical mobility, security and negative familial attitudes towards their work. Digital platforms have been touted as game-changers that will increase women’s workforce participation and earnings, because of the flexibility their model offers to workers to control their work.

However, far from increasing workers’ agency, platform models continue to reinforce gender norms and fail to account for factors that shape women’s work. The recent protests are a reminder that there is much to be corrected if work on platforms is to enhance women’s economic outcomes.

Flexibility for whom?

The term “flexibility” can be understood in various ways. From the workers’ perspective, it is usually understood as the ability to choose when and how much to work. Most platforms, including Urban Company, advertise this as one of their goals.

However, from the firms’ perspective, it could mean minimising input costs while achieving high labour turnover and service quality. Platforms deploy a range of strategies to manage workforce flexibility and match concurrent demand. Key among these is the system of ratings that determine the number of leads offered to workers and may also be used to coerce them into working longer hours and performing unpaid tasks to satiate customer demands.

In Urban Company’s case, workers’ ratings are determined not just on the basis of customer feedback, but also the rates at which workers accept or cancel tasks. This becomes antithetical to increasing flexibility – workers find themselves compelled to work longer hours to meet incentives and avoid penalties. Women who find work through the app have significant childcare responsibilities, and in many cases are sole earners in female-headed households.

Suman, a single mother working as a prime service partner asked us, “When my child has an accident, will I care about the ratings or penalties? I have to stay at home and take care of him. How will I take orders then if they keep giving me leads?” Workers often face penalties such as non-negotiable deductions from wages and permanent account blockages upon low response and high cancellation rates.

As Suman’s account illustrates, these penalties make it very difficult for women to take leaves for even short intervals. The list of demands put forth by workers also includes the ability to log out from the platform for longer periods on account of maternity or other personal obligations, without rejoining fees being deducted.

Another way in which Urban Company manages workforce flexibility is through the use of artificial and arbitrarily determined service categories. During the pandemic, amidst intense fluctuations in consumer demands and spending habits, the firm introduced five sub-categories under their beauty service vertical – classic, prime, silver plus, gold plus and lux. Classification of workers into these categories was primarily based on ratings, without taking into consideration prior experience or quality of work.

For workers in the classic category, such arbitrary classifications without considering prior experience in the beauty sector or quality of work could amount to deskilling and undervaluation of their work. Workers who have been promoted to higher categories have shared several negative implications including higher costs for uniforms and equipment, increased distance between customer locations and reduced leads with higher commission rates. In effect, these categorisations further obfuscate the rationale for lead generation and upskilling for workers.

The authors asked Urban Company about these and other matters. This article will be updated if the firm responds.

Absence of support

A key concern highlighted by workers is regarding the complete absence of infrastructural support necessary for dignified work. Women spend long hours commuting between their homes and multiple service locations where they receive orders. Many find it difficult to access critical amenities such as drinking water and toilets while on the commute and are denied these even within customers’ homes due to entrenched caste prejudices and discriminatory practices.

Companies also fail to support workers in case of emergencies, which has emerged as a key cause for concern among women who often work in private spaces such as customers’ homes. Workers emphasise the need for a human to respond to their calls in case of an emergency, rejecting technological solutions such as automated helplines and SOS buttons that leave workers to fend for themselves in case they are harassed by customers or in transit.

Beyond considerations of platform design and infrastructure, workers highlight the structural precarity that stems from the business model of platform companies. The “entrepreneurship” model put forth by companies does not allow workers to access the income security that comes with regular-wage employment, nor the control and agency that is necessary for self-employment.

Media reports after the protests have lauded Urban Company for being nimble and transforming work relations in ways that are responsive to workers’ demands. What is missed in public discourse are the efforts taken by hitherto unorganised workers to bring the firm to the negotiating table with little external support, while also balancing paid work and care responsibilities.

These movements are gaining ground across sectors to hold bigger companies accountable for extracting labour from workers while claiming to empower them. Exploitative practices across lesser-known platforms remain invisible and unchecked, with most continuing with business as usual. If workers’ collective voices are to transform industry-wide conditions, it becomes imperative to listen, amplify and act on their recommendations.

Ambika Tandon and Abhishek Sekharan are researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, where they study the impact of digital platforms on labour cultures in India. Read the original published in Scroll here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/are-indias-much-lauded-startups-failing-their-women-workers

Practicing Feminist Principles

ambika — 2021-12-07T00:54:54Z

AI can serve to challenge social inequality and dismantle structures of power.

Artificial intelligence systems have been heralded as a tool to purge our systems of social biases, opinions, and behaviour, and produce ‘hard objectivity’. However, on the contrary, it has become evident that AI systems can sharpen inequalities and bias by hard coding it. If left unattended, automated decision-making can be dangerous and dystopian.

However, when appropriated by feminists, AI can serve to challenge social inequality and dismantle structures of power. There are many routes to such appropriation – resisting authoritarian uses through movement-building and creating our own alternative systems that harness the strength of AI towards achieving social change.

Feminist principles can be a handy framework to understand and transform the impact of AI systems. Key principles include reflexivity, participation, intersectionality, and working towards structural change. When operationalised, these principles can be used to enhance the capacities of local actors and institutions working towards developmental goals. They can also be used to theoretically ground collective action against the use of AI systems by institutions of power.

Reflexivity in the design and implementation of AI would imply a check on the privilege and power, or lack thereof, of the various stakeholders involved in an ecosystem. By being reflexive, designers can take steps to account for power hierarchies in the process of design. A popular example of the impact of power differentials is in national statistics. Collected largely by male surveyors speaking to male heads of households, national statistics can often undervalue or misrepresent women’s labour and health. See Data2x. “Gender Data: Sources, Gaps, and Measurement Opportunities,” March 2017 and Statistics Division. “Gender, Statistics and Gender Indicators Developing a Regional Core Set of Gender Statistics and Indicators in Asia and the Pacific.” United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 2013. AI systems would need to be reflexive of such gaps and plan steps to mitigate them.

Participation as a principle focuses on the process. A participatory process would account for the perspectives and lived experiences of various stakeholders, including those most impacted by its deployment. In the health ecosystem, for instance, this would include policymakers, public and private healthcare providers, frontline workers, and patients. A health information system with a bottom-up design would account for metrics of success determined by not just high-level organisations such as the World Health Organisation and national governments, but also by providers and frontline workers. Among other benefits, participation in designing AI systems also leads to buy-in and ownership of the technology right at the outset, promoting widespread adoption.

Intersectionality calls for addressing the social difference in the datasets, design, and deployment of AI. Research across fields has shown the perpetuation of inequality based on gender, income, race, and other characteristics through AI that is based on biased datasets.

The most critical principle is to ensure that AI systems are working to challenge inequality, including inequality perpetrated by patriarchal, racist, and capitalist systems. Aligning with feminist objectives means that systems that have objectives that do not align with feminist goals – such as those that enhance state capacities to surveil and police – would immediately be excluded. Systems that are designed to exclude and oppress will not work to further feminist goals, even if they integrate other progressive elements such as intersectional datasets or dynamic consent architecture (which would allow users to opt in and out easily).

We must work towards decreasing social inequality and achieve egalitarian outcomes in and through its practice. Thus, while explicitly feminist projects such as those that produce better datasets or advocate for participatory mechanisms are of course practicing this principle, I would argue that it is also practiced by any project that furthers feminist goals. Take for example AI projects that aim to reduce hate speech and misinformation online. Given that women and other marginalised groups are often at the receiving end of violence, such work can be classified as feminist even if it doesn’t actively target gender-based violence.

All technology is embedded in social relations. Practicing feminist principles in the design of AI only serves to account for these social relations and design better, more robust systems. Feminist practitioners can mobilise these to ensure a future of AI with inclusive, community-owned, participatory systems, combined with collective challenges to systems of domination.

References

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Link to the original article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/practicing-feminist-principles

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T06:00:39Z

Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.

LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.

Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.

Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.
Paradigms of Practice:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.
Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.

Workshop Outcomes

The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.

Participation Guidelines

LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:

Name:
Institutional affiliation and title:
Address:
Email address:
Phone number:
A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)
Statement of interest (max. 350 words)
Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)
Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)
Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)
Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)

Notes:

Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets@cis-india.org
Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation.
Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.
Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.
A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.

Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;

Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University

Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad

Experts:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop

July 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T07:00:26Z

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. 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. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Pornography and the Law by Namita Malhotra, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem – An Inquiry into Technology and Governance by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar were sent for peer review.

Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline for submission – 26 July 2011; Participants to be selected by 30 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS 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. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

The Digital Natives Newsletter

"Links in the Chain" is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community members. It includes opinion posts by participants from the three workshops — Talking Back (Taipei, 15 – 18 August 2010), My Bubble, My Space, My Voice (Johannesburg, 6 – 9 November 2010) and From Face to the Interface (Santiago, 8 – 10 February 2011) as well as the facilitators, interviews with them, comics and cartoons highlighting current issues affecting the community, as well as current news and discussions happening at the project website, www.digitalnatives.in.

The Digital Dinosaurs [Links in the Chain, Volume 7]
Special Mid Year Edition [Links in the Chain, Volume 8]

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.

Featured Research

Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective (Revised Edition 2011) [A G3ict White Paper researched and edited by the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. Editor: Nirmita Narasimhan, Revised edition: May 2011]

Access to Knowledge (previously IPR Reform)

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.

Featured

Don't Shoot the Messenger: Speech on Intermediary Liability at 22nd SCCR of WIPO (speech by Pranesh Prakash at a side-event co-organized from 15 to 24 June 2011, by WIPO and the Internet Society on intermediary liability).

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.

Documentary

People are Knowledge – Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia (co-produced by CIS in association with the Wikimedia Foundation, on Oral Citations in India and South Africa)

Featured

Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector (published by Transparency & Accountability Initiative, CIS contributed the section on Open Government Data).

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized 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.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Post

RTI and Third Party Information: What Constitutes the Private and Public? [by Noopur Raval]

Events Organised

Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms – A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [at CIS, Bangalore on 8 July 2011]
Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [at TERI, Bangalore on 27 June 2011]

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 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.

Featured

Privacy & Media Law (by Sonal Makhija). The research examines the existing media norms governed by Press Council of India, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and the Code of Ethics drafted by the News Broadcasting Standard Authority, the constitutional protection guaranteed to an individual’s right to privacy upheld by the courts, and the reasons the State employs to justify the invasion of privacy.

Comments

Right to Privacy Bill 2010 — A Few Comments (by Elonnai Hickok). CIS has given specific recommendations and specific comments on the Right to Privacy Bill, 2010, which was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Rajeev Chandrashekhar.

Event Report

Privacy Matters, Guwahati – the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, IDEA Chirang, an NGO initiative working with grassroots initiatives in Assam, Privacy India and CIS on 23 June 2011.

New Blog Entries

My Experiment with Scam Baiting (by Sahana Sarkar)
When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind? (by Noopur Raval)
Video Surveillance and Its Impact on the Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok)
Consumer Privacy in e-Commerce (by Sahana Sarkar)
An Overview of DNA Labs in India (by Shilpa Narani)
UID: Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? (by Shilpa Narani)

News & Media Coverage

Indian SMEs still fail to harness the power of Net [Sunday Guardian, 19 June 2011]

Sorry Wrong Number [Telegraph, 3 July 2011]

Aadhaar’s moment of truth [Deccan Herald, 5 July 2011]
The Walls Have Ears [Outlook, issue, 11 July 2011]
Transparent Government, via Webcams in India [New York Times, 17 July 2011]; news also published in other languages in wprost (Polish), ictnews (Vietnamese) and @rret sur images(French)
NYT lauds Oommen Chandy’s 24/7 office webcast [Deccan Chronicle, 19 July 2011]
UID: The World’s Largest Biometric Database [International School on Digital Transformation, 21 July 2011]. Sunil Abraham made a presentation.
Facebook, my boyfriend is lousy [Bangalore Mirror, 24 July 2011]

Portal augurs well for transparency [The Hindu, 25 July 2011]

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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/july-2011-bulletin

June 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T07:14:57Z

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. Six monographs Rewiring Bodies, Archive and Access, Pornography and the Law, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance, Transparency and Politics and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities are published online and will be launched later this year.

CEPT to Set up Centre to Research Role of Internet in Social Development [Published in the Indian Express on June 18, 2011]

Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline for submission – 15 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

The Digital Natives Newsletter

The Digital Dinosaurs [Volume 5]

Pathways

HE Cell's initiative on social justice, in collaboration with CIS, has initiated the Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education. It is supported by the Ford Foundation. Under this project, nine under-graduate colleges in different parts of India will be identified to provide special skills in livelihood, knowledge and technology to underprivileged students in those colleges.

New Blog Entry

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

Accessibility

New Blog Entries

Policy Spotlight: 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act [Written by Deepti Bharthur; contains an e-mail interview with Jenifer Simpson, Senior Director for Government Affairs and head of the Telecommunications & Technology Policy Initiative at the American Association of People with Disabilities ]
ICT Accessibility in Sri Lanka [Written by Nirmita Narasimhan]

Intellectual Property

Statement

Statement of CIS, India, on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 22nd SCCR

New Blog Entry

Putting a Lid on Royalty Outflows — How the RBI can Help Reduce your IP Costs [Written by Sanjana Govil]

Openness

Submission

Comments on the draft National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy [submitted to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure]

Internet Governance

New Articles

The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations [By Anja Kovacs in the Caravan on June 1, 2011]
Big Brother is Watching You [By Sunil Abraham in Deccan Herald on June 1, 2011]
The Digital is Political [By Nishant Shah in Down to Earth, Issue of June 15, 2011]
Do You Want to be Watched? [By Sunil Abraham in Pragati on June 8, 2011]
Snooping Can Lead to Data Abuse [By Sunil Abraham in Mail Today on June 9, 2011]
Privacy and Security Can Co-exist [By Sunil Abraham in Mail Today on June 21, 2011]

Column in Indian Express

Nishant Shah, Director-Research will be writing a series of columns on Internet and Society issues:

Say 'Password' in Hindi [By Nishant Shah in the Indian Express, May 15, 2011]

Upcoming Event

Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms – A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, July 8, 2011]

Featured Research

New Articles

A Street View of Private and the Public [By Prashant Iyengar in Tehelka on June 4, 2011]
The new Right to Privacy Bill 2011 — A Blind Man's View of the Elephunt [By Prashant Iyengar in Privacy India website on June 8, 2011]

New Blog Entry

Bloggers' Rights Subordinated to Rights of Expression: Cyber Law Expert

Event organised in Guwahati

Privacy matters [Donbosco Institute, Kharguli, Guwahati, June 23, 2011]

Upcoming Events

Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [TERI, Bangalore, June 27, 2011]
Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Hyderabad [Osmania University Center for International Program, Hyderabad, July 9, 2011]

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:

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

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.

NTP 2011 Objective: Broadband [published in the Business Standard on June 2, 2011]

Miscellaneous

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi [June 5, 2011, Delhi]
Communication Policy Advocacy, Technology, and Online Freedom of Expression: A Toolkit for Media Development [June 20 – July 1, 2011, Budapest, Hungary]

News & Media Coverage

Your cyber space is a hackers paradise [Mail Today, June 6, 2011]
Centaur website reveals guests' personal info [Times of India, June 20, 2011]
Mumbai Takes Note of Sexting, the Seamier Side of Texting [Times of India, June 19, 2011]
Look what the state just did to you [Mid Day, June 12, 2011]
Tough neighbourhood tests India's e-tolerance [Times of India, June 12, 2011]
India Weighing Looser Web Rules [Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2011]
Public data on the Web leaves much to be desired [Hindu, May 28, 2011]
What documents will you need, to get UID? [CitizenMatters.in, May 28, 2011]
Mobile education comes to villages [Mail Today, May 27, 2011]
Google now stalks your street [Hindu, May 27, 2011]
Women in love with Facebook [Deccan Herald, May 27, 2011]
Google Unveils Controversial Street View Mapping in B’lore [Economic Times, Mumbai, May 27, 2011]
NGOs say eG8 report must stress internet rights [TELECOMPAPER, May 26, 2011]

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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/june-2011-bulletin

December 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T11:28:02Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! It gives us immense pleasure to present regular updates on the progress of our research on the mainstream Internet media. In this issue of we bring our latest project updates, news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

Pornography & the Law
This monograph attempts to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/f1sQsi

Re:wiring Bodies
Dr. Asha Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/gYCP1C

The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem — An Inquiry into Technology and Governance
The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour. The deadline for peer review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/iiYJp1

New Blog Entries

Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities

Queer Histories of the Internet

A Detour: The Internet and Forms of Narration: A Short Note

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.

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:

Make a Wish [published on 19 December 2010]
Play Station [published on 5 December 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Publication

Position papers from the Thinkathon conference held at Hague from 6 to 8 December have been published:

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers

Accessibility

National Award

Nirmita Narasimhan got a National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India on 3 December 2010. The award was presented by Smt. Pratibha Patil, President of India under the Role Model category. The event was telecast live on Doordarshan.

Nirmita Narasimhan wins National Award

Conference Report

An international conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT was held in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The full report of the conference is published online:

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - Conference Report

New Blog Entries

Intellectual Property

Copyright, patents and trademarks are the most important components on the Internet. 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

Reports

Event

Wikipedia Meetup in Bangalore, This time in TERI

Privacy

CIS is doing a couple of projects, one Privacy in Asia which is supported by Privacy International, UK and the other on Privacy and Identity which is funded by Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar.

New Blog Entries

Telecom

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

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.

Take 'Model T' for Telecom

News & Media Coverage

An online community platform for people with different needs (Sify News, 12 December 2010)

Self-regulation in media and society meet to gain legal perspectives (Indiantelevision.com, 13 December 2010)

This Is All India Radia (Outlook, 6 December 2010)

'Pakistan' hackers target India's top police agency (Google News, 4 December 2010)

Intellectual Property Rights as seen in a graphic novel (TimeOut Bengaluru, 1 December 2010)

The Niira Radia Tapes: Scrutinizing the Snoopers (The Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2010)

Mobile banking set to get a boost from IMPS (The Hindu, 28 November 2010)

UID elicits mixed response (Deccan Herald, 23 November 2010)

Time to bury e-mail? (DNA, 21 November 2010)

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2010-bulletin

September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T06:48:33Z

Welcome to the newsletter of September 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a second analysis by Snehashish Ghosh on the latest list of sites blocked by the Indian government from August 18, 2012 to August 21, 2012, a research on the issues of internet governance by Smarika Kumar, publication of a report on Accessibility of Government websites in India by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, the Access to Knowledge programme plan and updates from the Wikipedia community in India on Indic languages, updates from the Habits of Living workshop organised in Bengaluru, the events connected to the visits of international DNA experts, Helen Wallace and Jeremy Gruber in India, and introduce you to our Access to Knowledge team members.

Announcements

Office in Delhi
CIS now has an office with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge programme in Delhi at G 15, top floor, behind Hauz Khas G Block Market, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, Ph: + 91 11 26536425.

New Team Members

Nitika Tandon: Nitika Tandon is a Program Officer with CIS. She has an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands and is a recipient of Dean's Fund Scholarship Program, Erasmus University.
Shiju Alex: Shiju Alex is a Consultant. His background is technical writing and he is interested in Indic language computing and community building for Indic language Wiki projects. Presently he works out of CIS office in Bengaluru.
Subhashish Panigrahi: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Programme Officer to CIS's Access to Knowledge programme and works out of CIS's Delhi office. His background is Business Development in Corporate Communications. He works on designing and implementing programs to provide on-wiki and off-wiki support for new editors.
Noopur Raval: Noopur Raval is working as Consultant - Communications for the Access to Knowledge team at CIS. Having previously worked in the media, she is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Cinema Studies from JNU, New Delhi.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the posts of Research Manager, Researcher/Editor, and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply for these posts send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) with three references. Archives of our bulletins can be found here. Click to read the newsletter on our website.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies:
Featured Research

Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report (by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, September 26, 2012): This is a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. It was published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The report consists of an executive summary, introduction, methodology, findings and recommendations and interpretation and recommendations. Examples of errors are given as appendices.

Project

Creating a National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities: An Introduction (by Anandhi Viswanathan, September 28, 2012): CIS is engaged in a two-and-a-half year project starting from August 2012 to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. This project is supported by the Hans Foundation. The Resource Kit will be brought out in both English and Hindi and disseminated to policy makers from panchayat to ministry levels throughout India. Anandhi gives an introduction to the project in this blog entry.

Blog Entries

WIPO Treaty for the Visually Impaired — Moving from a Treaty on Paper to a Treaty that is Workable on the Ground (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): After many years of hard lobbying by the World Blind Union, it appears that the WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities (TVI) could become a reality next year.
Breaking News on Electronic Accessibility (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): The Parliamentary Standing Committee constituted to study the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill has in its report explicitly recognized the concept of electronic accessibility and reasonable accommodation. This is the first time in the country that these two concepts have been reflected at the level of a Parliamentary Standing Committee in relation to a non-disability specific law.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Submission

Feedback to Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 (by Pranesh Prakash, September 29, 2012): submitted its written comments on the Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 to Mr. G.R. Raghavender, Registrar of Copyrights & Director (BP&CR), Ministry of Human Resource Development. Pranesh does a detailed analysis and provides recommendations on Rules 8,9,10, 29(6), 34(2), 37, 71(3), 72, 74(1), 74(6), 75, and 79 (3) and (4).

Projects

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan: Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 of a 22 months ‘grant’ (beginning from September 1, 2012 to July 31, 2014) of upto INR 26,000,000 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of CIS. The prime objective is to support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects and supporting India-focused efforts to improve the quality of India-relevant content on Indic languages and English Wikimedia projects.
Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace (by Jadine Lannon, September 25, 2012): Jadine Lannon gives an introduction to the new A2K research initiative. Pervasive technologies have flooded the Indian market and are changing the ways in which the average Indian accesses knowledge but very little is understood about these technologies, particularly when it comes to their legality. CIS hopes to do a research that aims to understand how pervasive technologies interact with Intellectual Property laws and what can be done to protect these technologies from being labelled “illegal” and eradicated from the Asian market.

Event Participated

Meeting of the Global Network on Flexible Limitations and Exceptions (organised by American University Washington College of Law, Washington D.C., September 12 to 15, 2012).

Internet Governance

Featured Research

An Introduction to the Issues in Internet Governance (by Smarika Kumar, September 23, 2012): Smarika provides a detailed analysis to the issues that we face in Internet Governance today. She tries to canvass the controversies in the areas of internet governance that broadly focus around the institutional structures to govern the internet, discusses the evolution of these models against the historical background of internet governance and then proceeds to present the criticisms of each of these models with an emphasis on the interests of the regular internet user.
Analyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II (by Snehashish Ghosh, September 25, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”). This analysis was re-posted by Medianama on September 26, 2012.

Columns

The Five Monkeys & Ice-cold Water (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 16, 2012): “The Indian government provides leadership, both domestically and internationally, when it comes to access to knowledge.”
SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech (by Chinmayi Arun, Hindu Business Line, September 1, 2012): If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.

Media Coverage

Censorship makes India fall two places on global internet freedom chart (by Dilnaz Boga, Daily News & Analysis, September 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Pitroda seeks to put govt information in public domain (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 25, 2012): “One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media…they (government) should be available all the time.” — Sunil Abraham.

Govt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 19, 2012): ““The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process...We have to see what coordination results out of the body.” — Sunil Abraham.

Mind of the millennium teen (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, September 16, 2012): “We live in accelerated times...The breathlessness of our times is evident in everything — from the kind of movies we make to the ways in which our news and information travel. At the end of the day, our younger generations are also products of our times.”— Nishant Shah.

China outranks India in world’s first ever web index (First Post, September 6, 2012): ““The Internet today doesn’t work according to the idealistic principles of openness, and democracy of information that Berners-Lee envisioned for it, and in India in particular, although the Internet has helped us rethink what the government can do, the attitude is that that Internet can only be used in ways that the government sees fit.” — Nishant Shah.

Need a standard strategy to deal with Web issues: Chandrasekhar (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Political war on the web (by Kunal Majumder, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “The fact remains none of the blockings were politically motivated.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Government to hold talks with stakeholders on Internet censorship (by Shalini Singh, The Hindu, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

The state. And the rage of the cyber demon (by Shougat Dasgupta, Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “While some people may see Twitter as akin to friends talking in the pub, others use the service as a bulletin board.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Watch out for fettered speech (by Rohit Pradhan, Business Standard, September 1, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Events Organised

DNA Profiling Bill
International DNA experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States visited Bengaluru and Delhi and shared their experience in DNA sampling and gave feedback to the DNA Profiling Bill. Meetings were conducted with lawyers and the plaintiff in the Pascal Mazurier's rape case and with VR Sudarshan and Hormis Tharakan. There was a coverage of the event in Kannada media. Public lectures were organised in Bengaluru and Delhi:

UK DNA Database and the European Court of Human Rights: Lessons that India can Learn from Its Mistakes (organised by CIS and Alternative Law Forum, September 24, 2012): Helen Wallace from GeneWatch, UK and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics in the United States gave a public lecture.
The DNA Profiling Bill: Developing Best Practices (India International Centre, New Delhi, September 27, 2012): International experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States gave a public lecture. Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.

Blog Entry

A Public Meeting on DNA Profiling Bill in Delhi (by Elonnai Hickok, September 29, 2012): Elonnai has blogged about the public lecture delivered by Dr. Helen Wallace, Jeremy Gruber and Dr. Anupuma Raina.

Upcoming IGF Events
At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop:

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m.

Sunil Abraham will be a panelist in the following workshop:

New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m).

CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops:

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.).
Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.).

Events Participated

Second Freedom Online Conference (organised by the Ministry of Information and Communications, Republic of Kenya in partnership with the government of Netherlands at UN complex in Gigiri, Nairobi, September 6 and 7, 2012). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on Access to Internet: Challenges and Opportunities.
Multi-stakeholder Discussion on India’s Position in UN for Internet Governance UN Committee for Internet Related Policies (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, New Delhi, September 19, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
Seventh Meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting. This was the final meeting of the series.

Talk

Talk at Yale University (New Haven, September 19, 2012): Pranesh Prakash gave a talk on censorship, intermediary liability, and the way forward.

Video

Internet Governance Plenary (August 28, Tokyo, Japan): Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Ang Peng Hwa, Paul Wilson, Duangthip Chomprang and Raul Echeberria at this event organised by APNIC on August 28, 2012. Kuo Wei Wu, CEO, National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NIIEPA) was the moderator.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:
Featured Research

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012): Shiju Alex provides a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. He provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

Workshop Reports
Although most of the following workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the report for all of these was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring these.

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): This post is about the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop held in Ludhiana, Punjab on July 28, 2012. Surinder Wadhawan, a Mumbai based Wikipedian played an important role in designing this workshop and introducing Punjabi Wikipedia to the Punjabi speakers. Long-term Punjabi wikipedian G.S.Guglani also joined this workshop. The event was covered in the Tribune, Hindustan Times, Punjab Infoline, and YesPunjab.com.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012. Veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani came forward to spread the message of Punjabi Wikipedia among Punjabi speakers.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012): The workshop was held at the Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar on August 17, 2012. Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop. One of the active and long-time Punjabi Wikipedian Guglani Gurdip Singh led the workshop with the active support from Shiju and Subhasish.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized in Chandigarh by the British Library over two days on August 24 and 25, 2012. Bipin Kumar, Head of British Library and Christina, Deputy Manager had pivotal roles in designing this workshop with support from Piyush, a wikipedian. The session on Day 1 was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi and the session on Day 2 was conducted by Subhashish and Piyush.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012): This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur. Prof. Ashwin Kumar from the Department of English, Tumkur University and Kannada wikipedians, Om Shiva Prakash, Hareesh, Tejus and Pavithra played vital roles in organising this workshop. Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.

Blog Entries

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012): Nitika Tandon tells us about the Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telegu Wikipedia, how it will run, its necessity and the future steps.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012): A series of Wikipedia meetings were organized in Hyderabad on September 29 and 30, 2012. These workshops were a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community. There was coverage about this event in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Event Organised

Thinking with Data@CIS (CIS, Bengaluru, September 16 – 18, 2012): The course offered at the National Institute of Advanced Studies was screened in CIS office.

HasGeek HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of September: Cartonama Conference (TERI Complex, Bengaluru, September 22, 2012). The event was organised by HasGeek with support from CIS.

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Newspaper Column

One. Zero. (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, September 16, 2012): “The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak.”

Pathways to Higher Education

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and CIS. The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India. Training workshops were organised in the month of September at Xaviers in Mumbai on September 6, 2012 and in Newman College, Thodupuzha from September 17 to 20, 2012. Each workshop had 25-30 undergraduate students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They were trained to use digital technologies in order to think through problems of social justice.

Researchers at Work

From 2012 to 2015, the RAW series will build research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects is a global collaborative project to renew the conceptual power of networks. It concentrates on changing the habits of living. The Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University is an important locus.

CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Jadine Lannon and Alok Vaid-Menon live blogged about the event:

Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s) (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Radhika Gajjala Lectures on e-Philanthropy (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space
(by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Namita Malhotra on Amateur Pornography (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).

Telecom

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

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India

Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 2,00,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The knowledge repository deals with these modules: Introduction to Telecommunications, Telecommunications Infrastructure and Technologies, Government of India Regulatory Framework for Telecom, Telecommunication and the Market, Universal Access and Accessibility, The International Telecommunications Union and other international bodies, Broadcasting, Emerging Topics and Way Forward. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers.

The following are the new outputs:

Associations Regulating Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): Broadcast regulation in India is currently an intricate web, with multiple agencies involved in formulating and implementing policy, drafting and enforcing legislation.
Optical Fibre (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): This unit tells us what is optical fibre, the types of optical fibres, how does an optical fibre work, fibre-optic relay system, and why are optical fibres uses in telecommunication systems.
Direct to Home (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit tells us about Direct to home television, its history, how it works, the programming, its advantages and disadvantages are discussed in this module.
Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit brings you the history and evolution of cable television in India, talks about other cable based services, cable television digitization rule and the end consumer in India.
Private FMs (Commercial, Campus and Community Radios) (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 24, 2012): This unit introduces us to AM and FM, tells us the role of private FMs including what is a community radio and what is a campus radio.
Types of Radio Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 28, 2012): This unit tells us what is radio broadcasting, takes us through the history of radio broadcasting in India, explains what is AM and FM in the Indian context.
A History of All India Radio and Its Operations (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 29, 2012): This module gives us a picture of the history of All India Radio and its operations.

Newspaper Column

Changing Our Game (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, September 5, 2012): “Adopting 'co-ordination models' like the Stag Hunt could reduce contention and improve outcomes.” This was re-posted in Organizing India blogspot.

Event Participated

Insights India 2012 (organised by MACH, Bangalore, September 26 – 28, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh and Srividya Vaidyanathan participated in this event.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. Over the last four years our policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos. With the Government of India we have done policy research for Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.

CIS is an accredited NGO at WIPO and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

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September 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T06:34:19Z

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 that happened in the month of September 2011.

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 base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organizations and individuals in order to focus on its two year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs were recently launched at a workshop, Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum held in Ahmedabad from 19 to 22 August 2011.

Re:Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan
The Last Cultural Mile by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Porn: Law, Video, Technology by Namita A Malhotra
Archives and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, 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. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

Featured Publication

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? - This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Book Review

Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg - The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011, writes Maarten van den Berg. The review was published in "The Broker" on 19 September 2011.

Event Organised

Digital AlterNatives book launch – CIS and Hivos launched this book at the Museum for Communication, Hague on 16 September 2011.

Accessibility

Event Participated

Stakeholders Meeting of the USOF on Facilitating ICT Access to Persons with Disabilities in Rural Areas, on 7 September 2011. Nirmita Narasimhan made a presentation.

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential, and such access promotes creativity and innovation, and helps bridge the differences between the developing and developed worlds in a positive manner. Towards this end, CIS is campaigning for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-challenged people, advocating against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public-funded knowledge, call for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, question the demonization of 'pirates', and support endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime.

New Blog Entries

Copyright Amendment Bill in Parliament by Nirmita Narasimhan, 30 August 2011.
Photocopying the past by Sunil Abraham in the Indian Express, 2 September 2011.
Calling Out the BSA on Its BS by Pranesh Prakash, 9 September 2011.

Internet Governance

Internet technologies have fundamentally questioned the notion of governance, not only at the level of administration but also at the level of mechanisms of control, regulation and shaping of the individual. e-Governance initiatives, in combination with other regimes of surveillance, control and censorship, are redefining what it means to be a citizen, a subject, and an individual. We look at questions of governance — at the micro level of the individual and the private (family, relationships, community structures, etc.) as well as the level of governmentality — at the macro level of nation state, citizenship, market economies, and the public (spaces of consumption, work, leisure, political engagement, etc.) under the umbrella of digital governance.

New Blog Entry

Understanding the Right to Information by Elonnai Hickok, 28 September 2011.

Events Organised

Using the Internet as a Tool for Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward, IGF, Nairobi, 27 September 2011.

Telecom

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

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.

Reviving Growth, published in the Business Standard on 1 September 2011.

Event Organised

Open Spectrum for Development in the Context of the Digital Migration, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011.

Miscellaneous

Film Screening

Screening of Partners in Crime, Vikalp@Smriti Nandan along with CIS screened the film and followed it with a discussion with the director of the film, Paromita Vohra, Smriti Nandan Cultural Centre, 9 September 2011.
Prime Security: The Mathematics of RSA Encryption, a one-day workshop with Rohit Gupta, a leading Mathematician.

News & Media Coverage

India's social media "spring" masks forgotten protests [Alistair Scrutton in Reuters, 25 August 2011].
Social media holds the key to Hazare's campaign success [Alistair Scrutton in NEWS.scotsman.com, 26 August 2011].
Digital divide: Why Irom Sharmila can’t do an Anna [FirstPost.Ideas, 25 August 2011].
When revolutions go viral [Times of India (Crescent Edition), 27 August 2011].
IBSA Seminar on Global Internet Governance, organised by the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations, with support from the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Center for Technology & Society (CTS/FGV) and governmental and non- governmental actors from India, Brazil and South Africa, 1 to 2 September 2011, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.
Copyrights Amendment Bill to Be Tabled in Indian Parliament – Parallel Import provisions have Been Removed [Mike Palmedo in infojustice.org, 5 September 2011]
The Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development [Indigo Trust, 15 September 2011]. Sunil Abraham participated in this event. A video of his speech is now available on YouTube.
Planning Commission, Census 2011 and India Post using social media to understand people's pulse better [Vikas Kumar in the Economic Times, 20 September 2011]
The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise, organised by FOSSFA and ICFOSS, IGF, Nairobi, 28 September 2011.
Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses, organised by Expression Technologies, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011.
Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?, organised by GSM Association, 29 September 2011.
The Truman Show, in Kerala [Times of India, posted on CIS website on 23 September 2011].
Making a difference, online and offline [LiveMint, 27 September 2011].

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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/september-2011-bulletin

August 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-13T05:13:23Z

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. 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. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Porn: Law, Video, Technology by Namita Malhotra, The Last Cultural Mile by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar were officially launched at the Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop in Ahmedabad.

Workshop organised in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Featured Research

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism (This paper by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011).

Accessibility

Interview

An Interview with David Baines (Maureen Agena interviewed David Baines of Mada Centre for Assistive Technology in Khattar).

Access to Knowledge

New Blog Entry

Govt for Legalising Parallel Import of Copyright Works; Publishers Oppose

Openness

Featured Research

Call for Comments on Draft Report on Open Government Data in India (v2) (Nisha Thompson has updated the Open Government Data Report prepared by CIS last year including additional case studies and the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy).
Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report: Call for Comments (The report has been prepared by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu. It surveys the field of scholarly and scientific publication in India and provides a detailed history of the open access movement in India).

Internet Governance

New Blog Post

Bye Bye email? (Email might be the default method of communication for most of us, but could it be going the telegram way, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2011).

Public Lecture

The Mirror in the Enigma: How Germany lost World War II to a Mathematical Theorem (Rohit Gupta gave a lecture at CIS on August 12, 2011).

Featured Research

IP Addresses and Expeditious Disclosure of Identity in India (Prashant Iyengar reviews the statutory mechanism regulating the retention and disclosure of IP addresses by Internet companies in India and provides a compilation of anecdotes on how law enforcement authorities in India have used IP address information to trace individuals responsible for particular crimes).

New Blog Entries

Whole Body Imaging and Privacy Concerns that Follow (by Elonnai Hickok)
Financial Inclusion and the UID (by Elonnai Hickok)
CCTV in Universities (by Merlin Oommen)
Re-thinking Key Escrow (by Natasha Vaz)

Event Report

Privacy Matters, Chennai – the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Consumer and Civic Action Group, Privacy India and CIS on August 6, 2011.

News & Media Coverage

Net Gain [The Telegraph, 24 August 2011]
IISc students boycott UID, don’t want Big Brother to keep watch [Bangalore Mirror, 23 August 2011]
In the Right Circle [Indian Express, 24 July 2011]
The Siege of Android: How Google Lost The OS War [Business.in, 17 August 2011]
The Unsocial Network [Mail Today, 14 August 2011]
Hazare 'clicks' with city techies [India, 18 August 2011]
Govt wants to monitor Facebook, Twitter [Times of India, 8 August 2011]
Nothing unique about this identity [Deccan Chronicle, 5 August 2011]
Tired of tele-marketing calls? Act on privacy right: Experts [Times of India, 7 August 2011]
When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count? [New York Times, 7 August 2011]
Indian super-cops now patrol the www highway [Hindustan Times, 6 August 2011]
Better Understanding of the Idea of Privacy Sought [Hindu, 7 August 2011]
Converting Indian Slacktivists Takes (Offline) Time [Wall Street Journal, 2 August 2011]

Follow us elsewhere

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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/august-2011-bulletin

September 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T07:22:30Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this bulletin we bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage and announcement of events organised in the month of September 2010.

News Updates

Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010: This conference is being held in Budapest from 20 to 22 September 2010. It is co-sponsored by Google and Central European University. Sunil Abraham and Anja Kovacs are attending the conference.
http://bit.ly/afo0WY

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project: Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.
http://bit.ly/dnJDRu
Innovate / Activate: The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School. http://bit.ly/cbICFq
Webinar: Closed for Business: A Global Panel Discusses International Copyright Laws and Their Impact on the Open Internet
http://bit.ly/a3ZFBw
The madness of software patents
India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth.
http://bit.ly/cpHd7R
Why piracy is tough to rein in
“Video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the film industry”
http://bit.ly/aDUpiY
Transparency and MDGs: the Role of the Media and Technology
Key quotes from sixth panel
http://bit.ly/b3a0YC
Copyright bill restricts Net access
Law to curb piracy may fetter creativity
http://bit.ly/cFj3rD
科技改變社會數位原生代計畫
The Chinese language press covered the Digital Natives workshop in Taipei.
http://bit.ly/bPhEO4
科技改變社會數位原生代掀波
The Chinese press published an article on Digital Natives.
http://bit.ly/bHaQor
Information is Beautiful hacks in India with David Cameron
The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them.
http://bit.ly/dr3AJ2

Events

International Conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT: ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations open!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK
A Talk by Philipp Schmidt: Philip Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University will be giving a lecture at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 6 October, 2010.
http://bit.ly/aVyzMq

Research

On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop: What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed.
http://bit.ly/daE4dM
The Binary: City and Nature: A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.
http://bit.ly/b5FP5D
Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive: This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.
http://bit.ly/cNLKcY
The Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series: This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others.
http://bit.ly/agBOiq
Attentional Capital in Online Gaming: The Currency of Survival
This blog post by Arun Menon discusses the concepts of production, labour and race in virtual worlds and their influence on the production of attention as a currency. An attempt is made to locate attentional capital, attentional repositories and attention currencies within gaming to examine 'attention currencies and its trade and transactions in virtual worlds. A minimal collection of attention currencies are placed as central and as a pre-requisite for survival in MMOs in much the same way that real currency become a necessity for survival. The approach is to locate attentional capital through different perspectives as well as examine a few concepts around virtual worlds.
http://bit.ly/aaGZj8
What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least for Now: In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?
http://bit.ly/9a3I0G
Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context: This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India.
http://bit.ly/byfPye

Accessibility

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - A Conference in Delhi: The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore in cooperation with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT), a flagship advocacy organization of the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (UN-GAID), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), UNESCO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment and the Deafway Foundation is organizing an international conference, Enabling Access to Education through ICT in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The event is sponsored by Hans Foundation. Registration for the conference has begun.
http://bit.ly/bmrkf7

Access to Knowledge

Pre-grant Opposition Filed for a Software Patent Application by Blackberry Manufacturers: A pre-grant opposition was filed against a software patent application filed in the patent office by Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of Blackberry. The opposition was filed on August 31, 2010 by the Software Freedom Law Centre which has recently expanded its operations to India. This exciting development was announced by Mishi Choudhary from SFLC on the lines of the seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” organised on 1 September 2010 in Delhi jointly by SFLC, the Centre for Internet and Society, the Society for Knowledge Commons and Red Hat. Filing more such oppositions to software patents in India was in the pipeline and this is just the beginning of a movement to take on monopolisation of knowledge and ideas through patenting software, the organisers said.
http://bit.ly/9wE1Xs
First Post-Bilski Decision - Software Patent Rejected: In the first decision post-Bilski, the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) rejected a software patent claimed by Hewlett-Packard. The ruling in this case has buttressed the fact that the Bilski decision furthered the cause of narrowing the patentability of software even though the Supreme Court of the United States totally avoided mentioning software patents or the applicability of the machine or transformation test for software patents in its decision.
http://bit.ly/cnPw7E
The Bilski Case - Impact on Software Patents: The Supreme Court of the United States gave its decision in Bilski v Kappos on 28 June, 2010. In this case the petitioners’ patent application sought protection for a claimed invention that explains how commodities buyers and sellers in the energy market can protect, or hedge, against the risk of price changes. The Court in affirming the rejection by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also held that the machine- or-transformation test is not necessarily the sole test of patentability. The Court’s ruling of abstract ideas as unpatentable and its admission that patents do not necessarily promote innovation and may sometimes limit competition and stifle innovation have provided a ray of hope. In the light of the developments, the Bilski decision as far as patentability of software is concerned may not be totally insignificant, says Krithika Dutta Narayana.
http://bit.ly/bjrPGh

Openness

Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report: The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined.
http://bit.ly/9VVzkk
Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?: The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.
http://bit.ly/ciohYy

Internet Governance

Moldova Online: An Interview with Victor Diaconu: In this interview for Russian Cyberspace, set up with the help of Sunil Abraham (Executive Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India), computer software professional Victor Diaconu explains the nature of Internet use, state control and the development of blogging and social media platforms in Moldova. Victor works at Computaris in Chisinau. He is Moldova educated, and has travelled to several western countries (including lengthy stays to US, UK) to learn about and understand what there is to be done in Moldova. Sudha Rajagopalan interviewed Victor Diaconu.
http://bit.ly/cgIvXT
Presentation of the UID project by Ashok Dalwai – A Report: On Tuesday, 7 September 2010, Ashok Dalwai, the Deputy Director General of the Unique Identification of India (UIDAI), gave a lecture at the Indian Institute for Science in Bangalore. Representing the UID Authority, his presentation explained the vision of the project and focused on the challenges involved in demographic and biometric identification, the technology adopted, and the enrolment process. Elonnai Hickok gives a report of his presentation in this blog post.
http://bit.ly/aAy5DG
Beyond Access as Inclusion: On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is co-organised in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting was to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.
http://bit.ly/cgS9py
Summary of UID Public Meeting, August 25 2010: A summary of the "No UID" public meeting that took place on Aug. 25th at the Constitution Club, New Dehli.
http://bit.ly/9epHTz
No UID Campaign in New Delhi - A Report: The Unique Identification (UID) Bill is not pro-citizen. The scheme is deeply undemocratic, expensive and fraught with unforseen consequences. A public meeting on UID was held at the Constitution Club, Rafi Marg in New Delhi on 25 August, 2010. The said Bill came under scrutiny at the meeting which was organised by civil society groups from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi campaigning under the banner of "No UID". The speakers brought to light many concerns, unanswered questions and problems of the UID scheme.
http://bit.ly/97HwbS
Wherever you are, whatever you do: Facebook recently launched a location-based service called Places. Privacy advocates are resenting to this new development. Sunil Abraham identifies the three prime reasons for this outcry against Facebook. The article was published in the Indian Express on 23 August, 2010.
http://bit.ly/adXVjB

Telecom

What a highway can do: Despite signs of transformational change, we need more - SOPs and quality http://bit.ly/deUbmU

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin

May 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T10:00:54Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage and information on our events in this bulletin of May 2010

News Updates

India slowly gets to grips with ecommerce
Growth in computer use and Internet penetration will help e-commerce.
http://cis-india.org/news/India-gets-to-grips-with-ecommerce
World Wide Web Consortium for All
Indian web designers have long ignored needs of people with different disabilities but a new dedicated wiki aspires to change that, writes Malvika Tegta
http://cis-india.org/news/www-for-all
Biometry Is Watching
In its first steps, the UID drive encounters practical problems, raises ethical questions, reports Sugata Srinivasaraju in Outlook.
http://cis-india.org/news/biometry-is-watching
What Women Want: The ability debates
In this article published in the Hindu, Deepa Alexander argues that the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (1957) are restrictive and discriminatory.
http://cis-india.org/news/what-women-want
CIS – Internet is neither good nor bad
This post is also available in: French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil)
http://cis-india.org/news/Internet-not-good-not-bad
Right to Read event in Brussels
A 'Right to Read' event is being held at the European Parliament, Brussels on 4 May 2010.
http://cis-india.org/news/right-to-read-brussels
Mapping the things that affect us
'Map for making change' is a project using geographical mapping techniques to support struggles for social justice in India
http://cis-india.org/news/mapping-the-things
'UID is being forced'
CIS feels that the UID project is forced on the citizens.
http://cis-india.org/news/UID-is-forced
ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data
The government is looking to the ID programme to help ensure that various welfare programmes reach the poor
http://cis-india.org/news/id-programe-faces-challenge
Their India has no borders
Bangalore felt far for them, they would mark it outside the country. India, for migrant labourers, is different from the India we know
http://cis-india.org/news/their-india-has-no-borders
Scrap UID project, say people's organisations
The unique identification number project is executed without any legislative or parliamentary sanction.
http://cis-india.org/news/Scrap-UID-project
UID info can be misused
Public organisations, NGOs and concerned citizens feel UID may become an easy database for anti-social elements.
http://cis-india.org/news/uid-info-can-be-misused
UID project draws flak from civil rights activists
The unique identification project is drawing a flak from civil rights activists.
http://cis-india.org/news/UID-project-draws-flak
Citizens' forums want UID project scrapped
Citizens' forums and groups have stepped up their attack on the Unique Identification Project calling for the complete scrapping of the project.
http://cis-india.org/news/citizens-forums-want-UID-scrapped
Disability rights groups oppose changes to Copyright Act
Disability rights groups are up in arms against a Bill proposing an amendment to the Copyright Act, 1952, reports Aarti Dhar in an article published in the Hindu on April 23, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/news/disability-groups-oppose-copyright-amendments
Centre for Study of Culture and Society seeks Programme Associate
The Higher Education Cell, Centre for Study of Culture and Society is looking for a Programme Associate to help develop e-content and conduct training programmes for projects under its Social Justice and Networked Higher Education Initiatives.
http://cis-india.org/news/position-announcement

Research

Digital Natives at Republica 2010
Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet and Society, made a presentation at the Re:Publica 2010, in Berlin, about its collaborative project (with Hivos, Netherlands) "Digital Natives with a Cause?" The video for the presentation, along with an extensive abstract is online.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dnrepub

Accessibility

Right to Read in the European Parliament: A Report
The European Blind Union and the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue supported an event sponsored by seven MEPs in the European Parliament to discuss the way forward for EU to support the Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Other Reading Disabled which has been proposed at the World Intellectual Property Organisation by Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador and Paraguay.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/right-to-read-europe

Intellectual Property

The 2010 Special 301 Report Is More of the Same, Slightly Less Shrill Pranesh Prakash examines the numerous flaws in the Special 301 from the Indian perspective, to come to the conclusion that the Indian government should openly refuse to acknowledge such a flawed report. He notes that the Consumers International survey, to which CIS contributed the India report, serves as an effective counter to the Special 301 report.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/2010-special-301

Exceptions and Limitations in Indian Copyright Law for Education: An Assessment
This paper examines the nature of exceptions and limitations in copyright law for the purposes of the use of copyrighted materials for education. It looks at the existing national and international regime, and argues for why there is a need for greater exceptions and limitations to address the needs of developing countries. The paper contextualizes the debate by looking at the high costs of learning materials and the impediment caused to e-learning and distance education by strong copyright regimes.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/exceptions-and-limitations

Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010
In this post Pranesh Prakash conducts a legal exegesis of section 65A of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, which deals with the stuff that enables 'Digital Rights/Restrictions Management', i.e., Technological Protection Measures. He notes that while the provision avoids some mistakes of the American law, it still poses grave problems to consumers, and that there are many uncertainties in it still.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/tpm-copyright-amendment

Telecom

China Club instead of Bombay Club?
Emulate China's coordinated policies for strategic sectors, and we'll rely less on commodity exports, says Shyam Ponappa in his article in the Business Standard on May 13, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/China-club-Bombay-club

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2010-bulletin

June 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T09:38:46Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on events for the month of June 2010.

News Updates

Dont hang up on this one
Is 3G the next twist in the mobile phone growth story?
http://bit.ly/9NkaVP

Peeping Toms In Your Inbox
Nothing’s safe any more—not your mobile number, nor your e-mail—as they’re put on offer for the benefit of telemarketers, writes Namrata Joshi and Neha Bhatt in an article published in the Outlook.
http://bit.ly/ckmRRH

I don't want my fingerprints taken
Through this article published in Down to Earth, Nishant Shah looks at the role of the state as arbiter of our privacy.
http://bit.ly/aYdMia

An artist's hunt for lost stepwells
As part of the Maps for Making Change project, Kakoli Sen has brought to light some facts which she stumbled upon while mapping the stepwells in Vadodara. She mapped these and also discovered 14 such architectural heritage structures. The news was covered in the Times of India.
http://bit.ly/dxtwJU

Facebook, privacy and India
Does Facebook's decision to open out user information and data to third party websites amount to an invasion of privacy and should users' seriously consider getting out of the site? Sunil Abraham doesn't think so.
http://bit.ly/a2HzhT

APC starts research into spectrum regulation in Brazil, India, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa
Communication infrastructure is the foundation of the knowledge-based economy and while there has been a boom in the construction of undersea cables bringing potentially terabits of capacity to the African continent, the ability to deliver broadband to consumers is hampered by inefficient telecommunications markets and policies. Wireless connectivity offers tremendous potential to deliver affordable broadband to developing countries but inefficient spectrum policy and regulation means the opportunity to seize the advantages brought about by improvements in wireless broadband technologies are extremely limited.
http://bit.ly/a67ut8

WIPO Proposals Would Open Cross-Border Access To Materials For Print Disabled
The print disabled feel that the possible UN recommendations being negotiated upon may come up short, reports Kaitlin Mara in this article.
http://bit.ly/99kbS0

The Potential of Open Development for Canada and Abroad
IDRC held a panel discussion on 'The Potential of Open Development for Canada and Abroad' on May 5, 2010 in Ottawa.
http://bit.ly/aSp8J3

A letter to CGIAR in support of Open Access
Professor Subbiah Arunachalam wrote a letter to CGIAR apprising them of the need for, and advantages of making their research output Open Access.
http://bit.ly/doJmAe

Upcoming Event

The Internet, Culture, and Society - Looking at Past, Present, and Future Worldwide
It is now well known that with 4.5 billion mobile phone owners in the world and increased Internet penetration, global cultures and communities have experienced shifts in their economic, political, and social well-being due to the digital revolution. As a scholar and consultant who works worldwide, Prof Ramesh Srinivasan will illustrate how new media technologies have been used creatively to enable political movements in Kyrgyzstan, literacy and educational reform in India, and economic development across the developing world. In addition to this, he will discuss some of digital culture's biggest challenges, including considering how the Web can start to empower different types of cultural perspectives and knowledges.
http://bit.ly/c9cIvc

Research

Survey: Digital Natives with a cause?
This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.
http://bit.ly/cUtKhV

Queer Histories of the Internet: An Introduction
Nitya Vasudevan and Nithin Manayath introduce the Queer Histories of the Internet through this blog post discussing broadly the relationship between queer identity and technology.
http://bit.ly/9xdYRv

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'
This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.
http://bit.ly/9PV9YW

The power of the next click...
P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the Internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.
http://bit.ly/95twmz

Telecom

India's sorry spectrum story
In this article published in the Business Standard on June 3, 2010, Shyam Ponappa analyses the spectrum story in India. He says that the approach to spectrum management is an object lesson in how not to use information and communications technology for development.
http://bit.ly/cojFFT

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2010-bulletin

July 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T09:41:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on our events and other updates for the month of July 2010.

News Updates

Call for Case Studies on ICT
CIS invites organisations to participate in a study focusing on best practices in the use of ICTs in education for persons with disabilities.
http://bit.ly/d03jS0

Networking? Not working
Concerns about privacy, wastage of time and trivialized communication are some reasons ‘refuseniks’ are going off sites such as Facebook and MySpace, writes Shreya Ray in Livemint.
http://bit.ly/dpdKhX

Digital them about yourself?
If you’re on Facebook or have a blog, you could be a digital native, says Akhila Seetharaman.
http://bit.ly/ahA6Ts

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig
Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.
http://bit.ly/cLN8XE

CIS featured in the Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India
Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.
http://bit.ly/9GJsJ7

UID Act may be released for debate, may be introduced in monsoon session
An article by Karen Leigh & Surabhi Agarwal in livemint on June 30, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9Hq5dg

A New Age in News
Citizen journalism and online piracy were key topics during the opening day of the Mekong Information and Communication Technology conference. The 2010 Mekong ICT conference in Chang Mai, Thailand, has brought together an experienced crowd of experts from all over the globe. They have gathered to discuss the status, trends and the current situation of the ICT world.
http://bit.ly/bdGzbQ

Activists welcome privacy Bill, but point out concerns
Experts have welcomed the government's move to bring in a law for protecting individual privacy, amid concerns about the potential misuse of personal data it is collecting to execute social welfare and security schemes.
http://bit.ly/bnddaJ

Upcoming Events

Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex: A Lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin
The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), IT for Change and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are hosting a lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies, Miami University, Ohio, USA at CIS, Bangalore on 23 July, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9zy2Fa

Promoting Education through ICT
ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations to begin soon!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK

Research

The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction
This post examines attention economy as a brief prelude to a paper and monograph to be published on it. It examines the current theses on attention economy and a few approaches to reading attention economy in gaming besides foregrounding the attention economy and its functions and influence in MMORPGs.
http://bit.ly/OP7QFl

The Making of an Asian City
Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.
http://bit.ly/MXxyXP

Internet, Society and Space in Indian City: First Report
This is the first report on the progress of the research on Internet, Society and Space in Indian City. The post is a collection of some of the initial focus of these studies. I have started simultaneously exploring and testing various arguments and have listed some key observations from the ones that are nearing completion.
http://bit.ly/Ndmday

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!
The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.
http://bit.ly/P4mCKv

Accessibility

NMEICT Funds Book Conversion Project for the Print Disabled
IIT, Kharagpur, Daisy Forum of India, Inclusive Planet and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands to undertake a project for the print disabled. The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) is funding this project.
http://bit.ly/bWHi00

Right to Read: Campaign Updates
A nationwide campaign on Right to Read was co-organised by CIS along with the Daisy Forum of India and Inclusive planet to highlight the lack of content in accessible formats and accelerate change in the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, which presently does not permit the conversion of books in accessible formats for the benefits the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The campaign is affiliated with the global R2R campaign started by the World Blind Union in April 2008.
http://bit.ly/akoaSj

Intellectual Property

Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010
CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.
http://bit.ly/KLBQDx

A Guide to Key IPR Provisions of the Proposed India-European Union Free Trade Agreement
The Centre for Internet and Society presents a guide for policymakers and other stakeholders to the latest draft of the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which likely will be concluded by the end of the year and may hold serious ramifications for Indian businesses and consumers.
http://bit.ly/Rw7whN

Openness

Open Access to International Agricultural Research
Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.
http://bit.ly/cspMYY

Telecom

Catching up on broadband
The govt can invest some of the Rs 1,00,000 crore from the spectrum auctions to help India catch up on broadband, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest article published in the Business Standard on July 1, 2010.
http://bit.ly/ag67TU

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2010-bulletin

April 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-13T04:51:19Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! We bring you updates of our research, events and news for the month of April 2010.

News Updates

Worries voiced over ID Project
The Government of India's Unique Identification (UID) Project came under flak at a workshop organised jointly by the Citizen Action Forum (CAF), the People's Union of Civil Liberties - Karnataka, the Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society - An article in The Hindu - 17th April.
http://cis-india.org/news/worries-voiced-over-id-project

UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights
UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights - was jointly organized by the Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties - Karnataka, Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society on April 16th at IAT, Queens Road, Bangalore - An article in the Prajavani news paper - April 17th.
http://cis-india.org/news/uid-a-debate-on-fundamental-rights

UID is an invasion of Privacy: Experts
The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday - Deccan Chronicle, April 17th.
http://cis-india.org/news/uid-is-an-invasion-of-privacy-experts

Experts debate on UID and rights
Bangalore, Apr 16, DHNS: A debate on ‘UID and Fundamental Rights’ organised by several city-based organisations, discussed the social, ethical issues, economic and legal issues that accompanies the UID.
http://cis-india.org/news/experts-debate-on-uid-and-rights

Amendment to Copyright Act opposed
A report on the press conference held on 15th April, at the Press Club, Bangalore: The Hindu
http://cis-india.org/news/amendment-to-copyright-act-opposed

They fight for the visually challenged
Times News Network - A report on the press conference held at the Press Club, Bangalore on 15th April, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/news/they-fight-for-the-visually-challenged

Digital Natives Research Project Coordinator
The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, in collaboration with Hivos Netherlands, is looking for a Research Project Coordinator to help develop a knowledge network and coordinate international workshops for the project "Digital Natives with a Cause?"
http://cis-india.org/news/research-coordinator

Expel or not? That is the question
The decision of an international school to expel 14 students for their alleged ‘promiscuous’ behaviour has led to much debate and discussion.
http://cis-india.org/news/expel-or-not

Nokia eyes GeNext to tap mobile email mkt
Finnish handset giant banks on youth to be in the technology race
http://cis-india.org/news/nokia-eyes-genNext

Research

Critical Point of View: Videos
The Second event for the Critical Point of View reader on Wikipedia was held in Amsterdam, by the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Internet and Society. A wide range of scholars, academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and users came together to discuss questions on design, analytics, access, education, theory, art, history and processes of knowledge production. The videos for the full event are now available for free viewing and dissemination.

Colour Me Political
What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dn2

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dn1

Digital Natives with a Cause?
Digital Natives With A Cause? - a product of the Hivos-CIS collaboration charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology with a specific attention for developing countries to create a framework that consolidates existing paradigms and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dnrep

Advocacy

Accessibility

e-Accessibility: A Wiki Project
Envisaged and funded by the National Internet Exchange of India, and executed by the Centre for Internet and Society, a Wiki site pertaining to issues of disability and e-accessibility has recently been launched.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/e-accessibility-a-wiki-project

Copyright Law as a tool for Inclusion
Can Copyright Law be used as a tool for Inclusion? Rahul Cherian examines this in his blog on copyright.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/copyright-law-as-tool-for-inclusion

Web Accessibility as a Government Mandate?
Is Web accessibility just a Government Mandate? Should private sites be ignored? Wesolowski examines this in light of the steps taken by ictQATAR to make its website accessible to W3C standards, and hopes that Qatar and eventually all other Arab nations will follow suit and make Web accessibility much more of a mandate.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/web-accessibility-government-mandate

Intellectual Property

When Copyright Goes Bad
A part of the Access to Knowledge Project, this short film by Consumers International is available on DVD and online at A2Knetwork.org/film.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/when-copyright-goes-bad

Openness

Research Project on Open Video in India
Open Video Alliance and the Centre for Internet and Society are calling for researchers for a project on open video in India, its potentials, limitations, and recommendations on policy interventions.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/open-video-research

Does the Social Web need a Googopoly?
While the utility of the new social tool Buzz is still under question, the bold move into social space taken last week by the Google Buzz team has Gmail users questioning privacy implications of the new feature. In this post, I posit that Buzz highlights two privacy challenges of the social web. First, the application has sidestepped the consensual and contextual qualities desirable of social spaces. Secondly, Google’s move highlights the increasingly competitive and convergent nature of the social media landscape.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/does-the-social-web-need-a-googopoly

The (in)Visible Subject: Power, Privacy and Social Networking
In this entry, I will argue that the interplay between privacy and power on social network sites works ultimately to subject individuals to the gaze of others, or to alternatively render them invisible. Individual choices concerning privacy preferences must, therefore, be informed by the intrinsic relationship which exists between publicness/privateness and subjectivity/obscurity.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/the-in-visible-subject-power-privacy-and-social-networking

Internet Governance

Does the Safe-Harbor Program Adequately Address Third Parties Online?
While many citizens outside of the US and EU benefit from the data privacy provisions the Safe Harbor Program, it remains unclear how successfully the program can govern privacy practices when third-parties continue to gain more rights over personal data. Using Facebook as a site of analysis, I will attempt to shed light on the deficiencies of the framework for addressing the complexity of data flows in the online ecosystem.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/does-the-safe-harbor-program-adequately-address-third-parties-online

Sense and censorship
Sunil Abraham examines Google's crusade against censorship in China in wake of the attacks on its servers in this article published in the Indian Express.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/sense-and-censorship

Report on the Fourth Internet Governance Forum for Commonwealth IGF
This report by Pranesh Prakash reflects on the question of how useful is the IGF in the light of meetings on the themes of intellectual property, freedom of speech and privacy.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/report-on-fourth-IGF

Telecom

The Right Ring Tone
Focus on improving service quality with a strong partner, and not on one-shot stake sales, says Shyam Ponappa in his article published in the Business Standard on April 1, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/ring-tone

Other Advocacy

Maps for Making Change Wiki Now Open to the Public
Since December 2009, CIS has been coordinating and nurturing the Maps for Making Change project, organised in collaboration with Tactical Tech. During the past four months, participants have been on a challenging yet fertile and inspiring journey that is now slowly coming to an end. Would you like to know more about what has happened in the time that has passed? The Maps for Making Change wiki is a good place to start.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/others/maps-for-making-change-wiki-now-open-to-the-public

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2010-bulletin