Centre for Internet and Society

CIS-A2K Narrative Report (September 2012 – June 2013)

Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2013-11-30T11:18:56Z

This narrative report captures the work done by the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team in the first ten months of the grant. The report also throws some light on the CIS-A2K program strategy in the next one year.

This narrative report was originally published on the Wikipedia page. Access it here.

Background to the Access to Knowledge Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant to support the growth of Indian language Wikimedia communities to the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) to expand their Access to Knowledge program (A2K) in India. The grant enabled CIS to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand upon Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. Further, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

Section A: Introduction

Objective of the Narrative Report

This narrative report captures the work done by the A2K program during the period of September 2012 to June 2013. It examines projects and activities and its impact and outcomes over a period of the initial Ten months of the Grant. This report will also inform CIS-A2K program’s strategy for the next one year to achieve the goals set out by its donor, Wikimedia Foundation, and goals listed in our Work Plans (which were developed in consultation with the Wikimedia community in India). Importantly, this Narrative Report is critical for the Wikimedia community in India, Global Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation to get a comprehensive overview of A2K’s work and to critically assess the A2K program’s eligibility for further support.

Context

Though the mandate of the CIS-A2K program was clearly articulated before the commencement of the program, it should be noted, that the context in which the program had to undertake its work was very disturbed. Majority of the Wikimedia community in India saw CIS-A2K as an extension of the India Program as the entire team of the India Program moved into the CIS’s A2K program, except for the Director. Thus the CIS-A2K program inherited the not so conducive image of the India Program that was operational until August 2012. It should be noted that by August 2012, the Wikimedia community in India was extremely critical of the India Program’s work and achievement.[1]

Further, the community explicitly expressed lack of faith and Trust in the India Program’s method of work.[2] Thus, it is important to note that the CIS-A2K program did not start with a clean slate but had to first address multiple challenges, before it could take on active implementation of various programmatic activities. These challenges include:

building trust with the Wikimedia community in India;
building a collaborative relationship with Wikimedia India Chapter;
finding a new leadership to anchor the program that was left vacant in August 2012.

A2K Program Achievements (September 2012 to June 2013)

CIS Access to Knowledge (A2K) team started working on facilitating the improvement of Indian language Wikimedia projects with special focus on Indic Wikipedias in September 2012. Some key activities during the period of September 2012 to June 2013 are:

Number of newsletters published: 10
Number of events conducted: 49
Number of Wikipedia Education Programs conducted: 5
Number of people reached: about 1314
Number of women participants: approximately 406 (30.9%)
Number of community meet-ups & IRCs: 13
Number of sites across India where Wikimedia events were conducted: 18
Number of valid usernames: 582
Number of blogs posted: 58
Number of Print and Electronic Media mentions: 28
Number of Hackathons supported: 2
Number of community celebration events: 7
Number of Institutional partnerships: 13

CIS hired A2K Programme Director, T. Vishnu Vardhan, through an open and multi-stakeholder process of selection.[3] Representatives from Wikimedia India Chapter, Wikimedia community in India and Wikimedia Foundation were actively part of the selection process. This process was extremely critical and ensured participation of the Wikimedia community in India and the WMIN Chapter in deciding the leadership of the program.

Noted academician Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana was hired as Adviser to A2K.[4] This was done upon the request of the selection committee that was constituted for the selection of the program Director and in consultation with the WMF.

A2K proactively interacted with the WMIN Chapter Executive Committee and built collaborative working relationship.
Most of the A2K programs executed in collaboration with WMIN Chapter and community.
Began a new project on visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedias [5] [6] Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro are working on this. Two blog posts have been published so far. This was appreciated by the Wikimedia community in India and the WMF. Further, the WMF has expressed interest in extending these visualizations at a global level.
A2K has successfully reached out to the Wikipedians across Indian Language communities through conducting outreach programs, resolving technical bugs, supporting with required logistics, merchandise and media publicity, building public relations and communications.
Work-plans for the growth of Indic Wikipedias[7] were developed in a participatory manner with active collaboration from Wikimedia community in India and Wikimedia India Chapter Executive Committee.
Proactive open disclosure of A2K budget. and proposed revisions to the budget seeking feedback from the Wikimedia community in India towards building transparency.
CIS-A2K gave significant media visibility to Indian Language Wikipedias both in print and electronic media.

Section B: A2K Programme Impact

In discussing the A2K program’s impact we have presented below both the tangible and intangible aspects of our work.

Intangible Impact

The A2K team has left no stone unturned since the commencement of the program in September 2012 to work in a transparent manner. We have taken the following measures in being transparent:

Periodic publication of A2K work and outcomes through monthly newsletters.
Circulation of A2K monthly newsletters and notifications on various India related Wikimedia mailing lists.
Real-time listing and communication of activities on A2K Meta page.
Active documentation of all events and activities, which were published as blogs on CIS.
Prior announcements of all the events organized or supported by A2K.
Open and collaborative process of hiring Program Director.
Keeping the Wikimedia India Chapter EC in the loop on all programmatic developments since March 2013.
Proactive disclosure of A2K program budget and proposed revised budget to the Indian Wikimedia community.

In addition to this A2K has explored various possibilities of collaboration with the Indian Wikimedia community and Chapter alike. The biggest instance is the A2K Wok Planning exercise for 2013-14, where multiple stakeholders were consulted. These include

Some English-language Wikimedia community members from India;
Wikimedia India chapter Executive Committee;
Indian language Wikimedians and
A few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Some of the collaborative and community building efforts of A2K were:

Support to community-led activities and facilitating community participation and ownership (e.g. Wiki Women’s Month).
Mobilization of the Indian Wikimedia community in organizing mega community events like Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam.
Engagement with WMI Chapter EC and built a collaborative relationship.
Wikipedia Education programs in 4 Indian languages done in collaboration with the local Wikimedia community.
Supporting Wikimedians in conducting outreach events.
Almost all the A2K events since February were done in collaboration with WMI Chapter and the Wikimedia community in India.
A2K team actively participated in various community meet-ups.
A2K has provided significant media visibility to Indian Language Wikipedias, especially in mainstream English press.

These transparency and collaboration efforts resulted in building trust among the Wikimedia India communities, where in they have begun to constructively engage with the A2K program’s work. This is a significant achievement since the closure of India program in August 2012. However, there are still some Wikimedians who prefer to ignore the A2K program, which indicates that the A2K program still needs to prove its worth. Thus it could be said that the A2K program has been partly successful in winning the faith of the Indian Wikimedia communities and still needs to put in more effort in this direction. The A2K team is committed to achieve this by demonstrating success through its work during the next phase of this program.

Tangible Impact

It is difficult for the CIS-A2K program to either take direct credit for the growth or direct blame for the lack of it in the Indian language Wikimedia projects. However, we believe that we have been one of the factors — and sometimes a key factor — in impacting the growth of the Wikimedia projects and communities in India since the commencement of the project.

Though the A2K program has done some amount of work with almost all Indian language Wikipedias, the A2K team has had relatively more involvement in 10 Indic languages - Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu - during September 2012 to June 2013.

In addition to this based on the various outreach work done by A2K we have attempted to present an analysis of direct new Wikipedia users that have emerged in languages impacted by the A2K program, keeping in mind that community mobilization will always be an autonomous activity to some extent.


Graph 1: Growth of Articles in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

The growth momentum in Indian languages over the eight month period of September 2012 to June 2013 looks healthy.
Some language Wikipedias have been growing at a phenomenal rate than others in terms of percentage change since September 2012.
Punjabi, Assamese and Odia Wikipedias have a growth rate of 82%, 59%, and 37% respectively and are the top 3 Indian language Wikipedia projects during the ten month period.
In terms of absolute number of articles, Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi and Hindi Wikipedias have grown by about 5,812; 5,008; 3050; and 2,734 articles respectively.
However, given the small size of the Wikipedia communities in Punjabi, Nepali, Kannada, Odia and Sanskrit the growth achieved by them is much commendable and all efforts have to be put to ensure that this momentum continues by strengthening these communities and also expanding them.


Graph 2: Active Editors in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

There is a fluctuation in the number of active editors in all Indian language Wikipedias.
The active editors on Assamese, Marathi and Gujarati Wikipedias have been consistently coming down, which is a cause of concern.
It is important to note that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Nepali Wikipedias where the number of Active Editors were declining earlier have shown a remarkable turnaround. The efforts of the A2K program, especially in Telugu and Kannada, over the last 4 months could have resulted in this positive change.
It seems the Wikipedia Education Program, Nepal has been instrumental in bringing significant number of new active editors on Nepali Wikipedia.
Overall the active editors on Malayalam Wikipedia have crossed the 100 mark numerous times, making it the first Indian language Wikipedia to reach this benchmark. However, in month of May and June 2013 this dropped to a 2 digit figure again.
Looking at the trends Tamil Wikipedia may soon reach the 100 active editor mark.
Even Bengali community could cross 100 active editors if concerted efforts are put in.
The Assamese Wikipedia, which received support from A2K program until January 2013, had a consistent active editor population which was around 20 people. However, once the support from the A2K dwindled since February a declining trend can be noticed. One could deduce that the A2K program has had critical relevance in the growth of Assamese Wikipedia. The decline over the last 5 months also alerts us to the possibility of building dependencies on the A2K program, which is a concern that we need to address going forward.


Graph 3: Monthly growth of New Editors on Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to June 2013

On an average 94 new editors have joined Indian language Wikipedias every month.
Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil Wikipedias have consistently seen more than 10 new editors joining almost every month since Jan 2013.
Hindi, Marathi and Telugu have many new editors joining per month.
Total of 849 new people have become editors for Indian language Wikipedia since Sep 2012.
However, the conversion rate of new editors into active editors is still a challenge across all Indian language Wikipedias.


Graph 4: Snapshot of “Page Views” of Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 & June 2013

Overall the “Page View” trends of Indian Language Wikipedias until April 2013 look positive. but since the last two months the trend is in the decline. However, it should be noted that the month on month “Page View” trends keep fluctuating.
Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedias have shown highest percentage growth in page views since September 2012.
In absolute numbers Bengali Wikipedia has seen a spectacular growth of 3,000,000 page-views, Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedias witnessed a growth of about 927,150 and 365,913 a page-views respectively.
Based on the the absolute numbers of “Page Views” for Indian Wikipedias it could be speculated that there is a significant increase in demand for knowledge and information in Indian languages on the internet.

In the below given Graph 5, we have also looked at the direct impact the A2K programme had in cultivating new editors on Indian language Wikipedias through various outreach programs that conducted during September 2012 to June 2013.


Graph 5: New Editors from CIS-A2K Outreach September 2012-June 2013

It should be noted that during the 10 month period CIS-A2K reached out to a total of 1,314 participants. This is approximate 130 people per month. However, the username data for more than 700 participants could not be ascertained, due to incorrect inefficient data collection and input. This includes participants giving wrong usernames, trouble with the handwriting of some of the participants, etc. We have already taken note of this issue and have put in measures to efficiently capture the new user data. Hence, we have only presented an analysis of 582 participants, whose usernames are valid.

The analysis of this data reveals that more than 120 users have done more than 5 edits, which is about 21 per cent of the participants with valid usernames. Further, 25 participants have done more than 100 edits on English and various Indian language Wikipedias, which constitutes 4 per cent of the total participants that the A2K programme has reached out to. Further 11 users have become very active editors on Indian language Wikipedias with more than 1000 edits to their credit.

Section C: Learning and Challenges

Outreach

One of the biggest constraints with the existing outreach efforts across India including that of CIS-A2K's is that they are all based on light-touch model. We have learned that a light touch outreach with no follow up, no hand-holding, no support system will not be able to yield desired results. We need to have a thoroughly thought out well-designed outreach programs where there should be continuous interaction with the participants for a minimum of 2-3 months. CIS-A2K approach to outreach should be different from usual Wikipedia editing training. Further, any outreach with an educational institution on the lines of a "Wikipedia Education Program" requires at least 3-4 months commitment from everyone concerned (i.e. student, institution, community and CISA2K).

This in no way means diminish the importance of the light-touch model of 1/2 or 1 day Wikipedia editing training workshops, as seldom you get institutions/groups who are willing to commit to a long-term engagement. Thus a mixed approach is more pragmatic, while more energies need to put in long-term engagements.
There is a strand of criticism about effectiveness of physical outreach in general. However physical outreach for Indian languages is extremely essential as this is the lead exercise by which language communities have strengthened themselves over the years, though this has been very slow. The need to involve human element, face-to-face interaction and two-way communication is an extremely important factor of for growth of Indian language communities.
The need for each language community is different with respect to outreach. There are some communities that are more comfortable with conducting physical outreach while other communities are more efficient with outreach on social networking sites. For instance the Odia Wikipedia community where the average age of the active members is less than 25 is more active on Social Media and extensively uses it to network among themselves and to also discuss about the Wikipedia, whereas the Telugu Wikipedia is more comfortable with physical meetings and primarily uses Village Pump for all community discussions.
Based on the interaction with most of the Indian language Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K noticed that except for some communities like Malayalam, an institutional partnership is something that might not be easily taken up by community members. This is so because it requires high level of effort, time and strong network, amongst several other things. CIS-A2K has been focusing to address this need in general and in the five focus language areas in particular.

Work Plan Development and Community Communications

Even after sending multiple invitations, it took a lot of effort by CIS-A2K to encourage the larger community to engage and participate actively in the development of language focused work plan. CIS-A2K put its best efforts in inviting the community members through meta pages, village pumps, language and city-wide mailing lists, Indian mailing list, India English mailing list, meet-ups, IRCs, social-media channels to give their valuable suggestions and feedback. However, very few community members showed interest and helped in refining the plans. Better feedback could be gathered during physical and informal meetings with the community members.
Less than 10% active volunteers across all Indian language communities are active on Meta and even less on Indian mailing lists. During some informal conversations some community members expressed that it is too much of an additional burden to also visit Meta and engage. Taking into consideration that most of the language communities have less than 20 active volunteers, pragmatically speaking it is a huge ask to expect them to actively participate on Meta or mailing lists. Thus one cannot have a uniform standard and uniform mode of communication with different language communities. Thus CIS-A2K needs to explore various means of engaging with the Wikimedia community in India and should adopt a mixed channel approach of gauging community feedback. Though this is requires additional efforts on the team.
The mediums listed show a significant effort was made to solicit feedback and participation. It's okay and understandable that strategic planning is not for everyone, that volunteers economize their time devoted to the movement. So CIS-A2K does not necessarily see it as a failure that participation was low. What CIS-A2K aimed to do was to make sure participation was solicited, encouraged, and made possible. Of course ideally we would want higher participation, but CIS-A2K is careful not to confuse and turn higher participation in strategizing into a goal in itself.
In spite of this CIS-A2K took the risk and went ahead with a participatory and continuous mode of evaluation. We foresee a challenge in actively involving the community in quarterly evaluation cycles as this would require them also to introspect. In the five focus language communities such an introspection exercise was not done systematically before and a mandatory imposition may not be productive either for the Community or for CIS-A2K. The challenge would be that in the first 2 quarterly cycles CIS-A2K could miss meeting its own evaluation criteria. However, the opportunity here is to train the community to systematically introspect, which will go a long way in strengthening the Indian language Wikipedias and the associated communities.
Some programs, especially institutional partnerships, have a higher risk of failure than others. Though CIS-A2K committed to a very granular break-down of outcomes, it may require significant revisions. Hence it is extremely important for CIS-A2K to review and revise the plans and goals every 3-4 months.

Community Engagement/Development

Indian language communities are able to grow and cultivate new editors who come from similar background as their’s. For example, we find that the Telugu community comprises primarily in the age group of 30-50 years, while on the other hand, the Odia community consists of relatively younger editors between the age group of 20-30 years. Hence, it is essential that the community building programs take this aspect into consideration and work to diversify the community mix by engaging with people belonging to varied backgrounds.
Transparency and accountability are essential to build community trust. CIS-A2K has already taken various measures in this direction. However, there are occasions when more demands are placed on CIS-A2K, which consumes a lot of CIS-A2K's time and effort. The challenge is to struck a balance between the demands of transparency and accountability and the actual work they describe.
Meetups, one-on-one meetings/talk with community members are an essential ingredient to build long-term relationship. This is especially very important for nascent language communities with few editors. These kind of personal interactions help community members to know and connect with other Wikipedians. It also helps build trust and working relationship between community members and the A2K team.
CIS-A2K recognizes the potential role of Wikimedia India Chapter in growing the Wikimedia movement in India. Though CIS-A2K's work doesn't depend on the India Chapter, there is a huge potential for collaboration between the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS-A2K. CIS-A2K has put in its best efforts to build a cordial working relationship with the India Chapter. However, the extent of the collaboration would depend on the India Chapter's capacity and interest.

Section D: Progress Report

A detailed progress report of the A2K program activities has been presented on a monthly basis below. Most of the activities have been documented as blog posts or news-items on the CIS website. All of the A2K events, blog-posts and news-items can be seen here.

Outreach Sessions in September 2012

Note: Although most of these workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the reports for all of these were written during September 2012:

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012). A total of 25 participants came for this workshop. There were 15 new editors (of which 13 were female).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012). About 30 participants including students and teachers attended the workshop.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 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.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012). About 32 participants attended the session on Day 1 and 10 participants attended the session on Day 2.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012). About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (By Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012). There was coverage in the Hindu on September 28, 2012. About 60 students participated in the event.

Outreach Sessions in October 2012

Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (October 7, 2012, Bangalore). Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Jessie Wild led the session. Seven Kannada wikipedians participated in the event.
Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012). The Access to Knowledge team was approached by Gaurav Prashar, Assistant Dean at Inmantec College, Ghaziabad to organize the workshop. Over 120 participants attended the workshop including MCA, BCA, BBA students and faculty members.
Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (organised by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, October 28, 2012). Subhashish Panigrahi shares the experience in a blog post.
First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized! (Co-organised by CIS and Pune Odia Wikipedia community, Pune, October 27, 2012). The Access to Knowledge team showed the participants the Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians were connected to Facebook

Outreach Sessions in November 2012

Odia Wikipedia Workshop at AML (Academy of Media Learning, Bhubaneswar, November 10, 2012). Odia Wikipedians like Ansuman Giri, Manoranjan Behera and Diptiman Panigrahi participated in this event.
Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session (Bharati Vidyapeeth, Delhi, November 19, 2012). A Wikipedia introductory session was organised at Bharati Vidyapeeth Engineering College in Delhi early this year and a follow up session was organised by CIS on November 19, 2012. About 15 participants attended the follow up session.
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB (co-organized with CIS and with Odia Wikipedians, KMBB College, Bhubaneswar November 18, 2012). The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.

Outreach Sessions in December 2012

Marathi Wiki Workshop at TISS (co-organised with the Wikimedia India Chapter, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, December 8, 2012). There were about 25 participants (MA and PhD level) and 5 conductors - Yogesh, Nikita, Moksh, Kartik and Nitika.
Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (NMAIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka December 21, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Subhashish Panigrahi led the session. About 170 engineering students took part in this event.
Wikipedia Workshop at SRM (SRM University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, December 17, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Noopur Raval participated in the event. About 40 students from different engineering colleges in Chennai participated in the workshop.

(Note: The following events were also conducted in December 2012. However, reports for these events were published later in January.)
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Nitika Tandon, January 15, 2013). The workshop was conducted on December 12 and 13, 2012 along with the Wikipedia community members for M.A. and Ph.D. students at the Goa University. Over 35 participants attended the two-day workshop.
Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 19, 2013). The workshop was conducted on December 14, 2012. Over 30 participants attended the session.
Promoting GLAM in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 24, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team organised an introductory Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) session at Goa State Central Library on December 13, 2012. About 45 people from over 10 different GLAM institutes in Goa participated in the event.
Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level (by Nitika Tandon, January 25, 2013). An introductory session on Konkani in Wikipedia was conducted at the Konkani Department in Goa University on December 12, 2012. About 30 participants took part in the event.

Outreach Session in January 2013

A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad (RKGIT, Ghaziabad, January 17, 2013). Around 65 mechanical engineering students from second and third year participated in this workshop.

Outreach Session in February 2013

Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University (University of Delhi, February 5, 2013). A digital literacy workshop was organised at the Department of Arts, Delhi University for students pursuing their masters in Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies on February 5, 2013. About 30 students and 4 faculty members attended the workshop.

Outreach Sessions in March 2013

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit, Public Relations Officer at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani – Goa (BITS Goa) to organise Wikipedia session on March 7, 2013. About 30 people participated in the event.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop on Women's Day (organised by CIS, Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013). Telugu Wikipedians Dr. Rajasekhar and Rahmanuddin alongwith T. Vishnu Vardhan led this event.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the event.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.
Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay (organised by CIS, IIT Mumbai, March 28, 2013). Noopur Raval led the event.

Outreach Sessions in April 2013

Telugu Wikipedia Workshop (April 9, 2013 at the Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Arjunarao, Rahmanuddin and Pavithran along with T. Vishnu Vardhan led this half-day workshop. This was organized as a pre-event to Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
Telugu Wikipedia Workshop (April 11, 2013 at the Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Radhkrishna and Rajachandra led this half-day workshop. This was organized as part of the Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
Telugu Wikipedia Advance level Workshop (April 11, 2013 at the Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Telugu Wikipedians Arjunarao and Rahmanuddin led this demonstration. This was organized as part of the Telugu Wiki-Mahotsavam.
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.

Outreach Sessions in May 2013

Wikipedia workshop (May 8, 2013, TISS, Mumbai). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop to the students of Post Graduate Diploma in Community Media. A total of 14 students and 1 teacher attended this multi-lingual Wikipedia training workshop.

Outreach Sessions in June 2013

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (June 4, 2013, Ramakrishna Vidyalaya, Hassan). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.
Wikipedia workshop (June 10, 2013, Internet Institute, Palm Grove, Bangalore). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop. This orientation workshop on Wikipedia was attended by representatives from about 25 Civil Society organizations across India. This was followed up by a hands-on Wikipedia training workshop.
Kannada Wikipedia workshop for bloggers (June 24, 2013, Suchitra, Bangalore). Dr U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop and gave a presentation on Kannada Wikipedia.

Education Programme Updates

Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012). The program was launched on October 14, 2012 with 15 post-graduate students (90 per cent of these are women students) under the guidance of Prof. Dulumoni Goswami, Head of the Department of Education, Guwahati University.
Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012). This program is the first of its kind in an Indic language, and Malayalam community is doing the program in collaboration with the IT@School, a project of the Department of General Education, # Government of Kerala, setup in 2001, to foster the IT education in schools. Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). This was a competition to raise Wikipedia awareness and help students discover the joy of writing articles in their native language and an attempt to connect producers having knowledge in Gujarati to a wide audience of more than 4,00,000 readers.
Gujarat Wikipedia Education program:Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012 including students from the Galaxy Education System, Christ College students and members from the Wikipedia community.
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012). Odia wikipedians launched this program at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to bring students to edit articles on Odia wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors.
Odia Education Program (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, Orissa, January 26, 2013). This is the first Odia Education Program which ran for three months and 16 students took active part in contributing on various articles on Odia Wikipedia.
Odia Wikipedia Community Brings Wikipedia Education Program to IIMC, Dhenkanal (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 28, 2013). Sixteen student wikipedians signed up and took part in editing more than a dozen articles on Odia Wikipedia.

Hackathons

Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad (organized by CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, October 26 – 27, 2012).
A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi (CIS, New Delhi, November 11, 2012)

Meetups

Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia! (Kolkata, November 3, 2012). The journeys of three Wikipedians — Jayanta Nath, Deepon Saha and Ashwin Baindur are examined. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the meeting.
Wikivoyage, November 18, 2012: Ravikiran presented the Wikivoyage project and discussions on Wiki Project Karnataka. A total of 13 participants attended this meeting.
Wikidata, December 2, 2012: Lydia Pintscher presented the Wikidata project. The talk covered history of Wikidata project, state of the project and Wikidata India opportunities. About 13 people attended this event.
Wikimedia Meet-up, Hyderabad (7 Hyderabad based Wikimedians attended this meet-up. Abhijith Jayanthi - SIG Hyderabad, Rahimanuddin Shaik - SIG Telugu, Dr. Rajasekhar; Veera Venkata Chowdary, Tausif, Sai Anudeep, and Akhila Thumma came together for a discussion meeting with the CIS-A2K Program Director T. Vishnu Vardhan.
Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Kolkata Wiki Community, March 14, 2013). Four Wikipedians from Kolkata, Wikimedia Foundation's mobile Developer Yuvaraj Pandian and OPW intern Sucheta Ghoshal joined T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi for this event.
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Cuttack, March 16, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi met Odia Wikipedians in Cuttack to discuss about the current state of Odia Wikipedia and understand the community building strategies.
Odia Wikipedia – Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Bhubaneswar, March 17, 2013).
First Telugu Wiki Meetup @ CIS, Bangalore (co-organised by Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K on June 2, 2013). S.J. Veera conducted the meet-up.

Celebration and Events

Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary (organized by the Odia Wiki Community with support from CIS and Academy for Media Learning, January 29, 2013, Bhubaneswar). The event attracted good coverage in the local media:

Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai (by Noopur Raval, Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala, Mumbai, November 4, 2012).
Wiki Women's Day in Goa (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). The workshop was organised on International Women's Day. Rohini Lakshane and Nitika Tandon led the workshop.
Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (organised by Telugu Wikipedia Community and CIS, Hyderabad, April 9 – 11, 2013). T. 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.

Events Participated In

Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 (organized by Wikipedia Club, Pune, January 12 – 13, 2013).
GNUnify 2013 (organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, Pune, February 15 – 17, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.
Creative Commons comes to India (co-organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research in Pune, February 15, 2013, and CIS the Wikimedia India Chapter, Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore, February 25, 2013).The Access to Knowledge team participated in the CC meetings organized in Bangalore.
Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore (organized by Radhakrishna Arvapally, SIG (Special Interest Group) Chair, Bangalore (a part of the Wikimedia India Chapter) with support from Solutions IQ, Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Indian Institute of Management, February 25, 2013). Sudhwana Jogalekar (President, Wikimedia India) spoke on Wikimedia Projects. T. Vishnu Vardhan (program Director, A2K, CIS) gave a talk on 'Accessibility to Knowledge'. Joe Justice (Founder WikiSpeed) and Vibhu Srinivasan gave a presentation of WikiSpeed Car project. Chief Guest K.S. Viswanath (Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM) gave the welcome address. Noopur Raval participated in the event.
Knowledge Sharing through GLAM at Bangalore (organized by Wikimedia India and Creative Commons, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishad, Kumara Krupa Road, Bangalore, February 25, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event. CIS supported the event.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia Chapter India, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013 (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia at Avenir (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported the event.
Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications program (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore organizes a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report. During this period, CIS established partnerships with the Goa University, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, Regional Research Centre, Udupi, etc.

Section E: Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project


Given above is a chart depicting the visualization of Indic Wikipedia project

CIS hired Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Sajjad Anwar to work on visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia. Their project takes basic parameters, like page views, total articles and total editors, and compares them over time and across projects:

They have looked into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divided the visualisation into three different focus areas:
1. Basic parameters
2. Geographic patterns of edits
3. Exploring topics that receive greatest number of edits. You can read more about Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters
They also worked on visualisation of the page views statistics and the project specific pages. The page views indicate the number of unique visits Wikipedia project concerned has received in one month. You can read more about Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages
Readership Dashboard: The Readership Dashboard combines a line graph showing the movement of page view for a project across the years and bar graphs showing a separate variable for the same project.
Motion Charts: The motion charts help compare Indic Wikipedia Projects across Languages on various parameters such as new editors, new articles, active editors, total editors etc.
Calendar Charts: The calendar charts limits each chart section to 12 months allowing the user to focus on more granular movements of the variable concerned, say the number of new editors per month or page views per month, etc.

Section F: The Access to Knowledge Work Plan (2013 – 2014)

The Access to Knowledge team assessed 12 of the active Indic-language communities based on the community dynamics, growth patterns in readership, and community and edit contribution for drafting this work plan. In putting together this work plan the Access to Knowledge team has extensively engaged with various stakeholders. These include: a) some Wikimedia community in India members across various Indian-language Wikimedia projects; b) some English-language Wikimedia community members from India; c) Wikimedia India chapter executive committee; d) some potential institutional partners; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) Access to Knowledge program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Five languages were selected as core language areas. These include: Bengali, Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telegu. Some key factors that determined the selection of languages areas included:

The Access to Knowledge team's existing ties with knowledge institutions, groups and individuals.
Willingness of language community to interact and engage with the Access to Knowledge team.
Considering Wikimedia India Chapter EC's suggestion that Access to Knowledge team should work on at least one incubation project.
Access to Knowledge team's familiarity with the languages.

However, choosing these five languages do not necessarily mean that the A2K program would not focus on the other languages rather there would be more programmatic support and organizational ties to be built.

Language Area Work Plans

The language area work plans are linked to the individual meta-pages:

The expected and dream targets for the languages are shown below:

Expected and dream targets for languages
Parameters	Telugu		Odia		Kannada		Bengali		Konkani
	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Expected target	Dream target	Target
No. of Editors	755	905	120	350	600	1000	930	1200	NA
No. of New editors	200	350	35	100	300	700	30	100	24
No. of Acitve editors	25	40	20	40	50	70	100	150	NA
No. of Aritcles	54000	55000	5000	6000	25000	30000	27000	28000	500
No. of Outreach Events	29	34	12	15	12	20	5	15	12

The detailed plan with projection of outcomes and expected impact of the A2K program activities could be accessed here.

Overall Community Support

Besides the specific programs mentioned under individual language area plans, A2K team will provide overall support to all Indian-language Wikipedia communities. This includes but is not limited to:
Creating awareness through online editing videos, editing guides and digital coverage all in local Indian languages.
Supporting outreach activities
Capacity building to multiply outreach efforts. This would include training sessions to improve presentation skills, audience engagement skills with mock presentations and video recording for feedback. The first Train-the-Trainer program is being planned in June.
Facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst community members with an aim to foster creation of new project ideas in the form of physical meet-ups, hangouts/Skype calls, and small/large scale conferences.
Organize language specific IRCs where community members from that specific language could discuss their plans, issues, concerns, and anything at all.
Encourage community members to share feedback, suggestions or details of any kind of support on A2K's Meta help page.
Supporting communities for bug reporting and following up for resolution. A detailed overall community support page can be found here.

Section G: Team Orientation and Development

Team’s Professional Development

A one-day orientation was organized in CIS where Wikimedia board members Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala helped the Access to Knowledge team members to develop an agenda for a period of 6-7 months. They helped team members to find overlaps, prioritise and recognize possibilities to make best use of available resources. The board members also shared learnings, principles and concepts from other movements that could be applied to the Access to Knowledge program.
A one-day orientation program was organized with Wikimedia India Chapter Executive Committee Members to find common minimum program on which both the Chapter and the Access to Knowledge team could work together to achieve common objectives. The orientation also helped define overlapping areas and how the two oragnisations will handle them.
A one-day orientation program was organised with Wikimedia community in India Members such as Tinu Cherian who gave a talk on how to leverage mainstream and social media; Gautam John who organized a workshop on organisational procedures for greater transparency and accountability, and Arun Ramarathnam who spoke about best practices for working with Wikipedia community. This orientation was organized as a part of training and skill development for the Access to Knowledge team members.
Since March 2013 CIS-A2K started having weekly Team Learning Sessions on every Wednesday. However, given the hectic schedules of the Team these could not be organized in a regular manner.

Exits and New Hires

CIS has an office in New Delhi with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge program. The team is currently headed by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director (Access to Knowledge). Other team members include Tejaswini Niranjana (Distinguished Fellow), Dr. U.B. Pavanaja (Program Officer, Indian Language Initiatives), Nitika Tandon (Program Manager) and Subhashish Panigrahi (Program Officer).

	T. Vishnu Vardhan: Vishnu Vardhan was hired as the new program Director-Access to Knowledge at CIS. Vishnu Vardhan has over the last 11 years worked in various capacities as researcher, grant manager, teacher, project consultant, information architect and translator. Vishnu Vardhan managed the Art, Crafts and Culture portfolio of Sir Ratan Tata Trust and also worked as Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore.
	Dr. U.B. Pavanaja joined the team as program Officer, India Language Initiatives on March 4, 2013. Dr. Pavanaja holds a Master’s degree from Mysore University and Ph.D. from Mumbai University. He was a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, for about 15 years. He is one of the earliest editors of Kannada Wikipedia. He has to his credit many firsts, viz., first Kannada website, first Kannada online magazine, first Indian language (Kannada) website to receive Golden Web Award, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for Palm OS, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for WinCE device (HP Jornado 720), first Indian language version (Kannada) of universally popular Logo (programming language for children) software, etc.
	Tejaswini Niranjana is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai joined A2K as an Adviser. She guides the Access to Knowledge team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and helps in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

The following staff left the organisation:

Shiju Alex, Program Manager, Access to Knowledge left the organization on November 16, 2012.

Noopur Raval, Program Officer, Access to Knowledge left the organization on April 24, 2013.

Section H: Additional Links and Data

Blog Entries

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report: January – June 2012 (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012).
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012).
The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012).
Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex, September 30, 2012).
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012).
Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 16, 2012).
Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012).
Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012).
Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012).
Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 29, 2012).
Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012).
Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012).
First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 31, 2012).
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 10, 2012).
A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi (a guest blog post by Yuvraj Pandian, November 11, 2012).
Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad (a guest blog post by Yuvi Panda, November 19, 2012).
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 19, 2012).
Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants (by Nitika Tandon, November 19, 2012).
Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 19, 2012).
Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai (by Noopur Raval, November 21, 2012).
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012).
Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 30, 2012).
Marathi Wiki Workshop at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 8, 2012).
Non Unicode ISCII Text Can be Converted to Unicode Now! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 19, 2012).
A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 27, 2012).
New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups (by Noopur Raval, December 27, 2012).
A Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 30, 2012).
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 30, 2012).
Two-day Wiki Workshop in Goa University: An Introduction (by Nitika Tandon, January 14, 2013).
Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 19, 2013).
Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 (by Subhashish Panigrahi, January 21, 2013).
A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad (by Subhashish Panigrahi, January 22, 2013).
Bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in Public Domain (by Nitika Tandon, January 22, 2013).
Promoting GLAM in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, January 24, 2013).
Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level (by Nitika Tandon, January 25, 2013).
Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University (by Nitika Tandon, February 5, 2013).
Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 19, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia Community Brings Wikipedia Education Program to IIMC, Dhenkanal (by Subhashish Panigrahi, February 28, 2013).
Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (by Nitika Tandon, March 19, 2013).
Ahmednagar — Marathi Wikipedia Workshop (by Tanveer Hasan, March 18, 2013). This is a report contributed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society.
Wiki Women's Day in Goa (by Nitika Tandon, March 19, 2013).
Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 3, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 4, 2013).
Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2013).
Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain, April 29, 2013). This is a guest blog post by Netha Hussain.
Odia Wikipedia: Needs Assessment (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 11, 2013).
Access to Knowledge Work Plan: Synopsis of Feedback by Wikipedians (by Nitika Tandon, May 20, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 30, 2013).
CIS Signs MOU with TISS, Mumbai (May 31, 2013).
A Telugu Wiki Meetup @ CIS, Bangalore (April 2013 - June 2014) (a guest blog post by S J Veera, June 2, 2013).
Access To Knowledge Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014) (by T Vishnu Vardhan, June 10, 2013).
My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad (by T Vishnu Vardhan, June 19, 2013).
Wikipedia Visual Editor (by Nitika Tandon, June 27, 2013).
A 'Kannada' Wikipedia Workshop for Bloggers (by U B Pavanaja, June 28, 2013).

Press Coverage

Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (OdishaDiary.com, October 31, 2012).
‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’ (by Kalyan Subramani, Bangalore Mirror, November 15, 2012).
A Report of the Odia Wikipedia Workshop held in KMBB College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar (Sambad, November 19, 2012).
OdishaDiary conferred prestigious Odisha Youth Inspiration Award 2012 to Odia Wikipedia team (by Pravuprasad Routray, Orissa Diary, November 23, 2012).
A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).
વિકિપીડિયા ગુજરાતી માં પણ છે (by Harsh Kothari, Cybersafar, November 28, 2012).A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).
First Odia Wikipedia Education Program concludes at IIMC, Dhenkanal (OdishaDiary Bureau, January 27, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia's 9th Anniversary and Workshop on Application of Odia in Media (Sambad, January 30, 2013).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନ‌ବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ (Odishan.com, February 4, 2013).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନ‌ବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ (Sambad, February 4, 2013).
Odia language workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia: Application of Odia language in e-media (Odishaviews.com, February 5, 2013).
Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media (Odishaviews.com, March 2, 2013).
Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media (India Education Diary.com, March 2, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop, Mysore — Coverage in Prajavani (Prajavani, March 25, 2013).
CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Prajavani (Prajavani, May 24, 2013).
CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Udayavani (Prajavani, May 24, 2013).
A Feature on Wikipedia and Telugu Wikipedians on HMTV (Prajavani, May 30-31, 2013).
Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme on HMTV (Prajavani, June 1, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Prajavani, June 5, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Samyukta Karnataka, June 5, 2013).
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Vijaya Karnataka, June 5, 2013).
Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News (Suvarna News 24x7, June 13, 2013).
Wiki donors (TimeOut Bengaluru, June 21, 2013).

Newsletters

The following newsletters have been published:

September 2012 Bulletin
October 2012 Bulletin
November 2012 Bulletin
December 2012 Bulletin
January 2013 Bulletin
February 2013 Bulletin
March 2013 Bulletin
April 2013 Bulletin
May 2013 Bulletin
June and July 2013 Bulletin (During this month the CIS-A2K Newsletter was redesigned based on feedback from the community and thus the June Newsletter was clubbed with July 2013).

Talk @ CIS

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller (CIS, Bangalore, November 12, 2012). Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk on Wikipedia.

Section I: Budget Utilization

Currency in INR	2012-13 (Per month)	1st Year (10 months)	Budget Utilization (Sept. 2012 to June 2013)
People
Prg. Manager	1,17,000	1,170,000	1,170,000
Prg. Officer	58,800	5,88,000	580,000
Prg. Officer	1,44,000	14,40,000	1,008,000
Communications role	60,000	6,00,000	2,20,000
New Prg. Director	2,00,000	2,000,000	1,000,000
Consultant	34,500	3,45,000	2,76,000
Benefits – All	6,250	62,500	0
Staff costs	6,20,550	6,205,500	4,262,000
Rent	47,300	4,73,000	5,70,000
Janitorial	2,750	27,500	48,634
Utilities	7,500	75,000	61,836
Telephone	4,000	40,000	47,819
Office pantry	5,000	50,000	38,765
Office space	66,550	6,65,500	7,67,054
Travel
SF travel	77,726	7,77,257	1,81,887
Wikimania travel	0	0	0
Domestic travel	1,10,000	1,100,000	1,373,469
Travel	1,87,726	1,877,257	1,555,356
Printed materials	50,000	5,00,000	38,800
Design, Creative	55,000	5,50,000	1,25,400
Volunteer development	50,000	500,000	0
Postage & Mailing	2,500	25,000	5,800
Office supplies	7,500	75,000	50,192
General expenses	1,65,000	1,650,000	2,20,192
Total before fees	1,039,826	10,398,257	6,804,602
Admin fee	51,991	5,19,913	5,19,913
Program fee	51,991	5,19,913	5,19,913
Total	1,143,808	11,438,082	7,844,428

Notes:

The above table gives a picture of the A2K program budget utilization (un-audited) for the period Sept. 2012 to June 2013. Thus it is important that these figures be read as provisional figures, which could change post the statutory audit as per the Indian laws binding a Registered Society.
Approximately there is a 31% underspending of the Budget during the ten month period. This is mainly because of the transition of the program to CIS took sometime along with delays in the recruitment of the New Program Director. CIS-A2K has requested the WMF for a reallocation of the Budget since then.

Footnotes

[1]. Independent Report from Tory Read on India Education Program

[2]. Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot. Wikimedia-India Mail archive

[3]. Most recent updates on the hiring of the Programme Director for the A2K programme. Wikimedia-India mail archive

[4]. The Access to Knowledge - Bulletin - January '13

[5]. Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters

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

[7]. CIS-A2K Work Plan (Draft). Wikimedia-India mail archive

[8]. CIS-A2K Budget, Utilization Report and proposed revision. Wikimedia-India mail archive

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-access-to-knowledge-narrative-report-september-2012-june-2013

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia

nitika — 2013-12-31T11:48:02Z

The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K team) is pleased to share with you the key accomplishments about the work it accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013 in this report. In accordance with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge Program’s (CIS-A2K) Konkani Work Plan 2013-14 the program has invested time and effort to build Konkani Wikimedia community and projects.

Highlights

Increased editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K has been organising different programs and workshops. The idea is to bring in as many volunteers as possible who can contribute to Konkani Wikipedia for years to come. We have organised these outreach sessions mainly in Devanagari, Romi and Kannada scripts. As a result of these programs we have been able to significantly increase no. of editors, consistently have minimum of 5-6 active editors per month and build a community of volunteers. You can also view level of editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia for the past few months in the chart below:


Above: Edits Per Month on Konkani Wikipedia (Mar-13 to Dec-13) (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Increased number of articles on Konkani Wikipedia

Total number of articles increased from 150 in Sep 2013 to 315 in Nov 2013. The number of articles have doubled over a period of 3 months. We should keep in mind that out of those who edited in Devanagari; 95% of them were completely new to the input method and had to spend considerable time learning and practicing it.


Above: No. of articles on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Translated Media Wiki messages

CIS-A2K organised translation sprint to help translate Media Wiki interface messages. We achieved translating 79% of these messages in Konkani Devanagari while all 100% messages have already been translated in Romi script

Re-release of Konkani Vishwaksh under Creative Commons License

Upon CIS-A2K‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era. Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. To know more about click here and here

Initiated & Completed 30% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Goa University in collaboration with the CIS-A2K is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. 37 participants are enrolled in this project who are working to digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized. The program started on 19th October and in just about 2 months 30% of the encyclopedia had already been digitized. You can monitor the progress of this project on Wikisource. Here are the links for Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 and Volume 4. Please note that some of the participants firstly digitize the encylopedia either in their Sandbox or offline and then move it to Wikisource. To know more about the project click here.

Signed an MoU with Goa University

Goa University entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University and CIS-A2K will work together to help build Konkani Wikipedia and community.

White paper by a Linguist

Fr. Pratap Naik, S.J. B.Sc., B.Ed. M.A. (Linguistics), M.Phil. (Linguistics), Ph.D. (Linguistics) has written a white paper discussing issues faced by Konkani language and his views on how it should be dealt on Wikimedia projects. We'll soon upload the white paper on Wikimedia Commons and make the link available.

14 Outreach session, over 450 participants, in 3 months

CIS-A2K organised about 14 outreach sessions and reached out to over 450 people to create awareness about Konkani Wikipedia and the community between Sep-Dec 2013. Details of these sessions can be found here.

Got consensus from field experts

Over the past few months CIS-A2K has spoken with Konkani Wikipedians (such as Frederick Noronha, Deepak D'Souza, Seby Fernandes) Konkani linguists (such as Fr. Pratap), professors from Konkani Department at Goa University (Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar), cultural experts (such as Prof. Alito Siqueira and Harriet Vidyasagar) and other experts to propose a solution for Konkani Wikipedia that faces a problem of usage of multiple scripts. To a great extent we have got consensus from different field experts that we should strive to create separate Wikis for each script, at least those which prove to be active.

Wikipedians Speak

One of the ongoing projects of CIS-A2K is 'Wikipedians Speak' which are small videos of Wikipedians that captures their expereinces, learnings and challenges. As a part of this project CIS-A2K published several videos of Konkani Wikipedians.

Link to the post published on Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/work-accomplished-konkani-wikipedia

India Access To Knowledge/Draft Work plan July 2014 - June 2015

vishnu — 2014-04-08T09:51:27Z

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the open knowledge movement in South-Asia and in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008 when Jimmy Wales visited Bangalore. From September 2012 it has been actively involved in growing the movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Based on the 18-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed its Work Plan for July 2014 to June 2015.

This was originally published on Wikimedia blog

This work plan consists of 21 plans across 6 verticals. These are:

7 Language Area Plans: CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of its goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic language Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which can be seen here.
3 Community Strengthening Initiatives: We propose community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program. A detailed plan for each of these initiatives is available here.
8 Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects: These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language. All the stand-alone projects are more fully described here.
Creating Movement Resources: Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike in English there were not many Wikimedia-related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel there is an urgent need to create movement resources in Indic languages like a Creative Commons (CC) handbook; a Copyright handbook; training manuals; video tutorials, etc. See our plans for concerted efforts to create resources for strengthening the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages here.
Publicity, Research and Documentation: Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Also, the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit from more systematic research and documentation. CIS-A2K will put in more intensive efforts into Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.
General Support and Service to the Movement: CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work so far. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. This page gives more details about the proposed work.

The work plan includes details of aims, objectives, programme activities and expected outcomes. Most of the language area plans were put together in active consultation with the respective Wikimedia language communities. Various inputs and ideas contributed, opportunities provided, and challenges thrown at the CIS-A2K program during the last year by the Wikimedia communities in India, our institutional partners, Executive Committee (EC) of Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking Team have significantly informed our work plans.

Introduction

Background to CIS-A2K Program

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to CIS in Bangalore, India to expand their A2K programme in India. The grant was released over a three phase period - first in September 2012 (₹ 11,000,000), second in June 2013 (₹ 7,500,000) and third in December 2014(₹ 7,500,000). The purpose of the grant was to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand the Indic Wikimedia projects and associated communities. In addition, the grant was aimed at generating improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

CIS-A2K created an Annual Work Plan (2013-2014) that is being successfully implemented. Most of the projected outcomes against the plans have already been met. There have also been many unplanned outcomes. CIS-A2K has periodically been sharing its work openly with the Wikimedia community in India, WMIN and WMF's Grantmaking team. See all our reports and newsletters here.

Objective

The objective of the CIS-A2K is to catalyse the growth of open knowledge movement in South Asia and in Indic languages. Within the Wikimedia universe CIS-A2K specifically strives to further grow the Indic and English Wikimedia projects and communities by a) supporting and serving the Wikimedia communities; b) building institutional partnerships; c) bringing more content under free license; d) designing and executing projects with community participation; e) strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers; and f) fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem.

Context

It is important to understand the two broader contexts in which CIS-A2K program operates, which underpins the implementation of this work plan.

Linguistic Diversity of India: India is known for its linguistic diversity. India is home to several dominant languages and also several small languages which are facing extinction. Due to the large number of languages that exist in India, the country has more than 20 different language Wikipedias. Each Indic Wikimedia language project is different from the others in terms of community structure, speaker base, literacy level, technical knowledge, existing documentation, language corpora and challenges in the cyberspace, etc. Hence, each Indian language has its own strengths and challenges which are quite different from each other.

Since each Indian language is so distinct, we cannot apply a ‘one-size fits all’ approach; hence CIS-A2K early on adopted the strategy of creating a detailed plan for each language. During 2013-14 we chose five (of which only four could be executed) Indic languages for focussed intervention and developed [plans]. This strategy did pay off and we have now decided to work on seven languages. It is important to note that we are cautious about not massively scaling up this strategy and our choice to work on seven language areas is well informed. However, we have planned to execute some stand-alone projects in other Indic languages and will provide need based support to other Indic Wikimedia communities.
Institutional Context: The A2K program is housed at CIS Bangalore. CIS is an almost 6 year old non-profit organisation [with offices in Bengaluru and New Delhi] focussing on interdisciplinary policy and academic research. CIS conducts policy research in the following areas - accessibility, access for knowledge [including free/open source software, open content, open standards, open access and open data], internet governance [including privacy and freedom of speech and expression], telecom [limited to shared backhaul and shared spectrum]. CIS produces academic research focusing on digital natives and digital humanities.

CIS shares the same values as Wikimedia and the free and open source software community. CIS believes Wikimedia's objectives of disseminating free knowledge to each and every individual. There are certain advantages the A2K program has because of its location within CIS. Some of these include: a) opportunity to leverage the strong network CIS has developed with various free culture / openness movement stakeholders in the past 6 years of its existence; b) the advantage of having an office space in a city which is the hub of the openness movement in India; c) readily available administrative and support staff and systems that saves a lot of A2K staff's time; d) cross-pollination of ideas and work done in other CIS programs and vice-versa; e) organisational principles like subsidiarity, war on meta-work, post-facto accountability, and amorphous institutional boundaries give the A2K team members amazing programmatic agility; and f) the right kind of ecosystem for free knowledge work[1] There are also some disadvantages: a) CIS being a non-chapter or Wikimedia volunteer-driven entity faces very valid questions about legitimacy, representation and "voluntary sector" vs. "volunteer" dichotomy; b) a section of the community view CIS-A2K as a competitor to WMIN for financial resources which undermines trust-building and consequently threatens synergies between WMIN and A2K c) CIS has to be conservative about attributing Wikimedia growth and community growth to A2K initiatives as it can be misconstrued as credit-grabbing.[2]

Methodology

Process

This work plan is put together based on an extensive engagement with various stakeholders of Wikimedia movement in India. These include a) some Wikimedia volunteers across Indic Wikimedia projects; b) WMIN Executive Committee; d) Institutional Partners of CIS-A2K; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) A2K Program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Some of the language area plans were shared with that particular language Wikimedia community for feedback over the Wikipedia village pumps, mailing lists and social media groups. Each plan document has a list of contributors who have contributed in developing the plan.

Structure

There are 21 diverse plans within this plan. During the work planning exercise we realized that this diversity is both a good feature and a potential bug. We were concerned about making these plans intelligible. So we have worked very hard to come up with a standard template for all plans. Thus a cursory glance may give the impression that some plans look similar, but they are not. However, you may see repetitions in strategies across plans. Also in some plans we had to deviate from the template. Moreover, it is less productive to compare one sub-plan with another sub-plan as each plan was developed taking into consideration a) specific strengths and opportunities that CIS-A2K program could build on; b) particular needs for support to which we could respond; and c) specific challenges that require localized solutions.

Granularity

This plan is not set in stone and will be periodically (right now quarterly) reviewed and revised if required. The intention of this work plan is to continually ensure better design and better engagement. Thus this "plans within the plan" structure was essential to evolve a sense of granularity of the CIS-A2K team’s work along with micro-level outcome and impact metrics. This will give us the flexibility to amputate a plan, if it fails, without affecting the rest of the plans. We also believe that this granularity in plans will give a focussed direction for the CIS-A2K team and the volunteers who will collaborate with us in the implementation.

Mapping Plan to Budget/Mission Level Transparency

Each plan has an independent budget and is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. An attempt is made to correlate why we are spending a certain amount on a certain activity. Thus all these budgets are very optimally planned and the overall budget is an assimilation. CIS-A2K believes that this will give mission level transparency to our work and provide a clear structure of accountability to the movement.

Annual Work Plan July 2014-June 2015

Language Area Work Plans

CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of the proposed goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which is given below.

Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas have included:

Deepening the work. We have decided to continue our work in the language areas chosen last year as we believe that we need to deepen our work to ensure that the momentum we have built will be sustained even after our exit.
Networking of institutions and groups. The A2K team has put together a list of knowledge institutions, groups and individuals with whom it has some connections and believes that it can bring them into the Wikimedia movement. These collaborations will not only result in significant quality-content contributions, but will lead to the diversification and expansion of that particular language Wikimedia community.
Willingness of that particular language community to interact and engage with the A2K team. Though we tried approaching other language communities informally, we were given to understand that they would like to consider engaging with us at a later stage. We respect the community's decision and express our willingness to work with newer language areas in a subsequent phase.
Familiarity of the A2K team members with the language. Each of us are editors/can edit or at least read the discussions in most of the above language Wikipedias. This will give us an insider's perspective of what is happening in that particular language community and the Wikimedia projects.

Community Strengthening Initiatives

CIS-A2K proposes to undertake three community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program.

Nurturing Mediawiki and Tech Talent in Indic Communities: Through this initiative CIS-A2K aims to make the Indic Wikimedia communities relatively more self-reliant in addressing minor technical issues through nurturing and building community level technical leadership. This could go a long way in reducing excessive dependency on the Engineering resources and will help the Indic communities in building strong technical liaison with the Media Wiki global community and the WMF Engineer team. The detailed plan is available here.
Wikimedia Train the Trainer Program, CIS-A2K: The program will help build capacity and enable community members to conduct outreach sessions independently or with minimal support to introduce Wikipedia to prospective editors in their respective Indian languages. See here for a detailed design of this initiative.
Wiki-Data India Marathon: Wikidata India Marathon will be a month long travelling event (or a set of events) across India. The primary objective of this marathon will be to introduce Wikidata to various Indic Wikimedia communities and show how it can be used and what benefits it has. For more details see here.

Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects

Many project ideas came up as potential opportunities and as unplanned outcomes of our work during the last year. Based on an internal evaluation and thorough due-diligence we have short-listed some projects that could have high rate of success and learning. We propose to take up 8 such projects as stand-alone Wikimedia projects during this work plan period. These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language.

Med GLAM Project at Calicut Medical College: The main objective of this project is to create, curate and make openly available images from the Department of Pathology, Calicut Medical College (CMC) for the benefit of medical and para-medical students and staff of CMC specifically and for the larger medical fraternity across the world, using free/open knowledge database Wikimedia Commons.
Wiki Loves Public Art (India): This is a photography competition that seeks to get photographs of works of public art on Wikipedia. The competition is modelled on Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) which has been running successfully since 2010. We plan to execute this in active collaboration with WMIN GLAM SIG.
100 Books on Gujarati Wikisource: The main objective of this project is to add significant content to Gujarati Wikisource using OCR. This project will be executed in collaboration with Gujarati Wikimedia community, WMIN Chapter, Forbes Gujarati Sabha (which will provide access to copyright free Gujarati content to be put up on Gujarati Wikisource) and The Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda.
Urdu Wikipedia Education Program at MANUU: This project aims to roll out Wikipedia Educational Programme aimed at the students of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.
Odia Wikisource as OER: This project aims to make Odia Wikisource a live project. Towards this three things will be done by CIS-A2K. First, to get a major Odia author's (Dr. Jagannath Mohanty) content re-released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and to host it on Odia Wikisource. Second, with the help of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences undertake a project whereby the students will type and proof read the books on Odia Wikisource, which could be used as OER across various educational institutions. Third, the digitized children's literature in Odia will be freely distributed across the government schools in an offline form. This project is inspired by the Malayalam Wikimedia community's efforts of introducing Wikisource in schools as part of the IT at Schools program in Kerala.
Making the Tulu Wikipedia Live
Making the Santali Wikipedia Live
Telugu Wiki Bus: This pilot project aims to create massive awareness about Indic Wikimedia projects in smaller cities and towns. This is modelled on the Google bus program and will be implemented in the Telugu speaking region of Andhra Pradesh.

Creating Movement Resources

Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike English there are not many Wikimedia related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources, which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel that there is an urgent need for concerted efforts to create resources to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages. We strongly believe that creating these movement resources will go a long way in growing and strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers beyond the limits of CIS-A2K program. Some of the activities in this plan have a larger fit with the larger institutional work of CIS in the domain of Intellectual Property Rights and Openness.[3] We will collaborate with the legal expertise within CIS in executing some of these activities. A detailed plan of activities under this initiative along with a budget can be seen here.

Publicity, Research and Documentation

Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Many of the long time Indic Wikimedia volunteers have, during our interactions, expressed the need to increase the publicity about the Indic Wikimedia projects so that there is increased public awareness. CIS-A2K has left no stone unturned to get print and electronic media publicity for Indic Wikimedia projects and communities duirng 2013-14. Because of our efforts there were about 100 news items the print media[4] and about 10 programs on electronic media[5] in the last year.

Also the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit with more systematic research and documentation. It should be noted that CIS has been doing research about the Wikimedia movement way before the Access to Knowledge program got a grant from Wikimedia Foundation. Researching on various elements of the Wikimedia movement is not something new for CIS and the team will continue its efforts in this direction. In addition to action research, we undertook systematic documentation of the movement during the last year. More intensive efforts will be put in Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.

General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. Most of these requests are listed here and here. CIS-A2K also receives requests over e-mail and some community members do reach out to us over mobile phones to place requests. In general the quick response time of CIS-A2K to these requests has been appreciated by many of the community members. We would like to continue with our efforts in supporting and serving the Wikimedia community in India and maintain the quick response time. CIS-A2K has actively consulted with the Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) before supporting most of the community requests, especially when it involved allocating funds for large community events like Tamil Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations. We also ensure that supporting community events is done in a transparent manner. However, we would need to review our methods and further streamline systems of support, which will be worked up on during this year. This page will give more details about the proposed work.

Learning and Evaluation

Based on discussions with the Wikimedia India Chapter EC and with some members of the Wikimeda community, the A2K programme had put together some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work during the last year. We have included some more metrics for evaluation this year.

Evaluation Tools

Quarterly growth of no. of articles
Quarterly growth of no. of total editors
Quarterly growth of no. of new editors
Quarterly growth of no. of active editors
Quarterly growth of no. of very active editors
No. of page views
No. of articles < 2 KB < 5 KB
No. of new tools/gadgets made available during a time-slice
No. of mentoring interactions
No. of bugs filed and resolved
No. of edits (Article, Other mainspace edits)
Print and electronic media mentions

Reports

We will undertake quarterly and annually review of its work using the above evaluation tools. The team will also report the successes and learnings to the Wikimedia India & the global community. In addition to this the A2K team will actively review progress of each language area plan in collaboration with the respective Wikimedia community. Based on this feedback we will undertake mid-course corrections, should there be a need. This will be openly shared on the respective plan discussion pages on Meta. In addition to this, A2K will continue to publish monthly newsletter informing the larger community of the various activities A2K has undertaken in a certain month and is planning to undertake in the upcoming month. Towards the the end of the grant, A2K will share an impact report encompassing analysis of all year long work done by A2K. To summarize following reports will be published in the year of 2014 - 2015:

Quarterly Report 1 (July 2014 - October 2014)
Quarterly Report 2 (November 2014 - February 2015)
Quarterly Report 3 (March 2015 - June 2015)
Impact Report (July 2014 - June 2015)
Monthly Newsletters

Monthly Review and Learning Sessions

CIS-A2K conducted many weekly learning sessions to critically reflect on the successes and failures of our work internally. We had also used these weekly sessions to learn about new developments (tools, policies, etc) in the Wikimedia universe. However, this could not be sustained for a long period. We will take measures to revive this and make it a monthly exercise, which we will try to record or screen cast on CIS website. Simultaneously we will use this to do a monthly review of the progress of the various plans and discuss about the upcoming month's events.

Budget

As stated above in the methodology section, each of the 21 plans have an independent budget, which is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. Below we have give a concise picture of the budget requirements against the 6 verticals. As part of the WMF's grant to CIS, we have received Rs. 15,000,000.00 or US$ 242,178.00 during the last year. The proposed budget of Rs. 18,406,454.00 or US$ 297.831.00 is about 23 per cent more than the previous year's grant.

Sl. No.	Budget Item	FDC (INR)	FDC (US$)	Other Sources and in kind support (INR)	Other Sources and in kind support (US$)
1	Language Area Plans	Rs. 7,466,440.00	120,813.05338	Rs. 2,100,000.00	33,979.70279
2	Community Strengthening Initiatives	Rs. 2,610,400.00	42,238.3886	Rs. 200,000.00	3,236.16217
3	Stand Alone Wikimedia Projects	Rs. 2,584,300.00	41,816.06949	Rs. 2,495,000.00	40,371.12308
4	Creating Movement Resources	Rs. 1,188,000.00	19,222.80329	Rs. 2,400,000.00	38,833.94605
5	Publicity, Research & Documentation	Rs. 780,000.00	12,621.03247	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
6	General Support and Service to the Movement	Rs. 636,000.00	10,290.99570	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
7	Other Expenses	Rs. 1,468,000.00	23,753.43033	Rs. 2,964,000.00	47,959.92337
	Total before Institutional Development	Rs. 16,733,140.00	270,755.77331	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745
8	Institutional Development (10%)	Rs. 1,673,314.00	27,075.57733	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
	TOTAL BUDGET	Rs. 18,406,454.00	297,831.35064	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745

Other than item no. 7 and 8 the entire budget will go towards the programmatic implementation of the plans. The staff costs are not separately listed here as we see the CIS-A2K team as a programmatic investment and each of the team member's time is budgeted against a specific activity or plan. We propose to raise Rs. 10,159,000.00 or US$ 163,380.00 other sources and in-kind support towards executing this work plan. A detailed budget analysis is available here. Please See this google spreadsheet which gives a micro level picture of the Budget against each of the planned activity.

Giving Feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here.
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.

For Bangla plan here.
For Hindi plan here.
For Kannada plan here.
For Konkani plan here.
For Marathi plan here.
For Odia plan here.
For Telugu plan here.

For feedback on Community Strengthening initiatives, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Creating Movement Resources, please write here.
For feedback on Publicity, Research and Documentation, please write here.
For feedback on General Support and Service to the Movement, please write here.
Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at vishnu at cis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please write to us and we can set up a telephone/Skype call.

Notes

[1]. CIS supports the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University through a fellowship and participation on the advisory board; CIS supports the open data community through support for the founders of Data Meet; CIS is supporting venue costs for some of Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation's outreach programmes; CIS has supported the last edition of the Goa Project; CIS allows various groups to use its Bangalore and Delhi offices for meetings such as Null Con Bangalore, Bitcoin Delhi, Arduino, Dojo, Crypto Party and Maker Party communities. In the past, CIS has hosted Inclusive Planet India and Has Geek at its Bangalore office.

[2]. See the discussion in this TechCrunch article. Also see this blog which inspired TechCrunch to do a feature about the growth of Indic Wikipedia projects.

[3]. Openness initiative at CIS

[4]. All the four foucs language areas during the last year's plan received significant print media coverage because of CIS-A2K's efforts. In addition, even the mainstream English print media did stories on indic Wikimedia projects, which was unprecedented.

[5].There were 6 television programs and 1 radio program on Telugu Wikipedia and 2 television programs and 1 radio interview on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/india-access-to-knowledge-draft-work-plan-july-2014-june-2015

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

pavanaja — 2014-07-24T07:03:45Z

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license.

Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia. The print volumes of the first version of the encyclopaedia are out of stock now. Recently UoM has started revising and reprinting the encyclopaedia. So far 4 volumes have been revised, enhanced and published.

UoM believes in Open Access to Knowledge. It has put up the research outputs from its departments online for free access to the public. UoM has done these as a subscriber to the idea of Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Open Access Institutional Repository, of UoM, covers scholarly publications covering journal articles, conference papers, books, book reviews, presentations, reports and patents ever since UoM was established in 1916. Extending the philosophy of open knowledge to the Kannada encyclopaedia published by UoM becomes a natural extension. UoM is in the verge of celebrating its centenary soon and has taken many initiatives in that direction.

CIS-A2K has been in negotiations with UoM towards releasing of its high quality Kannada Vishwakosha (Kannada Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons license. CIS and UoM signed a MoU on February 22, 2014. Here is the relevant extract from the MoU: "They will work together to digitize all encyclopaedic publications for which the copyright is owned by UoM, and re-release them under the Creative Common license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The digitized content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia and Wikisource. The digitization will be done employing the global standard Unicode so that the content has longevity, is universally portable and is easily searchable. Both parties have joined hands to undertake the above in order to enhance digital literacy in the Kannada language and facilitate collaborative production and free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to the students, academics, researchers and the wider public. The parties also believe that by reintroducing the knowledge in digital and openly accessible formats could significantly enhance the production of knowledge in Kannada and give a new lease of life to Kannada language in the digital era. The parties will co-design and jointly implement relevant programmes to achieve this objective." As part of this MoU, UoM agreed to release the first six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC.

Volume numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha of UoM have been revised and published recently. A project page has been created in Kannada Wikipedia for this project. Kannada Wikipedians joined hands in the project. The project involved extracting the text from the soft copies of the files, converting them into Unicode, extracting articles from these files and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource.

A team of interns from Christ University had a major role to play in this development. These were students from the Wikipedia in Education Program that was conducted in Christ University during the academic period of 2013-14. These students took active part in the current project and uploaded about 1200 articles so far (till July 21, 2014).

Media Coverage

The event attracted very good media coverage. Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Other Links:

UoM Kannada Vishwakosha conversion project page in Kannada Wikipedia - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivwp
Articles from UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv
Category UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivws
For pictures from the Open Knowledge Day event in Mysore - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysore_University_Open_Knowledge_Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/university-of-mysore-releases-kannada-vishwakosha-under-cc-license

NIE Steps in to Grow Konkani Wikipedia

vishnu — 2014-10-10T11:26:26Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) signed a memorandum of agreement (MoU) with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS, in its sustained efforts to enhance the content and reach of Kokani Wikepedia (which is in incubation), has signed an MoU for a period of five years with Nirmala Insitute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College established in 1963 by the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in response to the then urgent need for trained teachers in post liberation Goa. The key objectives of this partnership are: a) to design, develop and execute a certificate course titled "Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia", which is aimed at middle and high school teacher-trainees and teachers; and b) to introduce Wikimedia projects into the pedagogic curriculum of NIE.

Both CIS and NIE share a mutual interest in conserving, developing and disseminating knowledge free of cost in Konkani, which incidentally is Goa’s official language. Konkani as a language faces several challenges — it has no official script. The population who speak it are dispersed across the world and have little motivation to further the cause of Konkani, and there are few educational venues that offer a formal course to study Konkani or offer Konkani based curriculum. NIE Principal Dr. Denzil Martins welcomed this MoU and said that "it will guide our teacher-trainees to upload relevant information in Konkani that can be freely accessed by the local population" and "provide the volunteer-trainees with skills that they will be able to use to contribute and enhance the free knowledge in Konkani". The MoU was signed by Dr. Denzil Martins from NIE and T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, CIS) in the presence of staff and students of NIE and volunteers Harriet Vidyasagar and Gayathri Rao Konkar. Dr. Rita Paes, ex-Principal of NIE who worked to forge this MoU sent her best wishes.

CIS-A2K since 2013, has worked to develop partnerships with key educational institutions to promote and grow Konkani Wikipedia. It has previously worked with NIE to design and implement a program to enroll 100 B.Ed. students to increase the amount of information available in Goan villages and towns on Konkani Wikipedia. A2K has also been instrumental in convincing Goa University to re-release Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia) under CC-BY-SA 3.0 , making it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done.

The course ‘Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia’ will enable the teacher participant to have a) a comprehensive understanding of changes due to digital technology to the knowledge domain; b) an introduction to various openness movements that inform the discourse on Open Educational Resources; c) exposure and training to participate on open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia; and d) practical examples and best practices of using Wikipedia and sister projects within the classroom context. The parties will also co-design and jointly implement programmes to introduce Wikipedia in the NIE curriculum. The curriculum for this workshop is positioned within the context of indian languages (particularly Konkani) and school education to ensure that any learning is practical and can be applied within the teachers immediate pedagogic environment. Speaking about the relevance of this course Gayathri and Harriet (who have been associated with NIE as volunteers) mentioned that "the Goa government has handed out tablets to all school going children in Goa. In order to use them effectively in the classroom will require teachers to rethink their role and teaching methodologies and this course is an important step towards that". Agreeing with this Denzil Martins feels that this course "will provide the teacher-trainees with ideas and inputs for using Wikipedia in creative ways in the classroom".

This partnership could bring huge momentum and scale for the growth of Konkani as participants who graduate from this course will as teachers act as anchors and mentors to teach and assign Wikipedia editing assignments in their respective schools and classrooms.

As Gayathri feels "such courses once fine tuned should be made available to teachers from all over the country and should be part of the package for introducing the digital technology in the school system. Today it ends with setting up computer labls in schools or distribution of hardware to students - they may have a 'computer teacher' but the class and subject teachers never become part of these new initiatives. Only when this happens can we move away from 'teaching computers' to using computers as tools to learn and teach, which is the primary objective of digital technology in schools".

CIS will develop this open course and welcomes anyone to partner in this effort, which will be made available for anyone to use it within their context. The efforts to build free and open knowledge platforms like Konkani Wikipedia will continue and partnerships like NIE will play a crucial role in building a robust knowledge society in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/nie-steps-in-to-grow-konkani-wikipedia

Expanding the World of Telugu Wikipedia – CIS-A2K and ALC join hands

T Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik — 2014-09-30T05:11:29Z

Students and faculty of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada aim to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in its quest to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in Indic languages recently added another feather to its cap by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Andhra Loyola College (ALC) in Vijayawada on August 14, 2014 to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource. College Principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, Vice-Principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju signed the agreement with CIS-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan.

The MoU signed with ALC is for a period of five years and encompasses four activities: Open knowledge creation in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia: ALC faculty and students will be trained by CIS-A2K staff and interested Telugu Wikimedians to understand the principles that govern Wikipedia in order to generate quality entries. Faculty from Botany, Physics, Statistics, Ethics, Religion, Telugu Literature, and Music will work with CIS-A2K. Each of the faculty in the coming months will come up with a plan to generate open knowledge in Telugu in their respective disciplines. Content donation and digitization on Telugu Wikisource: ALC through its networks will help CIS-A2K to bring Telugu content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The Telugu department of the college expressed keen interest to work with CIS-A2K in digitizing historical Telugu content and to make it available on Telugu Wikisource. Various competitions will be planned in the future. Creating a free software environment at Andhra Loyola College: 400 machines within various labs on the campus will be converted into FOSS systems with free and open source software including support for Telugu and other Indic languages. It should be noted that all the existing computers of ALC are run on proprietary software. As a pilot initiative CIS-A2K has already converted 30 systems in a lab and named it as Loyola FOSS Lab. CIS-A2K to revise the FIT (Fundamentals in Information Technology): A mandatory course for all undergraduate students which will introduce students to FOSS, Openness and Wikipedia. This is an outcome of the FOSS orientation done by T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahimanuddin Shaik during the two workshops that were held at ALC.

CIS-A2K will put every effort to involve Telugu Wikimedians and FOSS community in taking this collaboration with ALC forward. CIS-A2K will also create a project page on Telugu Wikipedia to actively document and publicly share the detailed plans and progress. More updates will also be shared on this website.


Above: Representatives from ALC and CIS-A2K seen during the signing ceremony.

The signing of the MoU was done at a public event in the presence of students, faculty and management of ALC and various representatives from media. The media covered this event enthusiastically. The Hindu coverage can be found here and Eenadu article coverage is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/expanding-the-world-of-telugu-wikipedia-cis-and-alc-join-hands

Privacy vs. Transparency: An Attempt at Resolving the Dichotomy

sunil — 2015-03-08T06:26:21Z

The right to privacy has been articulated in international law and in some national laws. In a few countries where the constitution does not explicitly guarantee such a right, courts have read the right to privacy into other rights (e.g., the right to life, the right to equal treatment under law and also the right to freedom of speech and expression).

With feedback and inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Geetha Hariharan. I would like to apologize for not providing proper citation to Julian Assange when the first version of this blog entry was published. I would also like to thank Micah Sifry for drawing this failure to his attention. The blog post originally published by Omidyar Network can be read here. Also see http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/

In other countries where privacy is not yet an explicit or implicit right, harm to the individual is mitigated using older confidentiality or secrecy law. After the Snowden affair, the rise of social media and the sharing economy, some corporations and governments would like us to believe that “privacy is dead”. Privacy should not and cannot be dead, because that would mean that security is also dead. This is indeed the most dangerous consequence of total surveillance as it is technically impossible to architect a secure information system without privacy as a precondition. And conversely, it is impossible to guarantee privacy without security as a precondition.

The right to transparency [also known as the right to information or access to information] – while unavailable in international law – is increasingly available in national law. Over the last twenty years this right has become encoded in national laws – and across the world it is being used to hold government accountable and to balance the power asymmetry between states and citizens. Independent and autonomous offices of transparency regulators have been established. Apart from increasing government transparency, corporations are also increasingly required to be transparent as part of generic or industry specific regulation in the public interest. For instance, India’s Companies Act, 2013, requires greater transparency from the private sector. Other areas of human endeavor such as science and development are also becoming increasingly transparent though here it is still left up to self-regulation and there isn’t as much established law. Within science and research more generally, the rise of open data accompanied the growth of the Open Access and citizen science movement.

So the question before us is: Are these two rights – the right to transparency and the right to privacy – compatible? Is it a zero-sum game? Do we have to sacrifice one right to enforce the other? Unfortunately, many privacy and transparency activists think this is the case and this has resulted in some conflict. I suggest that these rights are completely compatible when it comes to addressing the question of power. These rights do not have to be balanced against one another. There is no need to settle for a sub-optimal solution. Rather this is an optimization problem and the solution is as follows: privacy protections must be inversely proportionate to power and as Julian Assange says transparency requirements should be directly proportionate to power.[*]

In most privacy laws, the public interest is an exception to privacy. If public interest is being undermined, then an individual privacy can be infringed upon by the state, by researchers, by the media, etc. And in transparency law, privacy is the exception. If the privacy of an individual can be infringed, transparency is not required unless it is in the public interest. In other words, the “public interest” test allows us to use privacy law and transparency law to address power asymmetries rather than exacerbate them. What constitutes “public interest” is of course left to courts, privacy regulators, and transparency regulators to decide. Like privacy, there are many other exceptions in any given transparency regime including confidentiality and secrecy. Given uneven quality of case law there will be a temptation by the corrupt to conflate exceptions. Here the old common-law principle of “there is no confidence as to the disclosure of iniquity” – which prevents confidentiality law from being used to cover malfeasance or illegality – can be adopted in appropriate jurisdictions.

Around 10 years ago, the transparency movement gave birth to yet another movement – the open government data movement. The tension between privacy and transparency is most clearly seen in the open government data movement. The open government data movement in some parts of the world is dominated by ahistorical and apolitical technologists, and some of them seem intent on reinventing the wheel. In India, ever since the enactment of the Right to Information Act, 2003, 30 transparency activists are either killed, beaten or criminally intimidated every year. This is the statistic from media coverage alone. Many more silently suffer. RTI or transparency is without a doubt one of the most dangerous sectors within civil society that you could choose to work in. In contrast, not a single open data activist has ever been killed, beaten or criminally intimidated. I suspect this is because open data activists do not sufficiently challenge power hierarchies. Let us look a little bit closely at their work cycle. When a traditional transparency activist asks a question, that is usually enough to get them into trouble. When an open data activist publishes an answer [a dataset nicely scrubbed and machine readable, or a visualization, or a tool] they are often frustrated because nobody seems interested in using it. Often even the activist is unclear what the question is. This is because open data activist works where data is available. Open data activists are obsessed with big datasets, which are easier to find at the bottom of the pyramid. They contribute to growing surveillance practices [the nexus between Internet giants, states, and the security establishment] rather that focusing on sousveillance [citizen surveillance of the state, also referred to as citizen undersight or inverse surveillance]. They seem to be obsessed only with tools and technologies, rather than power asymmetries and injustices.

Finally, a case study to make my argument easier to understand – Aadhaar or UID, India’s ambitious centralized biometric identity and authentication management system. There are many serious issues with its centralized topology, proprietary technology, and dependence on biometrics as authentication factors – all of which I have written about in the past. In this article, I will explain how my optimization solution can be applied to the project to make it more effective in addressing its primary problem statement that corruption is a necessary outcome of power asymmetries in India.

In its current avatar – the Aadhaar project hopes to assign biometric-based identities to all citizens. The hope is that, by doing authentication in the last mile, corruption within India’s massive subsidy programmes will be reduced. This, in my view, might marginally reduce retail corruption at the bottom of the pyramid. It will do nothing to address wholesale corruption that occurs as subsidies travel from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. I have advocated over the last two years that we should abandon trying to issue biometric identities to all citizens, thereby making them more transparent to the state. Let us instead issue Aadhaar numbers to all politicians and bureaucrats and instead make the state more transparent to citizens. There is no public interest in reducing privacy for ordinary citizens – the powerless – but there are definitely huge public interest benefits to be secured by increasing transparency of politicians and bureaucrats, who are the powerful.

The Indian government has recently introduced a biometric-based attendance system for all bureaucrats and has created a portal that allows Indian citizens to track if their bureaucrats are arriving late or leaving early. This unfortunately is just bean counting [for being corrupt and being punctual are not mutually exclusive] and public access to the national portal was turned off because of legitimate protests from some of the bureaucrats. What bureaucrats do in office, who they meet, and which documents they process is more important than when they arrive at or depart from work. The increased transparency or reduced privacy was not contributing to the public interest.

Instead of first going after small-ticket corruption at the bottom of the pyramid, maximization of public interest requires us to focus on the top, for there is much greater ROI for the anti-corruption rupee. For example: constructing a digital signature based on audit trails that track all funds and subsidies as they move up and down the pyramid. These audit trails must be made public so that ordinary villagers can be supported by open data activists, journalists, social entrepreneurs, and traditional civil society in verification and course correction.

I hope open data activists, data scientists, and big data experts will draw inspiration from the giants of the transparency movement in India. I hope they will turn their attention to power, examine power asymmetries and then ask how the Aadhaar project can be leveraged to make India more rather than less equal.

Videos

Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights

Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector

The videos can also be watched on Vimeo:

[*].http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks “Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has.”

Read the presentation on Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy made at the Pecha Kucha session here. (ODP File, 35 kb)

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author(s) of this blog are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Omidyar Network. We make no representations as to accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of any information presented by individual authors of the blogs and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries or damages arising from its display or use.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency

Workshop on Open Data for Human Development

sumandro — 2015-06-02T15:34:06Z

Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Sunil Abraham will take part in the workshop being organised for government officials from Bhutan, Maldives, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Tripura, by the International Centre for Human Development (IC4HD) of UNDP India, during June 3-6, 2015. The workshop will be held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies Campus in Bengaluru. Sunil will be one of the panelists in the opening discussion on 'data and transparency in governance,' and Sumandro will provide input for and lead the sessions on developing the draft implementation plan for the Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy. Sumandro worked with the IC4HD team to design the objectives and the agenda of the workshop.

Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy

Government of Sikkim passed the SODAA Policy in 2014 so as to streamline and open up the availability of “authentic data to buttress the achievements of the Government of Sikkim and to gather data on key metrics to be able to spur growth in all the areas of human development.” The Policy mandates setting up an open data portal, hosted by the State Data Centre of Sikkim, where data contributed by all the state government agencies will reside, and from which the same data will be made openly accessible to government agencies, non-government organisations, and private individuals alike. Only data that is shareable – data that is not part of negative list prepared by any government agency – and that is non-sensitive – data that does not contain information that can be used to identify any private individual – will be made available through this Sikkim open data portal. The Department of Information Technology of the Government of Sikkim has been assigned the role of being the nodal agency for coordinating and monitoring the implementation “of policy through close collaboration with all State Government Departments and agencies.”

Objectives of the Workshop

The Government of Sikkim understands that data collection, management, and reporting processes at the different departments must go through a structural reconfiguration before systematic and sustainable publication of data through this open data portal can be possible. This work will of course involve a long duration of change, and participation of a wide range of actors. The International Centre for Human Development, at UNDP India, is organising this workshop for Sikkim government officials to conceptualise and develop the outlines of an action strategy towards this goal of streamlining data acquisition and publication processes across government departments.

Discussions in this workshop will focus on the activities of four departments of the Government of Sikkim – Department of Health, Rural Management and Development Department (RMDD), Human Resource Development Department (HRDD), and Department of Agriculture. At least two officials from each of these departments would take part in the workshop. Apart from these departments, officials from Department of Information Technology (DIT), Department of Economic Statistics, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DESME), and others, will also participate.

Apart from government officials from Sikkim, those from Bhutan, Maldives, Meghalaya, and Tripura will also attend the workshop, so as to think ahead towards their respective open data initiatives.

Agenda of the Workshop

Day 1: June 3, 2015

Time	Session
0930-1000	Welcome and Introductions A.K. Shiva Kumar, Director, IC4HD P.D. Rai, Honourable Member of Parliament (LS) from Sikkim
1000-1100 Session 1	Panel Discussion Data and Transparency in Governance Moderator: P. D. Rai Panellists: Srivatsa Krishna, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology, Government of Karnataka B. Gangaiah, Additional Director General, Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society
1100-1130 Session 2	Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy Moderator: P. D. Rai Presentation by: T. Samdup, Joint Director, Department of Information Technology, Sikkim
1130-1200	Tea Break
1200-1300 Session 3	Implementing an Open Data Policy - Key Components Moderator: A. K. Shiva Kumar Presentation by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Centre for Internet and Society
1300-1400	Lunch
1400-1430 Session 4	Group Exercise 1 Challenges of Opening up Government Data in Sikkim Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay
1430-1530 Session 5	Mobile Phone-based Data Collection Introduction to Akvo FLOW Moderator: Meenaz Munshi, IC4HD Presentation by: Joy Ghosh and Amitangshu Acharya, AKVO
1530-1600	Tea Break
16:00-1730 Session 6	Group Exercise 2 Collecting Data Using Akvo FLOW Facilitated by: Joy Ghosh and Amitangshu Acharya, AKVO

Day 2: June 4, 2015

Time	Session
0930-1000 Session 7	Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data Moderator: Amitangshu Acharya Presentation by: Thejesh GN, DataMeet
1000-1045 Session 8	Collecting, Visualising, and Publishing Geographic Data Moderator: Amitangshu Acharya Presentation by: Shiv Ramachandran, MapBox
1045-1145 Session 9	Group Exercise 3 Organising, Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data Facilitated by: Thejesh GN and Shiv Ramachandran
1145-1200	Tea Break
1200-1300	Group Exercise 3 Organising, Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data (Continued)
1300-1400	Lunch
1400-1500 Session 10	Open Data and Health Management Presentation by: Dr. Shiban Ganju, Consultant, Ingalls Health, Harvey, Illinois, Chicago; Chair, Atrimed Health Consulting, Bangalore
1500-1600 Session 11	Open Data and Primary Education Presentation by: Gautam John, Karnataka Learning Partnership

Day 3: June 5, 2015

Time	Session
0930-1030 Session 12	Panel Discussion Regional Experiences and Reflections on Open Data Panellists: representative from Bhutan, and from Meghalaya
1030-1115 Session 13	Implementing National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Presentation by: D. P. Misra, National Informatics Centre
1115-1130 Session 14	Group Exercise 4 Drafting the SODAAP Implementation Plan Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay
1130-1200	Tea Break
1200-1300	Group Exercise 4 Drafting the SODAAP Implementation Plan (Continued)
1300-1400	Lunch
1400-1500 Session 15	Group Presentations Draft SODAAP Implementation Plan Moderator: P. D. Rai Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay
1500-1530	Wrap-Up and Vote of Thanks

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06

Open Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries - A Synthesis Report

sumandro — 2015-06-16T09:40:58Z

The roles of intermediaries in open data is insufficiently explored; open data intermediaries are often presented as single and simple linkages between open data supply and use. This synthesis research paper offers a more socially nuanced approach to open data intermediaries using the theoretical framework of Bourdieu’s social model, in particular, his concept of species of capital as informing social interaction... Because no single intermediary necessarily has all the capital available to link effectively to all sources of power in a field, multiple intermediaries with complementary configurations of capital are more likely to connect between power nexuses. This study concludes that consideration needs to be given to the presence of multiple intermediaries in an open data ecosystem, each of whom may possess different forms of capital to enable the use and unlock the potential impact of open data.

This synthesis report is prepared by François van Schalkwyk, Michael Caňares, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Alexander Andrason, based on the analysis of a sample of cases from the Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries (ODDC) research network managed by the World Wide Web Foundation and supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada. Data on intermediaries were extracted from the ODDC reports according to a working definition of an open data intermediary presented in this paper, and with a focus on how intermediaries link actors in an open data supply chain.

Below is an excerpt from the report. The full report can be accessed from Figshare or from Github.

Implications for Policy

The practical implications of the findings presented here are not insignificant. Given that most of the open data intermediaries in this study were found to rely on donor in order to execute their open data-related social benefit activities, it is perhaps funders who should take heed of the findings presented here when making grants. For example, where a single agency is awarded a funding grant to improve the lives of citizens using open data, questions need to be asked whether the grantee possesses all the types of capital required not only to re-use open data but to connect open data to specific user groups in order to ensure the use and impact of open data. Questions to be asked of grantees could include: “Who are the specific user groups or communities that you expect to use the data, information or product you are making available?”; “Does your organisation have existing links to these user groups or communities?”; and “What types of channels are in place for you to communicate with these user groups or communities?”. Alternatively donor funders may rethink awarding funding to single agencies in favour of funding partnerships or collaborations in which there is a greater spread of types of capital across multiple actors thereby increasing the likelihood of effectively linking the supply and use of open data. Such an approach would be more in line with an ecosystems approach to multiple actors being participants in the data supply and (re)use of open data, and the importance of keystone species and positive feedback loops to ensure a healthy system.

In addition to highlighting the importance of social capital in developing-country innovations systems, Intarakummerd and Chaoroenporn (2013) point to the importance of government initiating and coordinating the activities of both public and private intermediaries. Our findings indicate that should governments adopt such a co-ordinating role in the case of open data intermediaries, they would do well to engage with a broad spectrum of intermediaries, and not simply focus on intermediaries who possess only the technical capital required to interpret and repackage open government data. To be sure, this will be a challenging role for government to assume as conflicting vested interests are likely to surface. Although speculative, it is possible that such a coordinating role is likely to work best when there is a strong pact between all actors involved. And this, in turn, will require a common vision of the value and benefits of open data – something that cannot be taken for granted.

Should there be agreement on the value and benefits of open data, our findings show that most of the intermediaries in our study are NGOs that rely on donor funding. This should raise serious questions about the sustainability of open data initiatives that are civic-minded in conjunction with questions about what incentives other than that of donor funding could ensure the supply and use of open data beyond project funding. Funders and supporters of open data initiatives may have to think not only about the value and benefits or funding projects, but of the sustainability and the impacts of the products produced by the projects they fund.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-data-intermediaries-in-developing-countries

Konkani Wikipedia Goes Live After 'Nine Years' of Incubation

subha — 2016-06-18T18:15:05Z

Konkani Wikipedia is the second Wikimedia project after Odia Wikisource that has gone live out of incubation. The project stayed in the incubation for nine long years and the community has gone through a long debate to have a Wikipedia of their own. Here is a blog highlighting three Konkani Wikimedians and an advocate of the Wikipedia movement whose efforts finally paid off.

Read the original blog entry published on Wikimedia Blog on July 15, 2015 here.

The Goan Konkani Wikipedia (available at gom.wikipedia.org) has gone live after spending nine long years in incubation.

An Indo-Aryan language, of the Indo-European family of languages, Konkani is the official language of Goa. It is a minority language in other Indian states, such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, northern Kerala, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu. It is spoken by about 7.4 million people.

Konkani can be written in five different scripts: Devanagari—officially used by the Government of Goa—as well as Latin (locally known as Romi Konkani), Kannada, Malayalam, and Persian. Of these, the Goan Antruz dialect of the language, in the Devanagari script, is considered standard by the Indian constitution.

The Konkani Wikipedia has many heroes, as we see them. Melissa Simoes and Darshan Kandolkar are two of the many long-term contributors who joined during the Konkani Wikipedia @ Goa University program and are still active even after the program formally concluded. Darshan is an assistant professor at the Government College Pernem in Goa. His professor at Goa University, Dr. Madhavi Sardesai—who passed away last year—played a vital role in inspiring him to go for higher studies in Konkani. Darshan realized that there is a lot to be written in Konkani when he was introduced to Wikipedia, and after that, he became dedicated to contributing to the project.

“I would like to bring more students as contributors to our Konkani Wikipedia,” Darshan says. “My aim is to start with my students at Government College Pernem. Being an alumnus of Goa University, I also want my juniors there to join our community and enrich Konkani Wikipedia.”

“I have a dream to start a project for the freedom fighters of Goa and involve a diverse set of people, from students to journalists and columnists. I also want to build partnership with educational institutions so we could engage with the students for a longer run and the existing Konkani community could mentor them,” he continues.

“Being a new Wikipedia project, Konkani Wikipedia needs more quality measures and the articles have to grow to good quality articles with more images and templates, I want to take it to the level of English Wikipedia with both quantitative and qualitative growth in articles!”

The Konkani Wikimedia community has been using social media actively to promote the Konkani Wikipedia project, and to celebrate the successes of its contributors. After Melissa became the top contributor to the project, her fellow editor Luis Gomes congratulated her. That brought Melissa into the spotlight, gaining the attention of editors from the global Wikimedia community. The community is continuing a tradition to rewarding the most prolific contributor of each month as the “Wikipedian of the Month”.

Melissa was introduced to the Wikipedia program at her university where the target for each participating student was to write one article each about a village in Goa. “I wrote my article just for the sake of the marks, but never bothered to think about why I am writing it. After the program was over, I became inactive on Wikipedia.

“After some time, I met Father [Luis Gomes] in parish and then Darshan and Father inspired me to resume editing. Then, it became an addiction and I never stopped even for a day. I would come back from work and sit in front of my computer.

“Now, I am a teacher, and my fellow teachers are mostly women. I would like to introduce the Goan Konkani Wikipedia to them so they could also contribute to Wikipedia,” Melissa says.

As Konkani Wikipedia went live, long term Wikimedian Fredrick Noronha, an early advocate of Konkani Wikipedia, said, “It is a wonderful feeling to see the Goan Konkani Wikipedia live. I would like to congratulate all who have been involved in some or the other way with the making of Konkani Wikipedia live from the days of its inception and incubation.

“I am not a great contributor or even a language expert. I come from a content background and found my interest in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons long ago. But this helped me to associate myself in some way with the Konkani Wikipedia incubator. I am happy that CIS-A2K chipped in to help build a community and help it grow in collaboration with the Goa University.

“Students of the Konkani department in the university are the real heroes to take this effort forward by filling the Wikipedia incubator with more editing activity to which the institutional backing acted as catalyst,” he added.

Fredrick feels there are major challenges that the community now has to start taking measures for: “The macrolanguage is written in multiple scripts. Out of five of the scripts three—Devanagari, Romi/Latin and Kannada—are actively used in printing and publication currently. People using all the scripts should be equally participating in a movement like Wikipedia to take their languages to other native speakers using Wikipedia as a digital tool.

“The second challenge is with the contributors. Goa, being home to majority of the Konkani language speakers, has English education from the primary level. This means many have a great level of technical ability. The technical contributor community here would be of great use to Konkani Wikipedia if tapped,” he adds.

“The technical contributors are eager to contribute but have not been approached in a manner that would interest them. Similarly the Konkani authors who are helping propagate the language to masses have sadly no or very little clue about Wikipedia’s existence in Konkani. This disparity is stopping a massive flow of local encyclopedic content to the Konkani Wikipedia. Unless we tap into the technological and the linguistic groups it will be only a tip of the iceberg.”

Fredrick explains that the the current Konkani Wikipedia community is primarily made up of students of Goa University. “This is both good and bad,” he says. “Having young and enthusiastic students as Wikipedia editors is helping the project to leap forward, which might not have happened if the faculty were targeted instead. There is, however, a great need for diversification.

“The approach to bring in authors in the 60–70 years age group will vary from the approach to bring in, for example, technical people. Our outreach strategies should ultimately fulfill both the literary and technological contributors, so that their work can help us to both grow content and to solve the problem of the multiple scripts, respectively,” Fredrick adds.

The Konkani Wikipedia community is organizing a public seminar on July 18 at Goa University to celebrate the launch of the Konkani Wikipedia and to pay tribute to Dr. Madhavi Sardesai, who always dreamed of the Konkani Wikipedia getting out of incubation.

Video


Wikimedian Darshan Kandolkar shares his experience of contributing to Konkani Wikipedia. Video in Konkani. Video by Wikimedia India, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live

How India Makes E-books Easier to Ban than Books (And How We Can Change That)

pranesh — 2012-02-21T11:50:56Z

Without getting into questions of what should and should not be unlawful speech, Pranesh Prakash chooses to take a look at how Indian law promotes arbitrary removal and blocking of websites, website content, and online services, and how it makes it much easier than getting offline printed speech removed.

E-Books Are Easier To Ban Than Books, And Safer

Contrary to what Mr. Sibal's recent hand-wringing at objectionable online material might suggest, under Indian laws currently in force it is far easier to remove material from the Web, by many degrees of magnitude, than it is to ever get them removed from a bookstore or an art gallery. To get something from a bookstore or an art gallery one needs to collect a mob, organize collective outrage and threats of violence, and finally convince either the government or a magistrate that the material is illegal, thereby allowing the police to seize the books or stop the painting from being displayed. The fact of removal of the material will be noted in various records, whether in government records, court records, police records or in newspapers of record. By contrast, to remove something from the Web, one needs to send an e-mail complaining about it to any of the string of 'intermediaries' that handle the content: the site itself, the web host for the site, the telecom companies that deliver the site to your computer/mobile, the web address (domain name) provider, the service used to share the link, etc. Under the 'Intermediary Guidelines Rules' that have been in operation since 11th April 2011, all such companies are required to 'disable access' to the complained-about content within thirty-six hours of the complaint. It is really that simple.

"That's ridiculous," you think, "surely he must be exaggerating." Think again. A researcher working with us at the Centre for Internet and Society tried it out, several times, with many different intermediaries and always with frivolous and flawed complaints, and was successful six out of seven times . Thus it is easier to prevent Flipkart or Amazon from selling Rushdie's Midnight's Children than it is to prevent a physical bookstore from doing so: today Indira Gandhi wouldn't need to win a lawsuit in London against the publishers to remove a single line as she did then; she would merely have to send a complaint to online booksellers and get the book removed. It is easier to block Vinay Rai's Akbari.in (just as CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com was recently blocked) than it is to prevent its print publication. Best of all for complainants: there is no penalty for frivolous complaints such as those sent by us, nor are any records kept of who's removed what. Such great powers of censorship without any penalties for their abuse are a sure-fire way of ensuring a race towards greater intolerance, with the Internet — that republic of opinions and expressions — being a casualty.

E-Book Bans Cannot Be Challenged

In response to some of the objections raised, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology, ever the dutiful guardian of free speech, noted that if you have a problem with access to your content being 'disabled', you could always approach a court and get that ban reversed. Unfortunately, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology forgot to take into account that you can't contest a ban/block/removal if you don't know about it. While they require all intermediaries to disable access to the content within thirty-six hours, they forgot to mandate the intermediary to tell you that the content is being removed. Whoops. They forgot to require the intermediary to give public notice that content has been removed following a complaint from person ABC or corporation XYZ on such-and-such grounds. Whoops, again.

So while records are kept, along with reasons, of book bans, there are no such records required to be kept of e-book bans.

E-Book Censors Are Faceless

Vinay Rai is a brave man. He is being attacked by fellow journalists who believe he's disgracing the professional upholders of free-speech, and being courted by television channels who believe that he should be encouraged to discuss matters that are sub judice. He is viewed by some as a man who's playing politics in courts on behalf of unnamed politicians and bureaucrats, while others view him as being bereft of common-sense for believing that companies should be legally liable for not having been clairvoyant and removing material he found objectionable, though he has never complained to them about it, and has only provided that material to the court in a sealed envelope. I choose, instead, to view him as a scrupulous and brave man. He has a face, and a name, and is willing to openly fight for what he believes in. However, there are possibly thousands of unscrupulous Vinay Rais out there, who know the law better than he does, and who make use not of the court system but of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, firmly assured by those Rules that their censorship activities will never be known, will never be challenged by Facebook and Google lawyers, and will never be traced back to them.

Challenging Invisible Censorship

Dear reader, you may have noticed that this is a bit like a trial involving Free Speech in which Free Speech is presumed guilty upon complaint, is not even told what the charges against it are, has not been given a chance to prove its innocence, and has no right to meet its accusers nor to question them. Yet, the Cyberlaw Division of the Department of Information Technology continues to issue press releases defending these Rules as fair and just, instead of being simultaneously Orwellian and Kafkaesque. These Rules are delegated legislation passed by the Department of Information Technology under s.79 of the Information Technology Act. The Rules were laid before Parliament during the 2011 Monsoon session. We at CIS believe that these Rules are *ultra vires* the IT Act as well as the Constitution of India, not only with respect to what is now (newly) proscribed online (which in itself is enough to make it unconstitutional), but how that which is purportedly unlawful is to be removed. We have prepared an alternative that we believe is far more just and in accordance with our constitutional principles, taking on best practices from Canada, the EU, Chile, and Brazil, while still allowing for expeditious removal of unlawful material. We hope that the DIT will consider adopting some of the ideas embodied in our draft proposal.

As Parliament passed the IT Act in the midst of din, without any debate, it is easy to be skeptical and wonder whether Rules made under the IT Act will be debated. However, I remain hopeful that Parliament will not only exercise its power wisely, but will perform its solemn duty — borne out of each MP's oath to uphold our Constitution — by rejecting these Rules.

Photo credit: Lynn Gardner, under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence*

This was reproduced in Outlook Magazine on 27 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-ebooks-easier-to-ban-than-books

Accessible Broadcasting in India

srividya — 2013-01-28T05:28:38Z

The abridged version of International Telecommunication Union's "Making Television Accessible" Report which we published last year has been broadened in scope and is now called "Accessible Broadcasting in India" report.

This is an updated version of the draft that was first put up for comments on October 8, 2012. Read the full report published by ITU.

Executive Summary

Television and Radio are mediums to inform, educate and entertain. Sitting down at the end of the day and turning on the TV or radio is a rather involuntary task for many. They have become part of the fabric of almost every Indian’s life. However, there are a significant number of people in India who are unable to enjoy TV or Radio.

Television and Radio technologies have advanced at a rapid pace but accessibility of TV and Radio in India has been a persistent problem. Being mediums that are consumed through sight and sound, those with impairments in these two areas have found TV viewing and radio listening difficult or impossible. Not much progress has been made in the area of Accessible Broadcasting since the introduction of the TV “Weekly News Bulletin for the hearing impaired” in 1987.

The purpose of this report is to provide information to Indian policymakers about various TV and Radio Accessibility options available, best practices followed internationally and suggest recommendations for a brighter future in the area of Accessible Broadcasting.

This report is based on ITU’s “Making Television Accessible Report” (November 2011) by Peter Olaf Looms, Chairman ITU-T Focus Group on Audiovisual Media Accessibility. It has been adapted especially to cater to the needs and interests of India. We’d like to thank ITU for the use of this report and Peter Olaf Looms for his inputs to this abridged version.

This abridged report specifically covers:

TV Accessibility Options
Costs Involved & Bandwidth Requirements
Best Practices followed internationally
Radio Accessibility Options
Recommendations.

Download the abridged report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/accessible-broadcasting-in-india

Back When the Past had a Future: Being Precarious in a Network Society

nishant — 2013-02-12T06:16:12Z

We live in Network Societies. This phrase has been so bastardised to refer to the new information turn mediated by digital technologies, that we have stopped paying attention to what the Network has become. Networks are everywhere. They have become the default metaphor of our times, where everything from infrastructure assemblies to collectives of people, are all described through the lens of a network.

This article by Nishant Shah was published in a peer-reviewed newspaper Researching BWPWAP. The write-up is on Page 3.

We are no longer just human beings living in socially connected, politically identified communities. Instead, we have become actors, creating archives of traces and transactions, generating traffic and working as connectors in the ever expanding fold of the network.

The network is an opaque metaphor, conflating description and explanation. So it becomes the object to be studied, the originary context that produces itself, and the explanatory framework that accounts for itself. In other words, the network was our past – it gives us an account of who we were, it is our present – it defines the context of all our activities, and it is our future – where we do everything to support the network because it is the only future that we can imagine for ourselves. It is this flattening characteristic of networks that are diagrammatically mapped, cartographically reproduced, and presented outside of and oblivious to temporality, that produces a condition of the future that can no longer be imagined through our everyday lives.

Networks neither promise nor deliver a flattened utopia of coexistence and decentralised power. Networks are, in fact, quite aware of the structures of inequity and conditions of privilege they create and perpetuate: the only way to recognise the existence of a network is to be outside of it, the only aspiration to belong to a network is to be kept outside of it when you recognise it. Networks create themselves as simultaneously ubiquitous and scarce, of everpresent and ephemeral, creating a new ontology for our being human – an ontology of precariousness, contingent upon erasure of our histories, archives of our present, and unimaginable futures; futures we are not ready for, and don’t have strategies to occupy.

I remember the times, before networks became the default conditions of being human, when kids, negotiating the variegated temporalities of their past-present-futures, would often begin their speculations on future, by saying, "When I grow up...". In that hope of growing up, was the potential for radical political action, the possibility of social reconstruction. In network societies, though, time has no currency. It has been replaced by attentions, flows of information and actions, and do not offer a tomorrow to grow into.

There is no future to help mitigate the exigencies of the present. And with the overwhelming emphasis on archiving the present, there is no more a coherent future that can be accounted for in the vocabulary that the network develops to explain itself, and the hypothetical world outside it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future

Arbitrary Arrests for Comment on Bal Thackeray's Death

pranesh — 2013-01-02T03:42:37Z

Two girls have been arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested for making comments about the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray's death. Pranesh Prakash explores the legal angles to the arrests.

Facts of the case

This morning, there was a short report in the Mumbai Mirror about two girls having been arrested for comments one of them made, and the other 'liked', on Facebook about Bal Thackeray:

Police on Sunday arrested a 21-year-old girl for questioning the total shutdown in the city for Bal Thackeray’s funeral on her Facebook account. Another girl who ‘liked’ the comment was also arrested.

The duo were booked under Section 295 (a) of the IPC (for hurting religious sentiments) and Section 64 (a) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Though the girl withdrew her comment and apologised, a mob of some 2,000 Shiv Sena workers attacked and ransacked her uncle’s orthopaedic clinic at Palghar.

“Her comment said people like Thackeray are born and die daily and one should not observe a bandh for that,” said PI Uttam Sonawane.

What provisions of law were used?

There's a small mistake in Mumbai Mirror's reportage as there is no section "64(a)"¹ in the Information Technology (IT) Act, nor a section "295(a)" in the Indian Penal Code (IPC). They must have meant section 295A of the IPC ("outraging religious feelings of any class") and section 66A of the IT Act ("sending offensive messages through communication service, etc."). (Update: The Wall Street Journal's Shreya Shah has confirmed that the second provision was section 66A of the IT Act.)

Section 295A of the IPC is cognizable and non-bailable, and hence the police have the powers to arrest a person accused of this without a warrant.² Section 66A of the IT Act is cognizable and bailable.

Update: Some news sources claim that section 505(2) of the IPC ("Statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes") has also been invoked.

Was the law misapplied?

This is clearly a case of misapplication of s.295A of the IPC.³ This provision has been frivolously used numerous times in Maharashtra. Even the banning of James Laine's book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India happened under s.295A, and the ban was subsequently held to have been unlawful by both the Bombay High Court as well as the Supreme Court. Indeed, s.295A has not been applied in cases where it is more apparent, making this seem like a parody news report.

Interestingly, the question arises of the law under which the friend who 'liked' the Facebook status update was arrested. It would take a highly clever lawyer and a highly credulous judge to make 'liking' of a Facebook status update an act capable of being charged with electronically "sending ... any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character" or "causing annoyance or inconvenience", or under any other provision of the IT Act (or, for that matter, the IPC).⁴ That 'liking' is protected speech under Article 19(1)(a) is not under question in India (unlike in the USA where that issue had to be adjudicated by a court), since unlike the wording present in the American Constitution, the Indian Constitution clearly protects the 'freedom of speech and expression', so even non-verbal expression is protection.

Role of bad law and the police

In this case the blame has to be shared between bad law (s.66A of the IT Act) and an abuse of powers by police. The police were derelict in their duty, as they failed to provide protection to the Dhada Orthopaedic Hospital, run by the uncle of the girl who made the Facebook posting. Then they added insult to injury by arresting Shaheen Dhada and the friend who 'liked' her post. This should not be written off as a harmless case of the police goofing up. Justice Katju is absolutely correct in demanding that such police officers should be punished.

Rule of law

Rule of law demands that laws are not applied in an arbitrary manner. When tens of thousands were making similar comments in print (Justice Katju's article in the Hindu, for instance), over the Internet (countless comments on Facebook, Rediff, Orkut, Twitter, etc.), and in person, how did the police single out Shaheen Dhada and her friend for arrest?⁵

This should not be seen merely as "social media regulation", but as a restriction on freedom of speech and expression by both the law and the police. Section 66A makes certain kinds of speech-activities ("causing annoyance") illegal if communicated online, but legal if that same speech-activity is published in a newspaper. Finally, this is similar to the Aseem Trivedi case where the police wrongly decided to press charges and to arrest.

This distinction is important as it being a Facebook status update should not grant Shaheen Dhada any special immunity; the fact of that particular update not being punishable under s.295 or s.66A (or any other law) should.

Section 64 of the IT Act is about "recovery of penalty" and the ability to suspend one's digital signature if one doesn't pay up a penalty that's been imposed.↩
The police generally cannot, without a warrant, arrest a person accused of a bailable offence unless it is a cognizable offence. A non-bailable offence is one for which a judicial magistrate needs to grant bail, and it isn't an automatic right to be enjoyed by paying a bond-surety amount set by the police.↩
Section 295A of the IPC has been held not to be unconstitutional. The first case to challenge the constitutionality of section 66A of the IT Act was filed recently in front of the Madurai bench the Madras High Court.)↩
One can imagine an exceptional case where such an act could potentially be defamatory, but that is clearly exceptional.↩
This is entirely apart from the question of how the Shiv Sena singled in on Shaheen Dhada's Facebook comment.↩

This blog entry has been re-posted in the following places

Outlook (November 19, 2012).
KAFILA (November 19, 2012).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/bal-thackeray-comment-arbitrary-arrest-295A-66A

India's Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty Celebrated; Accessible Books Consortium Launched

nehaa — 2014-07-01T11:09:08Z

On Day 1 of the 28th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”), the WIPO organized an event to mark India’s ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, 2013 (“Marrakesh Treaty”), and to launch the Accessible Books Consortium (“ABC”).

India Becomes the First Country to Ratify the Marrakesh Treaty

Francis Gurry, Director General, WIPO said that the Marrakesh Treaty received 79 signatures in the twelve month period that the treaty was open for signatures. He further said that India’s ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty one year from its conclusion was a “WIPO record of sorts” and a “great example from a major country” of the importance attached to the Marrakesh Treaty.

Dilip Sinha, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in Geneva handed over India’s Instrument of Accession to the Marrakesh Treaty to Francis Gurry. Ambassador Sinha in his speech stressed on the importance of the Marrakesh Treaty to India and said that it helped that India had its amendments to its Copyright Act, 1957 in place, incorporating the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty.

Maryanne Diamond, the Immediate Past President of the World Blind Union (“WBU”) congratulated India on its ratification. Calling it a country who showed “huge leadership” in negotiations of the Marrakesh Treaty, Ms. Diamond said that this ratification was extremely significant, with India being home to a large number of blind and print disabled people and a part of the Global South. Ms. Diamond urged other nations to follow India’s example and make it a priority to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty.

Jens Bammel, Secretary General, International Publishers Association (“IPA”) also congratulated India on its ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty and called on other member states to ratify it.

Accessible Books Consortium Launched

At the launch of the ABC, Mr. Gurry said that the Marrakesh Treaty was only the means to an end, where the end was books in the hands of print disabled and visually impaired persons across the world. “To make it operational,” said Mr. Gurry, “we need to have operational activities.” He said that the ABC was an operational activity which would “breathe life” into and “make operational” the legal framework provided by the Marrakesh Treaty.

What Does it Do?

Mr. Gurry said that the ABC aimed at achieving three things- first, capacity building; second, international book exchange and third, international book exchange.

Capacity Building- Mr. Gurry said that the ABC seeks to provide training on accessible book production and distribution. He thanked the Republic of Korea which has committed to providing financial assistance for training in respect of production of books in accessible formats.
International Book Exchange- Mr. Gurry said that this activity was an IT supported facility, namely, the TIGAR Service which has its origins in India. This would allow participating institutions to perform international searches of databases to find out if accessible formats of books are available.
Inclusive Publishing- Mr. Gurry said that at the end of the day, “books should be born accessible” and technology was creating the “promise of the realization of this aspiration.” Mr. Gurry said that the ABC would promote accessible publishing and to this end, had drawn up a charter of accessible publishing- Accessible Publishing Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers. Elsevier is the first publisher to have signed this charter.

India, WBU and IPA delighted

Praising the ABC, Ambassador Sinha called it an indicator of what multi-stakeholder cooperation needs to do. He said that the ABC would assist organizations such as the DAISY Forum of India in achieving the goal of access to books in accessible formats. Congratulating the WIPO for its efforts on this front, Ambassador Sinha said that this would help nations like India realize their goal of achieving the purposes of the Marrakesh Treaty. Ms. Diamond, representing the WBU congratulated Elsevier on signing the charter. Jens Bammel, on behalf of the IPA expressed concern for making books available in accessible formats for non English speakers. The ABC, he said, was a project initiated to “genuinely complement” the Marrakesh Treaty, and would create a global catalogue of accessible works, whether provided by libraries or by publishers. Expressing his delight that the ABC was being supported equally by all stakeholders, Mr. Bammel reached out to member states to support this initiative politically.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated