The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
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Bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in Public Domain
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bringing-konkani-encyclopedia-in-public-domain
<b>On December 14, 2012, a meeting was scheduled with the Vice Chancellor Dr. Satish R Shetye to discuss the possibility of bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in public domain. Nitika Tandon shares the development in this blog post.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>As for now the four volume Konkani Encyclopedia is under the copyright of the <a class="external-link" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Goa">University of Goa</a>. Dr. Shetye has gifted one whole set of Konkani Encyclopedia to the Centre for Internet and Society and is interested to relinquish the copyright to release it under creative common license and digitize it on Wikipedia.</span> In the coming weeks we'll be working closely with Dr. Shetye and his team to bring this free encyclopedia on Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Special thanks to Goa State Library, Goa University, Dr. Shetye, Prof. Alito Siqueira, and Prof. Gopakumar for such a wonderful gift. And a big thanks to Harriet Vidyasagar and Debanjan and all those who helped to pull this through.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bringing-konkani-encyclopedia-in-public-domain'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bringing-konkani-encyclopedia-in-public-domain</a>
</p>
No publishernitikaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopOpenness2013-07-26T11:35:29ZBlog EntryBridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune
<b>A2K team members Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval participated in the "WikiWomenDay" organized by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus on October 28, 2012. Subhashish unfolds the happenings of this full day free fun workshop.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Globally participation of women on Wikipedia is less than 10 per cent. Women wikipedians across the world have joined hands to boost women's contribution to Wikipedia. Recently the A2K team was in Pune for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune/WikiWomenDay">WikiWomenDay 2012</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a>, the first Wikipedia club in India, to encourage women's participation on Wikipedia, had organized a full day fun event on October 28, 2012 at <a href="http://www.pai-ils.com/">PAI International Learning Solutions</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of Wikipedia Club Pune briefed about the agenda of the event. Noopur spoke about the global contribution on Wikipedia in terms of various topics and how male-centered topics were well covered. Few of the male centric articles were taken up for comparison with those of women to make the audience understand the gap of contribution. A good majority of articles which were of interest to men were well written whereas women centric articles were of bad shape due to lack of contribution from women. A visual <a href="http://visual.ly/wikipedias-gender-gap">representation</a> was shown to the participants to explain the statistical information about gender gap on Wikipedia. Apart from article contribution, male editors were found to be more social and discussed more on talk pages which also bring more male editors on Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing (five pillars, notability, importance of source of references, vandalism) before they were explained about actual editing. Each of the participants were provided with a computer and one of them was invited to create her user account.</p>
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<p>Thereafter Abhishek demonstrated searching an article on Wikipedia and how logging in to Wikipedia allows editors to edit articles which are protected from editing by anyone. One of the logged in editors was asked to make a small edit on an article which surprised many of the participants. They realized that even they can make changes to the articles, for the first time in their life. Then there was a buzz about the credibility of the articles as they all saw that anyone can edit the articles. So the Wikipedia article on Pune was vandalized and Pune was made the capital of India for a few minutes! The page was refreshed after a while and reverted. This was clear enough to demonstrate how active the editor community is on Wikipedia.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/WikiLearning.png" alt="Wiki Learning" class="image-inline" title="Wiki Learning" /></p>
Abhishek Suryavanshi demonstrates wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most of the errors and typos get corrected quickly as someone or the other notices that there is a mistake and correct it. However, there are many articles, especially articles of Indian context which still have wrong information because the number of Indian editors are less. A series of editing for various favourite articles chosen by new wikipedians opened up the window for them to understand how important their participation could be. Abhishek, Nikita, Noopur and Subhashish helped the editors with editing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After engaging the editors for quite sometime with editing there was a fun quiz session to brush up what was taught. The participants were asked questions based on the previous session.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Winners of the quiz were awarded with Wikipedia stickers and badges.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/WP.png" alt="Pune Wikipedia Session" class="image-inline" title="Pune Wikipedia Session" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; ">A picture of participants learning wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012 in Pune</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some of the participants left after the lunch break. Those who came back then gathered for a Indian language Wikipedia session. Out of the whole audience there were Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Odia speakers. They all were showed their respective language wikipedias. A demonstration was given to show the typing tool. As the editors were completely new to the Indian language typing, some of them started typing using default <a href="http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Narayam">Narayam</a> transliteration tool and some took the help of <a href="http://www.bhashaindia.com/ilit">Microsoft ILIT</a> and <a href="http://www.google.co.in/transliterate">Google Transliterate</a> as well. During this session new wikipedians edited many articles on <a href="http://mr.wikipedia.org/">Marathi</a>, <a href="http://hi.wikipedia.org/">Hindi</a> and <a href="http://bn.wikipedia.org/">Bengali</a> Wikiepdia. After the whole day session there was still some time left for acclaim and fun. The participants were awarded with participation and contribution certificate by the Wikipedia Club Pune. All the new wikipedians registered on Wikipedia Club Pune.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There was a special announcement for Wikipedia Summit India, Anniversary Celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune. Club members celebrated with cutting a special Wikipedia cake. Rishi Aacharya and Ketaki Pole from PAI International Learning Solutions extended their support for this event.</p>
<h3>Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There was a meeting with some of the Wikipedia Club Pune members on October 27, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions. It was attended by Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of the club brought a proposal about the Wikipedia India Summit, anniversary celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune which is planned in the first quarter of 2013. Importance of a India level summit, plans and agenda, logistics and partnership and sponsorship options were discussed during this meeting. There will be public announcement regarding this summit.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopOpenness2012-11-10T08:30:09ZBlog EntryBooks are a bridge between generations
https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-23-2014-books-are-a-bridge-between-generations
<b>Kannada litterateurs stressed on the importance of books and cultivating the habit of reading on the occasion of ‘World Book Day’ on Wednesday.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.deccanherald.com/content/401569/039books-bridge-generations039.html">published in the Deccan Herald</a> on April 23, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was a speaker on the occasion.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Speaking on the sidelines of the event, writer Narahalli Balasubramanya said “We should ensure children emulate great minds if we want them to be responsible citizens. This is possible only if we make them read good books.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Today, we are increasingly finding ourselves in the company of corrupt people. It is through books that we can interact with great literary figures such as Bendre and Kuvempu.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The event was jointly organised by Karnataka Publishers Association, Kendra Sahitya Akademi, Karnataka Lekhakiyara Sangha and Indian Institute of World Culture.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Balasubramanya maintained that the Kendra Sahitya Academy sold books at affordable rates and also gave a funding of Rs 400 crore to the book publishers, annually. “But not many people are aware of books entering market and the works don’t reach people,” he added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A series of Kannada works written by authors were released on the occasion. Writer Dr Siddalingaiah who released the books said “Books are bridges between our minds and our ancestors’ minds. Every home should have a small library.”</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">‘Pustaka Bhagya’</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The State government has introduced Anna Bhagya, Ksheera Bhagya and other schemes. Similarly, they should also implement Pustaka Bhagya,” said M V Nagaraj Rao of Shrungara Prakashana.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Technical writer in Kannada U B Pavanaja maintained that in Kannada Wikipedia there was dearth of information on Kannada literary works. “There is enough information about English works but not on Kannada novels and literary publications. The Kannada publishers should strive to feed information and synopsis of each work into the Kannada wikipedia,” he added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Public Library Department celebrated the occasion by holding a book exhibition and essay competition for children at City Central Library premises on Wednesday.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-23-2014-books-are-a-bridge-between-generations'>https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-23-2014-books-are-a-bridge-between-generations</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2014-05-05T09:27:05ZNews ItemBooks and More are Relicensed to Creative Commons
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-education-may-2-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-books-and-more-are-relicensed-to-creative-commons
<b>This blog post is cross-posted from Opensource.com. It was published on May 2, 2014.</b>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/CCBY.png" alt="CC-BY" class="image-inline" title="CC-BY" /></p>
<p><i>Image by opensource.com</i></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">I began working with the<b> <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/" target="_blank">Wikimedia Foundation</a></b> in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the <b><a href="https://cis-india.org/" target="_blank">Centre for Internet and Society</a></b>'s <b><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge" target="_blank">Access To Knowledge program</a></b>, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We worked closely with <a href="http://www.unigoa.ac.in/department.php?adepid=7&mdepid=1" target="_blank">Goa University</a>, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the <a href="http://www.odiabiswabidyalaya.org/" target="_blank">Institute of Odia Studies and Research</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Increasing open access for publications gained a lot when the government of India <a href="https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/39342" target="_blank" title="blog post">launched</a> the <a href="http://india.gov.in/national-repository-open-educational-resources-ministry-human-resource-development">National Repository of Open Educational Resources</a> in August 2013 by the request of <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in">Wikimedia India</a>. It generally takes a long time and much effort to negotiate with copyright holders for relicensing material as Creative Commons. But, when we do negotiate it, and win, the content is a permanent and valuable addition to open knowledge and the movement.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>So far, authors might be avoiding open licensing because:</span></p>
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<li style="text-align: justify; ">They think it might put them out of business because others could plagiarize and republish their work without attribution.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">They think if they will lose ownership of the content due to the nature of open licenses, which allow reuse.</li>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open licensing should be important to authors because as more readers and reviewers get access to their books and other online content, the visibility of their work increases, allowing them to gain more respect and popularity. This can, in turn, help authors sell more of the reprints.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The "one book in every child's hand" campaign by <a href="http://prathambooks.org/" target="_blank">Pratham Books</a> was an initiative by a large publisher to license Indian langage books with a CC BY-SA license. The campaign's mission was to provide access to knowledge and good quality education of native Indian languages to students whose families cannot bear educational costs. Pratham Books gained a lot of attention globally and the campaign proved to be a sustainable model for publishers and free licenses.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scholarly research publications are less prone to plagiarism because of their low retail value compared to mainstream fiction, self-help books, or travel and lifestyle books. Encyclopedic books have even less retail value. Thus, releasing content online under free licenses would not affect such scholarly works or encyclopedic print publications to a large extent.</p>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Page.png" alt="Page" class="image-inline" title="Page" /><br /><i>Photo by Veethika Mishra, CC-BY-SA 4.0</i></p>
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<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Relicensing projects</h3>
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<li style="text-align: justify; ">Last year, Goa University applied a CC BY-SA 3.0 license to their four-volume encyclopedia, <i><a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Events/Konkani_Vishwakosh_Digitization" target="_blank" title="encyclopedia set">Konkani Vishwakosh</a></i>. It is the largest encyclopedia compiled in the language. The book is being digitized on Konkani WikiSource, attracting new volunteers.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/04/08/odisha-dibasa-2014-14-books-released-under-cc-license/" target="_blank" title="Wikimedia">relicensed</a> eleven of the noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty's Odia books under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><i>Classical Odia</i><span> is a 600+ page book of historical documents and manuscripts on Odia language and literary heritage of more than 2,500 years. The researchers Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty moved from copyright to a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">T<span>wo Odia language books by linguist Subrat Prusty have been relicensed to CC BY-SA 3.0. They are <i>Jati</i>, <i>Jagruti O Pragati</i>, and <i>Bhasa O Jatiyata </i>and have been digitized as well using ISCII standard fonts (not Unicode). ISCII standard fonts have glyphs with Indic characters that are actually replacements of the Latin characters by Indic characters.</span><span> </span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>A recent addition is the relicensing of the Kannada language encyclopedia published and copyrighted by Mysore University to a Creative Commons license.</span></li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The community and the publishers of books gain mutual benefits when more Indic language books are digitized, put online, and made freely available. By expanding online content and readership, a new life is given to many South Asian and non-Latin works, creating a revival for these languages and cultures.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://opensource.com/education/14/5/odia-wikimedia">Read the original post here</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-education-may-2-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-books-and-more-are-relicensed-to-creative-commons'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-education-may-2-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-books-and-more-are-relicensed-to-creative-commons</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2014-05-28T06:29:57ZBlog EntryBitcoin & Open Source with Aaron Koenig
https://cis-india.org/events/bitcoin-and-open-source-aaron-koenig
<b>Aaron Koenig, director of bitfilm.org and a global Bitcoin entrepreneur will give a talk at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on February 7 at 6.00 p.m.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Learn more about Bitcoin and its global path as we explore concepts and ideaologies behind the technology behemoth.</p>
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<p>Above is an image of a Bitcoin Expert giving a presentation.<br />Image source: <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1keLpwi">http://bit.ly/1keLpwi</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/bitcoin-and-open-source-aaron-koenig'>https://cis-india.org/events/bitcoin-and-open-source-aaron-koenig</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessInternet GovernanceEventAccess to Knowledge2014-02-06T01:40:24ZEventBig Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-june-24-2013-nishant-shah-big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-of-openness
<b>Openness has become the buzzword for everything in India right now. From the new kids on the block riding the wave of Digital Humanities investing in infrastructure of open knowledge initiatives to the rhetoric of people-centered open government data projects that are architected to create 'empowered citizens', there is an inherent belief that Opening up things will make everything good. </b>
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<p>This blog post was <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-openness">published in DML Central</a> on June 24, 2013.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">I am not an Open-data party pooper. In fact, I firmly believe that opening up data – through hardware, through software, through intellectual property regimes on content – and enabling access to information and data is one of the most basic needs of the information age. I also advocate for strong policies that curb corporate and government control and monopolies over data and information. Along with my colleagues at the <a href="https://cis-india.org/">Centre for Internet and Society</a>, and the many networks we work with, I have thought of myself as an open data advocate and have worked towards examining openness not only at the level of content, but also openness in infrastructure and conditions of access, distribution and storage. More than ever, it is necessary to build systems of Open Data that not only have distributed, collective and ethical ownership but also ensure the fair use and integration of information in our everyday life – especially given the sinister age of relentless remembering, as lives get incessantly archived through ubiquitous and pervasive technologies of portable computing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Having said that, there is a strange thing happening around Openness right now. Openness seems to have been separated from the fact that it is a response to things being gated and closed. Openness, as it is being deployed right now, in e-government initiatives or rapid digitization processes in university libraries, seems to suggest that Openness is merely about making things in the physical format available in the digital medium. Hence, for example, the National Mission for Education through Information and Communication Technologies, India’s largest flagship government initiative to build learning conditions of the future, is investing almost all of its budget on digitizing historical and local language material in digitally intelligible and legible records that can be easily distributed. While the effort at building the infrastructure and preserving this material is absolutely worth supporting, making it the be-all and end-all of Open data initiatives is symptomatic of what I call the ‘politics of the benign’. We need to realize that Openness is not merely about making already available content in physical formats in the digital domain. Openness is about battles with Intellectual Property Regimes, which charge an extraordinary amount of money for high-value knowledge to anybody who wants to access it. In other words, openness is not about digitizing our grandparents’ pictures; it is about claiming access to knowledge and information hidden behind paywalls and gateways that is often produced using public resources.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As you can imagine, the perpetuation of this politics of benign fits many agendas; there are numerous stakeholders and actors who seek to neuter the radical nature of demands made by the Openness movements while retaining the vocabulary of political change. And that is why, if you look at the ways in which openness debates have changed, they get immediately deflected to questions around infrastructure, access, last-mile, etc. – which are all presented to us as the infrastructure of being political and being open. In the last few years, especially with Digital Humanities emerging as the playground where politics is not allowed, I find too many instances where the Humanities and Social Sciences questions get morphed into similar sounding questions that pretend to be the same but dislocate the political content and intention from the engagement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the ways this works really well is by a separation of data from the lived reality of people. Data is seen as something that is out there – something that is <i>about</i> the real rather than <i>the</i> real. It is seen as an abstraction, which, when it further enters the circuits of pretty visualizations and graphic representations, becomes so entrenched in questions of reading and coding that it often becomes a surrogate for the larger realities that it is supposed to intervene in. So, for example, in India, the concerns around agriculture infrastructure and conditions of the farmers have easily been replaced by agriculture informatics – leading to a strange paradox where the states with the highest community informatics infrastructure also have the highest <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India">incidences of farmer suicides</a>. I am not suggesting there is a cause-and-effect relationship here. However, it is a telling story that the community informatics infrastructure which was supposed to change the bleak realities of agriculture and farming in India has definitely not changed the nature of the reality it set out to solve.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Or in a similar vein, the ways in which the landscape of education is changing in the country, because of the emergence of the digital as the new organizing principle and in some instances, the <i>raison de etre</i> for building education infrastructure also needs to be examined. So, for instance, India has seen a rapid improvement of the Gross Enrollment Ratio in education that measures the annual intake and successful completion of education programs by students in the country. The GER shows that with remote education processes, the attempts at building distributed learning environments and the building of digital infrastructure has led to more students in different parts of the country getting enrolled in formal education systems. There is a celebration that more children are entering schools and colleges and are also in a state of socio-economic mobility. There is a clear causal relationship established in producing digital infrastructure and greater access to education and learning resources for an emerging information society like India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, this particular mode of looking at education, through the lens of access and inclusion, is no longer able to reflect on the core concerns that education institutions in the country were historically supposed to address. If the primary function of education was to address the questions of inequity, uneven modernity, disparate wealth distribution, and widespread socio-cultural conservatism, these are no longer questions that are featured in the Data-Technology driven education programs. These problems, which have been at the center of education debates in the country – leading to widespread affirmative action and violent resistance to it – have now been reformulated around quantifiable parameters of intake, credits, employability, affordability, accessibility, merit, etc. So there is silence about the nature of the students who enter education. There is an implicit push for the disinvestment of the state from education resources in favor of privatization. We remain enamored by the numbers joining the system, without worrying about the categories of discrimination – caste, gender, sexuality, language, location – that have affected the quality, intention and function of education. These issues have become moot points, to be replaced by visualizations and data sets that remain opaque in looking at the negotiations of identity politics and the need to embed education processes in lived realities of the students who enter formal education.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These problems are not new. And the intention of this articulation is not to deny the power of digital technologies or the opportunities they produce. Instead, it is a call to say that we need to stop thinking of data – an abstraction, an artifact, a manual product – as a natural state of being. We need to remind ourselves that engagement with data is not a sterile engagement, rendered beautiful through visualizations and infographics that can make reality intelligible. It is perhaps time to realize that Data has replaced People as the central concern of being human, social and political. Time to start re-introducing People back into debates around Data, and acknowledging that Data Informatics is People Informatics and data wars have a direct effect on the ways in which people live. And Die.</p>
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<p>Banner image credit: sugree <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/73462957">http://www.flickr.com/photos/73462957</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-june-24-2013-nishant-shah-big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-of-openness'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-june-24-2013-nishant-shah-big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-of-openness</a>
</p>
No publishernishantOpen DataOpenness2013-07-03T04:23:11ZBlog EntryBig Data and Positive Social Change in the Developing World: A White Paper for Practitioners and Researchers
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world
<b>I was a part of a working group writing a white paper on big data and social change, over the last six months. This white paper was produced by a group of activists, researchers and data experts who met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre to discuss the question of whether, and how, big data is becoming a resource for positive social change in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Bellagio Big Data Workshop Participants. (2014). “Big data and positive social change in the developing world: A white paper for practitioners and researchers.” Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. Available online: <a class="external-link" href="http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491555">http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491555</a>.</p>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our working definition of big data includes, but is not limited to, sources such as social media, mobile phone use, digitally mediated transactions, the online news media, and administrative records. It can be categorised as data that is provided explicitly (e.g. social media feedback); data that is observed (e.g. mobile phone call records); and data that is inferred and derived by algorithms (for example social network structure or inflation rates). We defined four main areas where big data has potential for those interested in promoting positive social change: advocating and facilitating; describing and predicting; facilitating information exchange and promoting accountability and transparency.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In terms of <span class="ff5">advocating and facilitating</span>,<span class="_0 _"> </span> we discussed ways in which volunteered data may <span class="_0 _"> </span>help organisations to open up new public spa<span class="_0 _"></span>ces for discussion and awareness<span class="_0 _"></span>-building; how both aggregating data and working across different databa<span class="_0 _"></span>ses can be tools for building awa<span class="_0 _"></span>reness, and howthe digital data commons can also configure new<span class="_0 _"></span><span class="ff5"> </span>communities and actions<span class="_0 _"></span> (sometimes serendipitously) through data science and aggregation. Finally, we also<span class="_0 _"></span> looked at the problem of overexposure and ho<span class="_0 _"></span>wactivists and organisations can<span class="_0 _"></span> protect themselves and hide their digital footprin<span class="_0 _"></span>ts. The challenges w<span class="ls2">e</span> identified in this area were how to interpret data<span class="_0 _"></span> correctly when supplementary information may b<span class="_0 _"></span>e lacking; organisational capacity constraints aro<span class="_0 _"></span>und processing and storing data,<span class="_0 _"></span> and issues around data dissemination, i.e. the pos<span class="_0 _"></span>sible negative consequences of inadvertently ide<span class="_0 _"></span>ntifying groups or individuals<span class="_0 _"></span>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Next, we looked at the way big data can help describe and predict, functions which are particularly important in the academic, development and humanitarian areas of work where researchers can combine data into new dynamic, high-resolution datasets to detect new correlations and surface new questions. With data such as mobile phone data and Twitter analytics, understanding the data’s comprehensiveness, meaning and bias are the main challenges, accompanied by the problem of developing new and more comprehensive ethical systems to protect data subjects where data is observed rather than volunteered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The next group of activities discussed was facilitating information exchange. We looked at mobile-based information services, where it is possible for a platform created around a particular aim (e.g. agricultural knowledge-building) to incorporate multiple feedback loops which feed into both research and action. The pitfalls include the technical challenge of developing a platform which is lean yet multifaceted in terms of its uses, and particularly making it reliably available to low-income users. This kind of platform, addressed by big data analytics, also offers new insights through data discovery and allows the provider to steer service provision according to users’ revealed needs and priorities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our last category for big data use was accountability and transparency, where organisations are using crowdsourcing methods to aggregate and analyse information in real time to establish new spaces for critical discussion, awareness and action. Flows of digital information can be managed to prioritise participation and feedback, provide a safe space to engage with policy decisions and expose abuse. The main challenges are how to keep sensitive information (and informants) safe while also exposing data and making authorities accountable; how to make the work sustainable without selling data, and how to establish feedback loops so that users remain involved in the work beyond an initial posting. In the crowdsourcing context, new challenges are also arising in terms of how to verify and moderate real-time flows of information, and how to make this process itself transparent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, we also discussed the relationship between big and open data. Open data can be seen as a system of governance and a knowledge commons, whereas big data does not by its nature involve the idea of the commons, so we leaned toward the term ‘opening data’, i.e. processes which could apply to commercially generated as much as public-sector datasets. It is also important to understand where to prioritise opening, and where this may exclude people who are not using the ‘right’ technologies: for example, analogue methods (e.g. nailing a local authority budget to a town hall door every month) may be more open than ‘open’ digital data that’s available online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our discussion surfaced many questions to do with representation and meaning: must datasets be interpreted by people with local knowledge? For researchers to get access to data that is fully representative, do we need a data commons? How are data proprietors engaging with the power dynamics and inequalities in the research field, and how can civil society engage with the private sector on its own terms if data access is skewed towards elites? We also looked at issues of privacy and risk: do we need a contextual risk perspective rather than a single set of standards? What is the role of local knowledge in protecting data subjects, and what kinds of institutions and practices are necessary? We concluded that there is a case to be made for building a data commons for private/public data, and for setting up new and more appropriate ethical guidelines to deal with big data, since aggregating, linking and merging data present new kinds of privacy risk. In particular, organisations advocating for opening datasets must admit the limitations of anonymisation, which is currently being ascribed more power to protect data subjects than it merits in the era of big data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our analysis makes a strong case that it is time for civil society groups in particular to become part of the conversation about the power of data. These groups are the connectors between individuals and governments, corporations and governance institutions, and have the potential to promote big data analysis that is locally driven and rooted. Civil society groups are also crucially important but currently underrepresented in debates about privacy and the rights of technology users, and civil society as a whole has a responsibility for building critical awareness of the ways big data is being used to sort, categorise and intervene in LMICs by corporations, governments and other actors. Big data is shaping up to be one of the key battlefields of our era, incorporating many of the issues civil society activists worldwide have been working on for decades. We hope that this paper can inform organisations and<br />individuals as to where their particular interests may gain traction in the debate, and what their contribution may look like.</p>
<hr />
<p><b><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change.pdf">Click to download the full white paper here</a></b>. (PDF, 1.95 Mb)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world</a>
</p>
No publishernishantBig DataPrivacyInternet GovernanceFeaturedOpennessHomepage2014-10-01T03:52:35ZBlog EntryBharat Majhi Writings Now Available Under a Creative Commons License
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bharat-majhi-writings-now-available-under-cc-license
<b>Before the advent of Odia Wikisource becoming live, Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) got in touch with notable Odia author Bharat Majhi for bringing his writings on the Internet.</b>
<p>Dr. Sailen Routray, Director, <a class="external-link" href="http://kiss.ac.in/">Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences</a> (KISS) (also an institutional partner of <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">CIS-A2K</a>) played a key role in initiating a dialog with Mr. Majhi. Five of his books are now available under <a class="external-link" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 </a>(CC-by-SA 4.0) license:</p>
<ol>
<li>Agadhu Duari</li>
<li>Saralarekhaa</li>
<li>Murtikaara</li>
<li>Mahanagara Padya</li>
<li>Highwayre Kuhudi</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Bharat Majhi is a known name in Odia literary circle. His writings on societal structures in rural Odisha, the people, their life, aspiration and suffering have been critically acclaimed. These books also become the first Odia modern poetry books to be available under a CC-by-SA license and Mr. Majhi takes another leap of being the first Odia poet to release his literary work under CC-by-SA 4.0 license.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: center; ">Video</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="450" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odia_poet_Bharat_Majhi_reciting_poetry_from_his_first_book_Agadhu_Duari.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="800"></iframe></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In this video, Odia-language poet Bharat Majhi reciting a poem from his first book Agadhu Duari. He recently released 5 of his books under CC-by-SA 4.0 license by the efforts of Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS).He also tells Subhashish Panigrahi about his dreams of poetry becoming a performing art coming true by it becoming more open. After other Odia author and poet Dr Jagannath Mohanty, Majhi is the first Odia poet to release poem online under CC-by-SA license and his poetry earn the title of the first Odia modern poetry under the same license.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bharat-majhi-writings-now-available-under-cc-license'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bharat-majhi-writings-now-available-under-cc-license</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaVideoOpennessOdia Wikipedia2014-11-07T15:34:38ZBlog EntryBeyond the Language Tussle
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-hindu-december-6-2014-tejaswini-niranjana-beyond-the-language-tussle
<b>It might be more productive to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn.</b>
<p>The Op-ed was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/beyond-the-language-tussle/article6665681.ece">published in the Hindu </a>on December 6, 2014.</p>
<hr />
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">The ongoing <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/german-taken-off-third-language-slot/article6600359.ece?ref=relatedNews">Sanskrit vs. German controversy</a> is being seen by some as the sign of a sinister conspiracy to change educational options, and by others as a much-needed corrective to bring back “Indian culture” into the schools. It might be more productive to see it instead as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn. The attempt to implement the teaching of Sanskrit in schools seems to be supported by a remarkably uninformed view about what sort of language policy we require today. And this is not to say that previous governments had any greater insight into how to handle either the medium of instruction problem or the issue of how many languages to teach and at what level.</p>
<h3 class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Education budget cut</h3>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Far more disturbing than the Sanskrit-German debate was the news last week that the new Central government has decided to cut Rs.11,000 crore from the Education budget (<i>The Hindu</i>, “<a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/social-sector-funds-slashed/article6637180.ece">Social sector funds slashed</a>,” Nov. 27). The favouring of physical infrastructure over “the social sector” (health, education, social security, nutrition, etc.) disregards the intangible factors that go into strengthening knowledge bases and the setting up of infrastructure in the first place. One of the implicit casualties of the massive cut in the Education budget is a proposed 12th Plan programme to revitalise Indian language resources in higher education. The rationale for this programme was that generation of knowledge in Indian languages would not only create new intellectual resources but transform the teaching-learning process in positive ways. The access-equity-quality triangle emphasised by policymakers could effectively be strengthened through a focus on Indian languages. Since the default medium of instruction at the tertiary level was actually a local language rather than the “mandatory” English, the deliberate blindness of successive governments to this fact was depriving students across disciplines of good quality resources. This linguistic divide affects the majority of tertiary students in the country. Thus, investing in Indian language materials at the basic and advanced levels is a sustainable (not to mention cost-effective) way by which Indian higher education could be strengthened.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote" style="text-align: justify; "><span>“</span>The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.<span>”</span></blockquote>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">We should note here that the emphasis is not on how many languages the student learns but on whether s/he is developing cognitive capabilities. This too has been a serious blind spot in modern Indian education over the decades, right up to the recent May 2014 Supreme Court judgment on the non-enforceability of mother-tongue instruction. The Court invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression in this instance to say that children and parents could choose the language in which the child wanted to be educated. With all respect to the learned judges, one wonders if they sought expert opinion in the matter or merely relied on their common sense. If they had done the former, they might have found out that worldwide research has proved that the most effective teaching and learning happens through the use of the mother tongue. If exposing a child to English at a very young age is dictated by opportunism and a skewed sense of what makes social mobility possible, this choice flies in the face of language and education research as well as the most enlightened pedagogic practices available. If mother tongue or Indian language education is not practical today, it’s because of the enormous lack of good educational resources in those languages, another need that state initiatives have failed to address adequately.</p>
<h3 class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Parallel with China</h3>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Since, these days, China is the favourite country of comparison for us, we should pay attention to the fact that students in China start learning English in the fourth standard and for the most part study all their subjects in Mandarin. In my experience, the English fluency of the average Chinese undergraduate ranges from functional knowledge of English to complete proficiency, with an emphasis on reading and writing rather than speaking. Even those with functional knowledge are far more capable of dealing with the world of higher education today than most students I encounter in India. The single most important variable here would have to be that of mother tongue instruction combined with later exposure to a language that gives students access to resources not so readily available in Chinese. It’s a different matter that Internet use is so heavily policed in China. However, every person I know inside and outside the university has figured out how exactly to access the resources they want, which is much more than can be said of Indian students who don’t experience government-imposed firewalls. So, again, is the ability to navigate the digital domain related to language skills or critical skills?</p>
<h3 class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Lack of clarity</h3>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">The inability to create a systematic curricular exposure to language and critical skills is perhaps what prompts periodic outbursts like the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directive to replace German in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools with Sanskrit. Combined with this lack of application is what can only be seen as the extraordinarily resilient prejudices about what constitutes “Indian culture.” We routinely tend to forget that this is a modern concept, mobilised by colonialist as well as nationalist perspectives on our society. Lack of clarity about what education is for leads to muddled thinking about what should be done in the space of education. We should not confusedly believe that the primary task of education is to pass on ways of living — we do that in almost every domain of social engagement. The task of education is to foster and strengthen cognitive capacities that can equip students to produce original knowledge on their own terms, for which we are likely to need bilingual and trilingual education. Debating whether we should learn Sanskrit instead of German is a distraction from the real tasks that lie ahead. We need to reorient the language debate to focus not on learning the language (any language) but learning how to think.</p>
<h3 class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Language use analysis</h3>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">The CBSE circular of June 30, 2014, instructing its affiliated schools to observe ‘Sanskrit Week’, introduced the topic by stating that “Sanskrit and Indian culture are intertwined as most of the indigenous knowledge is available in this language.” It’s shocking to see that people in the business of education are unaware about the fundamental histories of language use in our country, and that mere assertion can pass for accurate information. Apart from the facile collapsing of “culture” onto “knowledge,” the circular’s statement about Sanskrit as the language of indigenous knowledge appears as a sweeping generalisation when you look at it from the point of view of medical, artisanal or performing arts knowledge forms. Even if we stay with just one example, that of indigenous medicine, and even if we stay with the venerable Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a quick overview of the books listed would show that the languages of indigenous knowledge include Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Tamil in addition to Sanskrit. The library currently lists 137 Tamil books on Siddha, for example, with 157 Sanskrit books on Ayurveda. Some of this knowledge is also available in Malayalam, like the important works on <i>vishavaidyam</i>.</p>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Coming to contemporary language use in India, it would be important to note that just as modern Kannada, Marathi or Telugu for example have drawn on Sanskrit to build their vocabulary, they have equally strongly drawn on other languages. Here are some sample Kannada words that reveal the original language coiled inside the present day usage: <i>adalat</i>, <i>vakila</i>, <i>javabu</i>, <i>ambari</i>, <i>gulabi</i>, <i>sipayi</i>, <i>taakathhu</i>, <i>firyadu</i>, <i>bunadi</i>, <i>najooku </i>(Persian/Urdu). This kind of sampling could be replicated for any contemporary Indian language, and an exhaustive mapping exercise might reveal fascinating borrowings and transformations that gesture well beyond language use.</p>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Most of our languages cannot sustain teaching and research in the context of the modern university and its disciplines. We need to create critical vocabularies across several conceptual domains. Students need to learn the ability to distinguish between levels of meaning, to contextualise/translate, and to create new concepts that capture the life of our societies and our institutions. And in doing this, they have to learn to draw on multiple linguistic resources.</p>
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; ">Ensuring the entry of Indian language resources into the mainstream of our higher education system is a long-delayed project. By bringing these resources into a national educational structure, we will be (a) expanding the analytical abilities of these languages, and (b) making the curriculum more relevant to the society we live in. The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.</p>
<hr />
<p class="body" style="text-align: justify; "><i>(Tejaswini Niranjana is with the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society) </i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-hindu-december-6-2014-tejaswini-niranjana-beyond-the-language-tussle'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-hindu-december-6-2014-tejaswini-niranjana-beyond-the-language-tussle</a>
</p>
No publishertejuOpennessAccess to Knowledge2014-12-10T14:08:02ZBlog EntryBeyond Property Rights: Thinking About Moral Definitions of Openness
https://cis-india.org/news/tech-president-august-6-2013-david-eaves-beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness
<b>It is hard for Westerners to realize just how much we take for granted about intellectual property, and in particular, how much the property owner’s perspective--be it a corporation, government or creative artist--is embedded in our view of the world as the natural order of things.</b>
<hr />
<p>This blog post by David Eaves <a class="external-link" href="http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/24244/beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness">was published in TECH President </a>on August 6, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While sharing and copying technologies are disrupting some of the ways we understanding “content,” when you visit a non-Western country like India, the spectrum of choices become broader. There is less timidity wrestling with questions like: should poor farmers pay inflated prices for patented genetically-engineered seeds? How long should patents be given for life-saving medicines that cost more than many make in a year? Should Indian universities spend millions on academic journals and articles? In the United States or other rich countries we may weigh both sides of these questions--the rights of the owner vs. the moral rights of the user--but there’s no question people elsewhere, such as in India, weigh them different given the questions of life and death or of poverty and development.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Consequently, conversations about open knowledge outside the supposedly settled lands of the “rich” often stretch beyond permission-based “fair use” and “creative commons” approaches. There is a desire to explore potential moral rights to use “content” in addition to just property rights that may be granted under statutes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A couple of months ago I sat down in Bangalore with <a href="https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil">Sunil Abraham</a>, the founder and executive director of the <a href="https://cis-india.org/">Center for Internet & Society (CIS)</a> there, to talk about the center, and his views on the role of technology and openness in politics and society. One part of our conversation led to <a href="http://techpresident.com/news/23934/how-technology-and-isnt-helping-fight-corruption-india">this WeGov column on “I Paid a Bribe”</a><a> and the challenge of fighting corruption in India using technology. Here I want to reflect further on how Sunil and his counterparts may be radically challenging how we should think about open information more generally.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As we talked, Sunil outlined how people and organizations were using “open” methodologies to advance social movements or create counter power. To explain his view he sketched out the following “map” of IP rights and freedoms to show people use and view the different “permissions” (some legal, some illegal).</p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Mapping.png" alt="Mapping the Definition and Use of Open" class="image-inline" title="Mapping the Definition and Use of Open" /></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As a high-level overview this map offers a general list of the tools at the disposal of citizens interested in playing with intellectual property, particularly as they pursue social justice issues.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the top of the chart are the various forms of “permissions” that a property owner may (or may not) grant you. Thus at the far left sits the most restrictive IP regime and, as you move right, the user gets more and more freedoms (or, if you take the perspective of property owners, property loses more and more of its formal legal protections and a different notion, of “moral rights,” arises).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second row divides the permissions and the actors along what Sunil believes is one of the most important permissions - the requirement to attribute (or the freedom not to).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, at the bottom, I’ve placed various actors along the spectrum to both show where they might be positioned in the access debate and/or how they use these tools to advance their aims. Thus someone like Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual father of Creative Commons, might support many uses of information as long as the owner gives permission; whereas groups like the Pirate Party or the Yes Men edge further out into uses that may not appear legitimate to a property owner.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Particularly interesting is Sunil’s decision to include non-legal “permissions” such as ignoring the property holders rights in his spectrum of openness. He sees this as the position of the Pirate Party, which he suggests advocates that people should have the right to do what they want with intellectual property even if they don’t have permission, with the exception, interestingly, of ignoring attribution.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He also includes two even more radical “permissions” – counterfeiting, that is claiming that you created the work – and false attribution – assigning your work to someone else! Sunil sees Anonymous as often using the former and the Yes Men as using the latter. “They (the Yes Men) are playing with the attribution layer,” he says, by conducting actions such as their fake DOW press release about the Bhopal disaster.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Pushing the identity envelope</b><br />To Sunil, the big dividing line is less about legal vs. illegal but around this issue of attribution. “This is the most exciting area because this (the non-attribution area) is where you escape surveillance,” he declares.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“All the modern day regulation over IP is trying to pin an individual against their actions and then trying to attach responsibility so as to prosecute them,” Sunil says. “All that is circumvented when you play with the attribution layer.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This matters a great deal for individuals and organizations trying to create counter power – particularly against the state or large corporate interests. In this regard Sunil is actually linking the tools (or permissions) along the open spectrum to civil disobedience. Of course, such “permissions” are also used by states all the time, such as pretending that a covert action was the responsibility of someone else, or simply denying responsibility for some action.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This, in turn, has some interesting implications.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The first is, that it allows Sunil to weave together a number of groups that might not normally be seen as connected because he can map their strategies or tools against a common axis. Thus Lawrence Lessig, the Yes Man, companies and journalists can all be organized based on what “permissions” they believe are legitimate. For example, journalists and new publishers are often seen as fairly pro-copyright (it protects their work) but they are quite happy to ignore the proprietary rights of a government or corporate document and publish its contents, if they believe that action is in the public interest. Hence their position on the spectrum as “willing to ignore proprietary rights.” (Leave aside government arguments that publishing such documents is “stealing” when, at least in the US, they are technically already not subject to copyright.) However, a credible newspaper or journalist would never knowingly attribute a quote or document to a different person. Attribution remains sacred, even when legal proprietary rights are not.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It also tests the notions of who is actually an IP radical. As Sunil notes: “The more you move to the right the more radical you are. Because everywhere on the left you actually have to educate people about the law, which is currently unfair to the user, before you even introduce them to the alternatives. You aren’t even challenging the injustice in the law! On the right you are operating at a level that is liberated from identity and accountability. You are hacking identity.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil is thus justifying how the use of “illegal” permissions may actually be a form of civil disobedience that can be recognized as legitimate. This is something journalists confront regularly as well. Many are willing to publish “illegally” obtained leaked documents when they believe that may serve the public good. What is ethical is not always legal and so there position on this chart is more nuanced than one might initially suspect.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is not to say that Sunil doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of legal approaches. For him this map represents a more complete range of choices an activist can choose from as they try to develop their strategy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“So what you do, and the specific change you are trying to precipitate, you’ll have to determine what strategy you need. Sometimes working within the left hand group is sufficient. Having a non-derivative, non-commercial license to enable students to access academic works, in India, is good enough… But then, to do what the <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_reminds">Yes Men did to DOW Chemicals</a>? You have to be over on the right side.”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/tech-president-august-6-2013-david-eaves-beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness'>https://cis-india.org/news/tech-president-august-6-2013-david-eaves-beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessIntellectual Property RightsAccess to Knowledge2013-08-07T09:43:35ZNews ItemBerlin 6 Open Access Conference
https://cis-india.org/news/berlin-6-open-access-conference
<b>The Berlin 6 Open Access conference was attended by Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society Distinguished Fellow. </b>
<p>Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society
Distinguished Fellow, attended the Berlin 6 Open Access conference (<a href="http://www.berlin6.org/" target="_blank">www.berlin6.org</a>), held in Dusseldorf
from 11 to 13 November 2008. Berlin 6 is the fifth follow-up conference to the drafting sessions for the <a href="http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html">Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.</a></p>
<p>Subbiah Arunachalam is a member of the Programme Committee
of the Berlin series of conferences, and this year chaired the session on Open Access
for Development, which looked at the status of open access in developing countries
and the factors inhibiting progress in this area. The speakers at this session
were Dev Kumar Sahu (MedKnow, India), Eve Gray (Eve Gray & Associates/Open
Society Institute, South Africa), Solange M Santos (BIREME/PAHO/SciELO, Brazil)
and Subbiah Arunachalam himself. Their presentations are available on the
conference website (<a href="http://www.berlin6.org/?page_id=70">http://www.berlin6.org/?page_id=70</a>).</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/berlin-6-open-access-conference'>https://cis-india.org/news/berlin-6-open-access-conference</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaOpenness2011-04-02T16:16:16ZNews ItemBengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects!
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bengaluru-a-hub-for-kannada-and-sanskrit-wikipedia
<b>Kannada Wikipedia is one of those Indic language wikipedias which has seen many readers coming up every month. Subhashish Panigrahi summarizes the experiences of some of the very active Kannada wikipedians from the recent Kannada Wikipedia meetup held in Bengaluru on October 7, 2012.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Seven Kannada wikipedians (a couple of them also contribute to Sanskrit Wikipedia) participated in this <a class="external-link" href="http://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B2%B5%E0%B2%BF%E0%B2%95%E0%B2%BF%E0%B2%AA%E0%B3%80%E0%B2%A1%E0%B2%BF%E0%B2%AF:%E0%B2%B8%E0%B2%AE%E0%B3%8D%E0%B2%AE%E0%B2%BF%E0%B2%B2%E0%B2%A8/%E0%B3%AB">event</a>. Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi from the Access to Knowledge team of the Centre for Internet & Society and Jessie Wild from the Wikimedia Foundation also participated in the event.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After a brief introduction about the theme of the meetup, Omshivaprakash, one of the active contributors for community building who also solves technical issues besides contributing articles explained the history and happenings of Kannada Wikipedia said “the only reason all of us joined together to contribute for Kannada Wikipedia is because we love our mother language, Kannada.” He explained how he reached out to a renowned Kannada writer asking him to document his own writings and books to become active on Kannada Wikipedia and start contributing. In the recent past Kannada community has organized many outreach events. The presentation for each outreach has been translated and customized for effective presentation. In the past they struggled for the six username creation barrier. Om also spoke about the scope of government partnership for including Kannada Wikipedia in the school syllabus (which worked out really well in Kerala) for which he is willing to meet the government officials. Additionally, he also shared the idea of recording an outreach session and presenting it to the government.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another active wikipedian, Tejas emphasized the importance of having Kannada Wikipedia as part of the syllabus where lecturers and teachers will be learning to teach about Wikipedia in the classroom. As this will be mandatory, both students and teachers will take it seriously and it would be a sustainable practice. To show the results about 4-5 schools could be shortlisted for a pilot program. Tejas also proposed the idea of including Kannada typing in schools because that is something most people are not taught.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/wkp2.jpg" alt="bengaluru wikipedia" class="image-inline" title="bengaluru wikipedia" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; "><i>The above picture shows some participants working on their laptops during the meetup.</i></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The wikipedians further discussed about Kannada Wiktionary and how collaborations will work to bridge the gap of wikipedians who contribute separately for Kannada Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Frequently Used Entries for Localization (FUEL) is a great project for creating content on Wiktionary, which will involve bringing new people to the community. In Bengaluru, CIS and <a href="http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsanchaya.net%2F2012%2F05%2Ffuel-kannada-workshop-on-kannada-computing-terminology%2F&ei=8L93UMrzD4iHrAfIsICQCg&usg=AFQjCNFfXFz-D48NPY27lCwY-cx_O4OoSw&sig2=_PkJ_65fL-q5XrczMchblg" target="_blank">Sanchaya</a><i> </i>co-hosted a two-day workshop for discussion regarding the same. Involving more wikimedians for such workshops would be helpful for both the projects, Wikipedia and Wiktionary. “I was always keen to do something for Kannada language on the web, being a software professional nothing leaves me a better chance to work for such a project like Wikipedia in my own language,” expresses Pavithra, another active Kannada Wikipedian who has supported many outreach events and translation projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedians, those who were a few weeks older, spoke about the problems they are facing when searching databases. Even the experienced wikipedians face the same problem. Options, such as having a central place, like a list of templates with little description and templates which could be standardized so that anyone could contribute to the translation and other things which need contribution, were discussed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Tejas, a long-term Kannada Wikipedian discussed about the non-standard nature of the South Asian language wiktionaries. If Wiktionary could be standardized it could be easier to ask other communities to collaborate and contribute in their respective languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Discussion on Sanskrit Wiki projects:</b><br />Abhiram, another wikipedian who initially began with editing Sanskrit WikiSource and then started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia explained the hurdles they faced while spreading the word about Sanskrit WikiSource in Karnataka. Being closely associated to <a href="http://samskritabharati.in/" target="_blank">Samskrita Bharati</a> and contributing largely to the Kannada WikiSource project, Abhiram feels not many people can write in Sanskrit though they can speak because of their fluency in the Devanagari script. People who study Sanskrit lose their grip of it after they pass 10<sup>th</sup> or 12<sup>th</sup> grades. “As Sanskrit is rarely found as a spoken language a lot of ground work and motivation for the contributors are needed to cultivate a community. We could plan for 10 spoken Sanskrit sessions in a month to kick-start before we teach how to edit Sanskrit Wikipedia”, Abhiram added.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bengaluru-a-hub-for-kannada-and-sanskrit-wikipedia'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bengaluru-a-hub-for-kannada-and-sanskrit-wikipedia</a>
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No publisherSubhashish PanigrahiOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2012-11-04T14:03:49ZBlog EntryBargarh Manuscript Digitisation Project
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/bargarh-manuscript-digitisation-project
<b>The digitisation of temple manuscripts at the Dadhivamana Temple, Bargarh in Western Odisha followed by a workshop for the students of Imperial College took place between 11- 12 February, 2017.</b>
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<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6a520b68-785b-1cce-b50f-f1af9415b19a"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.orissa.gov.in/e-magazine/orissareview/jun2004/englishpdf/workship.pdf">Shri Dadhivamana Temple</a>, also known as the Srikshetra(Puri) of Western Odisha is a 400-year-old temple in Bargarh, Odisha. The temple is among the most important religious sites in Western Odisha. The temple has a record room with 250 ancient palm leaf manuscripts in the Odia language, dating back to the 16th century. These palm leaf manuscripts tell the stories of the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Skanda Purana and the history of the temple itself.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr">Given the historical value of the temple, the temple administration and the Temple Trust have preserved the pothi(palm leaf manuscripts) with the help of various chemicals, including the indigenous usage of turmeric and camphor. The process of preservation of the manuscripts began a few years ago years with student volunteers from different colleges in Bhatli helping the temple administration by identifying and storing the manuscripts.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-6a520b68-785c-811b-7fd1-d636007720a6">Minati Sahoo, a well known social activist in Bargarh and a few other journalists explained the importance of manuscript digitisation to the temple administration and took permission for digitising the manuscripts in the month of March. One of the pandas (temple priests), Pandit Shri Goura Chandra Ratha, released his book, Jay Shree Dadhibamana, under the Creative Commons 4.0 license. A three-day long digitisation camp will be organised in Bhatli for introducing the students to Wikipedia and the process of digitisation. The manuscripts will be digitised simultaneously during the workshop. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-6a520b68-785d-0efd-44f2-0ab04c96fef2">An orientation program was organised at <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Imperial_College_Orientation_Program">Imperial College</a>, Bargarh for introducing the students of the college to the digitisation process as well as to introduce the pothi digitisation which they would be partaking in. With over 60 participants, the workshop not only explained the idea of the global Wikimedia movement to them, but also taught them how they could use the digitisation skill for the preservation of language. This digitisation project will bring different manuscripts into Odia Wikipedia, while also helping to raise awareness about digitisation of language in western Odisha. After scanning the manuscripts, the Odia Wikipedia community will take help of the students for uploading, digitising and proofreading the same.</span></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/bargarh-manuscript-digitisation-project'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/bargarh-manuscript-digitisation-project</a>
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No publisherSailesh PatnaikCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOdia WikipediaOpenness2017-04-16T20:08:04ZBlog EntryBarcamp Bangalore
https://cis-india.org/openness/news/barcamp-bangalore
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team participated in a Barcamp at SAP Labs, Bangalore on October 12, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja and Rahmanuddin Shaik participated in the event.</b>
<h3>Dissecting Wikipedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia is the world’s most famous free and open encyclopaedia which anyone can edit. In this session we will explore various technical aspects of Wikipedia with demonstrations. Wikipedia has its own set of APIs using which we can retrieve information by using various queris and parameters. The output can be generated in various formats. These output can be used for processing by programming languages as input. These will be demonstrated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://barcampbangalore.org/bcb/monsoon-2014/dissecting-wikipedia">Click to read the details on the Barcamp website</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/news/barcamp-bangalore'>https://cis-india.org/openness/news/barcamp-bangalore</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2014-10-13T04:43:45ZNews ItemBangla Wiki turns 10
https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-telegraph-march-29-2015-bangla-wiki-turns-ten
<b>The 10th anniversary of Bengali Wikipedia was marked with a a gathering of Wikipedians of vernacular languages from across the country and beyond at Jadavpur University. Bengali is one of 20 Indian languages to have a Wikipedia presence. The event also celebrated 14 years of the mother edition in English of the open-access, crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Contributed by Sudeshna Banerjee, Showli Chakraborty and Abhinanda Datta </i>the<i> </i>story published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150329/jsp/calcutta/story_11432.jsp">Telegraph</a> on March 29, 2015 quotes T. Vishnu Vardhan.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">"We hear of digital divide all the time. Here it is about digital inclusiveness. The University Grants Commission talks of four factors to make a good university - access, equity, quality and employability. What a teacher cannot give in class, he can offer on the world wide web. The question of quality in Wikipedia can be addressed through workshops like this," said Calcutta University registrar Basab Chaudhuri.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Wikimedia Foundation trustee Bishakha Datta spoke of the uneasy relationship between Wikipedia and academia, especially over authenticity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Yes, we do not use original research. So our articles are not admissible as primary sources. At the same time, every piece of information in a Wikipedia article has to be cited and annotated. It is great that an institution like JU has come forward to host us," said Datta, thanking the university's School of Languages and Linguistics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Joint registrar Sanjay Gopal Sarkar argued in favour of the existence of Wikipedia articles in the vernacular. "It is a part of the empowerment of my mother tongue."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Quantity was a problem, he said. "It is not enough to have 33,000 articles (the English version has 4.7 million). Workshops need to be held in Bengal and Assam on how to write articles. If Wikipedia and the universities join hands, a battalion of writers and editors can be created."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Bangladeshi delegates revealed how Wikipedia's mission of making knowledge free was getting a technological boost back home. "Grameenphone and Bangla Link, two of our biggest mobile service providers, have made Facebook and Wikipedia free. Subscribers just have to log on to specific domains (0.facebook.com and zero.wikipedia.org) to see picture-less texts," said Ankan Ghosh Dastidar, a Class XI student from Dhaka.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vishnu Vardhan from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, urged for more institutional tie-ups so that instead of stopping students from going to Wikipedia, teachers would integrate their contributions to Wikipedia in the course. "Andhra Loyola College is the largest contributor to Telegu Wikipedia," he said. Hindi, he added, has the maximum articles among Indian languages, followed by Tamil and Telugu. "But Malayalam has the most active Wikipedians - around 100."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A workshop was held to teach how to type in Bengali and edit the Bengali Wikipedia. Techno India student Ayan Chaudhury addressed queries on downloading the Avro font and typing tricky conjoined letters in Bengali, as also how to create cross references and highlight terms. "Ask yourself two questions when you want to add any information: Is it relevant? Can it be verified? Also do not blindly turn on Google Translate. The quality of its translation is such that a word like 'swipe' becomes ' <i>dhum dhadakka</i>'."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A group editing session took place on the second day with 15 volunteers translating articles from the English Wikipedia and adding new articles in Bengali. Some also worked on Wiktionary, an online dictionary, and others on Wikisource, typing out pages of seminal texts outside copyright.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Crafts for a cause</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Artisans from Bengal and Bangladesh joined hands to participate in a handcrafted jewellery and handloom exhibition organised by WIIN (Women and Infants in Need) at Shree Art Gallery in Ballygunge on March 25 and 26.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"The proceeds will be donated to Paripurnata, a home for women with mental disabilities (off EM Bypass). We emphasise on mental health awareness programmes and try and create job opportunities for the residents at Paripurnata. This helps in building their confidence and creates a sense of social acceptance," said Nilanjana Mukherjee, the general secretary of WIIN and Paripurnata.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exhibition was inaugurated by actress Sonali Gupta, who plays Satyabati to Dhritiman Chaterji's Byomkesh Bakshi in <i>Sajarur Kanta</i>. "This cause is close to my heart. We must come together to help women and infants in need," said Gupta.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exhibition showcased a collection of saris and jewellery from the Rajshahi district in Bangladesh, quirky handbags, hand-painted mugs, kurtas and dupattas.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Trilingual road trip</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An independent film - or indie - by two graduates of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) has hit theatres this Friday. Titled <i>Yahan Sabki Lagi Hai</i> (Everybody Gets Screwed Here), the 100-minute trilingual (English, Hindi and Bengali) black comedy is directed by Calcutta girl Tina A. Bose and Mumbai boy Cyrus R. Khambata.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Produced by Vibrant Works, the film revolves around Kesang and Bharat, who are on their way to a birthday party but their road trip soon turns into a disaster as they find themselves in the middle of a jungle, robbed of all their belongings.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Road trip gone wrong has been done before, but according to the young film-makers, "while most of them have been horror or slasher films, ours travels the philosophical path and focuses on the issues we face in life."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The lead actress is a Tibetan girl, Eden Shyodhi. "We wanted to cast a girl from a minority community. We needed someone who was weird and interesting as the character of Kesang is very unusual. And when we met Eden, she had flaming red hair, just like how we had envisioned Kesang!" said Tina, who has studied in Lady Brabourne College and Jadavpur University. The cast also includes stand-up comedian Varun Thakur and Bengali actor Heerok Das, previously seen in <i>Egaro</i>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-telegraph-march-29-2015-bangla-wiki-turns-ten'>https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-telegraph-march-29-2015-bangla-wiki-turns-ten</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2015-04-04T16:10:12ZNews Item