Centre for Internet and Society

International School at the Digital Media program of the University of Texas at Austin - Portugal Collaboratory (CoLab)

sachia — 2009-03-27T09:55:53Z

Applications are now open for the first International School on Digital Transformation, to be held July 19-24, 2009, at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. The School is accepting applications from advanced students and recent graduates from around the world with an interest in how digital technologies are changing societies and the world as a whole.

The International School on Digital Transformation will be an intensive six-day residential program, conducted in English and bringing together emerging and established scholars and professionals from around the world. During the week-long session, innovators in digital communications will serve as teachers and mentors, presenting their current projects and research and participating in discussions with advanced students and professionals beginning careers in the field. Presenters and students will be regarded as peers during the School.

The School will focus on these themes:

• Democratic transformations of society through digital media
• Innovations in transparency and political participation using new online tools
• Grassroots civic activities using digital technologies
• Building effective communities with the Internet
• Reaching out to new users with mobile and online technologies
• Prospects for digital communication in developing regions
• Digital arts and culture in a globalized, online world

The goals of the International School include:

Combining lectures on current research and innovation with practical experience, using accessible, low-cost digital technologies
Providing an informal venue for sharing expertise, perspectives, and best practices and for mentoring advanced students
Fostering a sustainable network of scholars and activists in the field of digital technology, communication and social change

Program

The basic daily schedule will consist of one 90-minute session of lecture and discussion in the morning: free time for teachers and students to interact, converse and explore the city in the afternoon; and two more 90-minute lecture and discussion sessions in the evening, folowed by a communal meal.

The confirmed speakers for the International School on Digital Transformation include:

Sunil Abraham
Director of Policy at the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India; and current board member of Mahiti Infotech
Patricia Aufderheide
Professor, School of Communication, American University; director,
Center for Social Media at American University
Warigia Bowman
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy Leadership,
University of Mississippi
Fiorella De Cindio
Associate Professor, Computer and Information Science Department,
University of Milan
Martha Fuentes-Bautista
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
Stephanie Hankey/Marek Tuszynski (tentative)
Co-founders and directors, Tactical Technology Collective
Lisa Nakamura (associate faculty)
Professor, Institute of Communication Research; Director, Asian
American Studies Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tapan Parikh
Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of California
at Berkeley
Tiago Peixoto
Researcher, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Alison Powell
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
Andrew Rasiej
Founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident
Nicholas Reville
Executive director, Participatory Culture Foundation
Scott Robinson
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Jorge Martins Rosa
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Sciences; Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, New University of Lisbon
Christian Sandvig
Associate Professor, Department of Communication; faculty member,
Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doug Schuler
Program Director, Public Sphere Project, an initiative of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility
Leslie Regan Shade
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University
Maripaz Silva (associate faculty)
Laura Stein
Assistant Professor, Radio-Television-Film Department, University of
Texas at Austin
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Associate Professor, University of Virginia, Media Studies and Law;
Fellow, Institute for the Future of the Book
Katrin Verclas
Co-founder and editor of Mobileactive.org

The International School on Digital Transformation is a program of the University of Texas Austin-Portugal Colaboratory, or CoLab. The co-directors of the School are Drs. Sharon Strover and Karen Gustafson, and Gary Chapman, of the University of Texas at Austin.

The School will be held at the Rectory, a building of the University of Porto in the center of the city. Student housing will consist of nearby hotels, and the cost of the School will include a shared hotel room, two meals per day (breakfast and dinner) and the program itself. The week will also include a cultural activity offered to all School participants.

The estimated cost of the International School on Digital Transformation will be between €300 and €400. Travel to Porto, Portugal, is not supported; students must find and pay for their own travel to Porto.

The student application, and more specific information for students, are available at this link.

Porto, Portugal

Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996, Porto is known for its spectacular architecture and medieval alleyways, and it is also compact, allowing visitors to easily explore the central city on foot. Porto is on the Douro River and also near the Atlantic Ocean. It is famous for its port wine from the inland Portuguese wine region along the Douro River valley.

During the free afternoons, students and teachers may explore the sidewalk café culture on Santa Catarina Street, a nearby pedestrian shopping area, or walk across the Dom Luís I Bridge spanning the Douro River to the promenade, restaurants, and port houses in Vila Nova de Gaia, directly opposite central Porto. Short river cruises may be taken in barcos rabelos, flat-bottomed boats traditionally used to ferry shipments of port wine.

While Porto is famous for its ancient Roman ramparts and Gothic churches, it is also home to the Casa da Música concert hall, a superb example of modern architecture, finished in 2005, that has become an icon of the city. The Serralves Museum is a major cultural institution which hosts rotating exhibitions of contemporary art and which features a world-class garden.

In the late evenings, Porto hosts a thriving clubbing culture, and the city’s nightspots attract DJs from around the world.

Porto has an international airport and is also served by trains from Lisbon and from Spain. By train, Porto is approximately three and a half hours north of Lisbon.

Please direct questions regarding the program to Karen Gustafson, at kegustafson@mail.utexas.edu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/international-school-at-the-digital-media-program-of-the-university-of-texas-at-austin-portugal-collaboratory-colab

International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:34Z

Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop.

I was in Amsterdam for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam of CIS and other participants from UK, USA, Japan, and Australia. The workshop was funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER Project. The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for the future course of international repositories’ action.

The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories infrastructure. Soon after the keynote, participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to draft action plans on the following topics:

International Organization
Identifier Infrastructure
Citation Services
Repositories Handshake

I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’ group. The handshake group, which consisted of mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh. Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered: one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and interoperability.

On the second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit opportunities' on the principles of more (content), better (quality metadata), easy (uploading) and rewarding (for depositor). The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use cases like:

Easy deposit method for multi-authored papers, with different affiliations from different countries, in multiple repositories
Communication between institutional, subject and funding repositories
Publisher deposits in repositories (IR/SR)
Institute induced deposits

We had two breakout group presentations during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.

Finally, all participants assembled at the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation Services group. Leslie Carr, who was the moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull references from a document in repositories.

The next impressive development came from the Repository Identifiers group. The moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation here). Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.

Clifford Lynch of CNI summed up of the outcomes of the break out groups in his closing remarks. He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs. He also prioritised 'Identifier Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on it.

There was a funders' meeting after the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface. With pre-workshop wiki discussions on repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.

During the workshop, I met a few key people involved in the DRIVER project, particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from ISTI-CNR, Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about DRIVER, which has come up with a set of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines have been translated into three other languages, showing their international acceptance. To streamline repository developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a DRIVER-like initiative to ensure metadata uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.

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Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report

International Communication Association Pre-Conference on 'India and Communication Studies'

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:56:35Z

Sunil Abraham, Director-Policy, CIS, is to take part in a panel discussion on 'Media, Technology, and Governance' at the International Communication Association Pre-Conference on 'India and Communication Studies' on 21 May 2009, 1.00-2.15 pm.

PRECONFERENCE #2

Sponsored by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University for Pennsylvania, and Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi

Title: India and Communication Studies

Time: Wednesday, May 20, 13:00 – 19:00 and
Thursday, May 21, 8:00 – 17:00

Limit: 50 persons

Cost: $100.00USD (Includes refreshment breaks, lunch and reception)
$50.00USD Students

Organizers:

• Monroe Price, Director, Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
• Biswajit Das, Director, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
• Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Radhika Parameswaran, Associate Professor, School of Journalism, Indiana University, Bloomington

Overview:

India plays an increasingly important role in the processes of globalization, including the global production of culture and the communications technology industry. At the same time, the field of communication studies in India is expanding. Yet there is no Indian Communications Association and little in the way of considered and formal review of contributions to the field.

This pre-conference is an effort to create a new coherence and a new salience for this subject by mapping the area of communication and culture studies in India; to strengthen ties among leading and emerging scholars and institutions in India and elsewhere; to develop and cultivate a research agenda for the field; and to explore the creation of an Indian Communication Studies Association.

The pre-conference will take place over 2 days. The first day will be dedicated to paper presentations from emerging scholars on a diverse range of issues, including media and cultural representations, gender, minorities, issues of nationalism and culture, and structural questions of governance.

The second day will be centered around three panels, which will address the development of communication studies in India; issues of technology, governance and development; and a discussion of scholarship about India. The organized panels will draw from academia, business, civil society, and government/policy-making circles.
Schedule for India and Communication Studies ICA Pre-Conference:

May 20 (Day One):

13.00 – 13.15 Opening Remarks, Monroe Price and organizers
13.15 – 14.30 Paper presentations: Session 1
14.30 – 15.45 Paper presentations: Session 2
15.45 – 16.00 Break
16.00 – 17.15 Paper presentations: Session 3

Moderators for paper sessions: TBC

17.30 – 19.00 Reception for pre-conference participants and guests

May 21 (Day Two):

8.00 – 9.00: Breakfast for pre-conference participants

9.00 – 10.15 Opening Keynote Discussion -- India and Cultural Pathways: Reflections on Identity, History and Scholarship:

The opening keynote will address the history of communications/media studies in and about India, placing it in the broader context of global communication studies and globalization and international relations.

• Biswajit Das, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University
• Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green University
• Sevanti Ninan, Honorary Secretary, The Media Foundation (TBC)
• Arvind Singhal, University of Texas (TBC)
• Daya Thussu, University of Westminster

Moderator: Monroe Price, Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

10.15 – 10.30 – Coffee Break

10.30 -- 11.45 Panel One: The Complex Challenge of Developing Communications Studies in India

This panel will seek to begin mapping the intellectual network of scholars that has informed communications scholarship in and about India. Panelists will discuss the history and development of "Indian" communication studies, including the approaches taken towards this subject; the competition between production and commercial goals and theoretical study; and the institutional and other pressures and challenges encountered by emerging programs..

• Biswajit Das, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University
• Vinod Pavarala, University of Hyderabad
• Anjali Monteiro, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
• Atul Tandon, MICA
• Peng Hwa Ang, MICORE

Moderator: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University

11.45 – 13.00 –Lunch

13.00 – 14.15 Panel Two: "Media, Technology & Governance"

This panel will be approached through cases as presented by the panelists. It seeks to (a) open the door to the growing work on the IT industry and ICT for Development; and (b) outline a tighter set of analytics to encourage a stronger connection between academic research & public policy in India.

• David Page or William Crawley (TBC), Media South Asia Project, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, UK
• Victoria Farmer, Department of Political Science and International Relations SUNY-Geneseo
• Steve McDowell, Department of Communication, Florida State University
• Sunil Abraham, Director (Policy), Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore

Moderator: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Associate Professor, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University

14.15 – 14.30 Coffee Break

14.30 – 15.45 Panel Three: Nodes of Contact: How to Map Scholarship about India

This panel aims to map the intellectual patterns and trajectories in media and communications scholarship on India. Panelists will address specific areas within communications research--gender and interdisciplinarity, new media, diaspora, television, and media production and reception--to chart and analyze the theoretical and empirical terrain that scholars have covered, and to suggest new and productive directions for future research.

• Radha Hegde, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
• Shanti Kumar, Department of Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin
• William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
• Ananda Mitra, Department of Communication, Wake Forest University
• Hemant Shah, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moderator: Radhika Parameswaran, School of Journalism, Indiana University

15.45 – 16.15 Concluding Remarks and Wrap-up

This last part of the ICA Pre-Conference Program will feature open discussion and commentary from the organizers and audience.

For more information about this pre-conference, please contact Susan Abbott, Associate Director, Center for Global Communication Studies: sabbott@asc.upenn.edu

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Click here to read this information on the ICA website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ica-preconference

Inclusive Planet

sachia — 2009-07-09T08:51:28Z

Context

There are approximately 75 million differently-abled persons in India. This community is largely excluded from civil society and persons with disability continue to have to depend on family members or others to meet their basic needs and wants. Neither the Government nor private enterprise has had significant success in including this community in mainstream society.

Vision

Inclusive Planet (“IncP”) aims to create India’s largest cross disability community for the 75 million differently-abled people in India and their support groups. IncP will also thereby become the largest provider of products and services to this community.

InclusivePlanet.com

The primary delivery platform for IncP will be www.inclusiveplanet.com (not yet operational), a Web 2.0 portal. Supplementary delivery platforms will be channel partner web sites, vendor websites, Inclusive Planet franchisee stores (brick and mortar), partner stores and mobile phones. The portal will be a ‘one-stop shop’ for the specific requirements of people with disabilities. The portal will also comprehensively address the daily needs of persons with disabilities, including specific requirements for information, everyday requirements of life, employment, entertainment and assistance. In short, the portal will assist persons with disabilities with obtaining access to facilities available to the public at large.

The portal will have channels that specially cater to the disabled and their support group, for the following: medical information, legal information, policy information, news, shopping, service provider listings, career listings, career guidance, medical expert panel, social networking (blogs, forums and chat), and entertainment. IncP is working with several of India’s largest NGOs to provide the back-end for several of the features of the portal.

The Entertainment Channel

This channel of the portal is aimed primarily at the visually-impaired community. Visually impaired persons cannot enjoy the same content in the same format as sighted persons and have to rely on audio content such as audio books and content in specific computer readable formats. The entertainment channel is loosely based on the YouTube model and provides for users to upload and share audio books and other content with each other. This channel will also have a feature allowing users to request any specific item of content; this content can be uploaded by other users or volunteers. This channel will be an integral part of the community building aspect of IncP.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/inclusive-planet/inclusive-planet

Hindi translation WCAG

sachia — 2009-07-06T08:36:42Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/uploads/English%20to%20Hindi%20UNICODE%20FILE.pdf

Hindi Translation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

sachia — 2011-08-17T08:50:41Z

A Hindi translation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was commissioned by the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and is now available for download.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has supported the Centre for Internet and Society and its campaign for web accessibility for the disabled. In addition to sponsoring the first National Workshop on Web Accessibility to train web developers, held in February 2009, the NIXI has now brought out a Hindi translation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. It is hoped that this translated version will help Indian web developers to get a better understanding of the guidelines for creating accessible web pages.

To view a copy of the translated guidelines, in HTML format, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/hindi-translation-of-web-content-accessibility-guidelines-2.0

Government websites: Access denied to special users

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:17:22Z

Article by L. Subramani in the Deccan Herald, 8 December 2008

The homepages of 23 government agencies have been identified as inaccessible to special users, the city-based Centre for Internet and Society has found.

The organisation carried out an automated test using software tools, on websites of agencies like the National Informatics Centre, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Ministry of HRD etc, the majority of which have failed to meet even the basic access criteria laid down in the guidelines of Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).

“Except for the Reserve Bank of India and CMC Vellore, all the sites don't even meet priority 1 of WCAG (W3C Access Guidelines), which would ensure availability of text for non-text elements (images) and other graphical contents that can't be read out by screen reader software,” said Nirmita Narasimhan, who carried out the tests at CIS. She mentioned that all of the websites failed in priority 2 and 3 of the guidelines.

“Despite being one of the most important sites for persons with disability, the homepage of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment - which contains documents and important government schemes for persons with disability - has completely failed to meet the accessibility criteria.

This is not only against the spirit of laws that guarantee freedom of information, but also contradicts the government's own policy of making websites accessible to persons with disability,” she added.

Handbook

Nirmita pointed out that the Right To Information handbook - an important reference for persons with disability, demanding information from government and private organisations - has been provided in an inaccessible document format.

She echoed the common contention that persons with disability are deprived of one of the most important aspects of modern technology, despite being empowered by technologies like screen readers and speech recognition software.

The information, coming soon after the International Day for Persons with Disabilities was observed, raises question marks over the government's commitment to break barriers, and its genuineness in creating an accessible society as per the Persons with Disability act (1995) and the United Nations Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disability, to which it has been one of the early signatories.

Ganesh Prasad, Director (Systems and Process) at Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled described the test results as ‘not surprising, but certainly disappointing.’

“Given the urban conditions, visiting a place in person has become one of the most difficult things for persons with disability,” Prasad said.

Priority 1 of the guidelines calls for text descriptions of images or alternative pages with text contents, while priority 2 asks for the turning off of auto refresh and other deprecated features of W3C technologies, and recommends semantic information of the page for persons with disability to instantly know the contents.

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Read the article on the Deccan Herald website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/government-websites-access-denied-to-special-users

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender and Technology

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:47:46Z

A course module designed by CIS for the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

Introduction:

Let us begin with three statements of facts and reflect upon them:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.
In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.
George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

These sound like disjointed bits of trivia, and indeed, are probably facts that are all too familiar to us. But what joins them together? What are the common implications that these three statements are suggesting to us? We need to see, that the theme that runs common in all the three statements is that they are all about women and their relationship with technology in some form. Let us look at all the three sentences in detail and see if we can work out the implications:

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.

Does this imply that women are less artistic than men? Surely, the question is no; in fact, men who take to the arts, are often perceived as feminine and that arts and culture are in the domain of the women. We, of course, can make a certain historical reading and suggest that art as a profession belonged to the realm of the public and hence women did not have access to these arenas – the choice to be a female painter, or artist, or writer. And that is indeed a valid reading of such a statement. However, deeper than that is the relationship that women had with technology. We often forget that even arts when they first were taken up institutionally, were techniques and technologies. That historically, the art of painting – which was indeed a technology that had its heyday in Renaissance Europe – was also a technology, and one that was unavailable to women for a very long time. It is only when these technologies get superseded by newer technological inventions that they become rare, private, and feminine enough to be granted to women.

However, that does not mean that women did not have any relationship with technology. What the statement draws our attention to is that women were indeed the major subject of technologised cultural productions – as mythical creatures, as objects of erotic representation, as monsters, as demons, as beasts, as goddesses and as sometimes representative of abject and frail human conditions, women have been almost obsessively at the centre of all technology imagination. Even now, when we look around us, at billboards, and advertisements, we constantly see the messages of consumption and selling, as etched on the body of a woman; even in instances when the product being sold or the body of the woman have nothing in particular.

And Virginia Woolf draws our attention to exactly that. At the Ox-bridge library that she is in, she discovers a long list of “women and…”ⁱ and then reflects, “Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently.” (Chapter 2, just before footnote 3)

Let us remain with these thoughts for a moment then: that there is, when we talk of technology and technologised production, a certain gendered relationship; that women did not always have access to acts of production and control over technology, and that they were obsessively the subjects of technology and technologised production; and as an aside, that what we today understand as ‘arts’ or ‘artistic’ was historically in the domains of technology and science and that such shifts happen due to a series of socio-political and econo-cultural events which we will think of sometime later. And now let us look at the second statement:

In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.

If you throw back your mind to some of the most iconic and cult representations of technology in almost any of your favourite sci-fi movies, you might realize, that most of these representations are women. Starting all the way from the movie Metropolis, where you have the demonized robot Maria, to Star Trek, where the mother ship is indeed, a mother; to Lara Croft Tomb Raider to the ghost in the machine – the mother board, the mother ship, the robots and the systems that need to be controlled and tamed, are always women or appropriating the female form or feminine in nature. In the slight variations from the law, you have an occasional character like Sonny in the movie I, Robot, but there too, we also have the feminine V.I.K.I. who turns out to be the actual villain of the story. We need to look into why, our imaginations of technology – and we are not looking at technologised production right now, but technology itself – are so gendered in nature. Why is it that we always have a particular idea of technology as feminine, as irrational, as demonic, as something that needs to be tamed and controlled, preferably by men?

Isn’t it a strange thing that on the one hand, we identify science as the domain of the masculine and the male, and the technologies that govern science as feminine in nature? We are going to perhaps complicate our first ideas about the gendered nature of technology now: We are going to say that it is not as if the gendered biases or construction of technology are limited to the cultural production and technologised arts but to the very imaginations of technology itself. When we talk of even our daily electrical gadgets – computers, laptops, cellphones, ipods, wiis we catch ourselves talking about them in a feminine form – objects of consumption, objects we have an eroticized relationship with, and objects which need certain control and mastery. Now keeping these in mind, let us go to the third statement that we began with:

George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.

It sounds alien to our ears, used to listening to the Arundhati Roys and Jhumpa Leharis of our time, to imagine that there was a time when women were not allowed to write; and if they were allowed to write, they were allowed to write only a particular kind of things, and that even if they were allowed to write, they were not necessarily allowed to become published authors within a publishing industry market. It seem perhaps funny, to imagine that there was a time when women tried on the names of men to write; just like it must have seemed funny, to somebody in the eighteenth century, to think that women would have to wear men’s clothes in order to enter the professional world. Once we remove the ‘funny’ quotient from this particular statement, what remains is the hard fact that technologies are a part of the culture industry – there are markets, there are audiences and consumers, there is an economics of visibility and distribution which is at work. And as with other technologies, for a very long time, the technologies of print and writing, also kept women as either the audiences to their products or the subject of their production, but very rarely at the centre, as creators and masters of those technologies. So that, when women wanted to write, not mere romances, but larger fictions, they had to take on the guise of men and write without their own names and identities.

To go back to the question of technology, then, we also need to look at the gender and technology question as not simply a question of art and expression, but also that of economic forces that shape these ideas and reinforce certain kind of images within us.

Reading 1: (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3 available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/chapter3.html )

Let us take for example, the case study that Virginia Woolf gives us, about Judith Shakespeare – William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister.

(Please refer to the text and addresses the following questions on technology and gender relationships:)

Why is technology always thought of as more easily accessible to men than women? Is it in the inherent nature of technology that it makes itself available to men or is there an entire social construct to legitimize only some kinds of usages of technology as valid? The story of Judith Shakespeare that Woolf draws, addresses these questions quite effectively. It also points out how, the question of livelihood and gender is also closely linked in with our understanding of technology.
How does this masculine imagination of technology change the very nature of the person who controls technology? For example, a man who is not very good at different technologies would be considered effeminate or not masculine enough. On the contrary, men who are more adept at certain kinds of technologies are also considered not male enough. Similarly, women who enter into certain kinds of technology oriented roles, will always be looked upon as ‘women in a man’s world’ or sometimes as ‘one of the boys’; gendered with masculinity, beyond her own control. Extending that logic, women have their own technologies and women who do not take to those are also labeled as aberrant or deviant. We are now trying to posit the idea that it is not as if being a man or a woman precedes technology; but in fact, the socio-political gendered contexts within which technologies operate, indeed create us as men and women, masculine and feminine, in our access to technologies, in our role within the technology paradigm, and our ability to control certain kinds of technologies.
The common sense understanding that technologies follow gender – in books like Why Men won’t listen and women can’t read maps; or in bio-deterministic assumptions that boys should be good at numbers and women should be good with languages – needs to be questioned. There is a small (and perhaps very clever) claptrap that comes into being when we try and dismantle these notions. When we question, as Woolf does, any of the tenets of technology, at the level of the imaginary, the arguments that are posited against it are at the level of material technologies. Let’s take that example of the very popular book title, ‘Why Men won’t listen and Women Can’t read maps”. If we were to suggest, keeping the technology and gender relationship in mind, that the maps reading exercise, requires a certain kind of masculine identity, which women are not encouraged to perform and hence, even though they might have the capacity to read maps, they are never trained or indeed discriminated against if they can read maps, the argument that is given to us is that in a given sample, certain percentage of female participants responded in an identifiable pattern which is their inability to read map. The evidence presented is at the level of majority acts, of biological and neural research – research that presumes that technology is a neutral tool to which the brain responds without any kind of external influence; research that further presumes that the brain is an autonomous independent entity that innately responds to certain kinds of technologised stimuli. We need to avoid this kind of oppositional dialectic between the scientific and the cultural, and perhaps learn to understand that science is indeed a social construct and arises out of different cultural practices, and that culture is not merely in the realms of the imaginary but also has very material and significant consequences.

We have so far deduced a few things:

That technology and gender are not mutually exclusive domains of understanding but that technology, in its very conception, is gendered.
That different technologies are made accessible to certain kinds of gendered behaviours through complex socio-cultural and economic processes.
That technologies are not neutral, and indeed, in their imaginary (and sometimes material) construct, demand a masculine or a feminine identity on the part of the person they are interacting with.
That technologised productions are indeed about representation and their politics but they are also about the politics of access and livelihood and create a relationship between genders; where one is produced and the other is the producer.
That the relationship between gender and technology is one of transactions, where, technology is often treated as the feminine, which would then need to be tamed, domesticated or exorcised of its excesses, and brought under the control of Man with a capital M.

It is with these ideas in the back of our mind that we need to now look at a new relationship between technology and gender. Let us look at how technologies indeed become feminized – not only in their representations and access, but in their economic development and proliferation.

Reading 2 (Jennifer Light. When Computers Were Women. Available at http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/Light%20J%201999%20T&C.pdf)

As with the earlier part of the module, let us again begin with looking at three examples, but this time in the very specific realms of digital technologies and computers. We shall go through three exercises and then see if we can bind them together to talk about a different dimension to explore the gendered nature and the gendering role of technologies.

Starting with the Father: If you paid attention to the history of computing in your school days, you will remember that the father of the Computer is Charles Babbage. One is not particularly sure what Fatherly function Mr. Babbage performed, but it must be something unmentionable with a circuit board and some vacuum tubes. In the history of technology – even as it is unfolding right now - there are a few names that emerge as the architects, the creators, the fathers, the grandfathers, the builders and the miracle workers of technology.

Especially in the very accelerated world of computers and internet, we always hear of new names cropping up as THE people who made the internet, the www, and now the web 2.0, what it is now. Let us do a quick exercise and try to list down ten names that we think are influential in our contemporary understanding of technology. Let me give you a few of the more obvious ones – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sabeer Bhatia, Jimmy Wales… you can continue with this list till you have exhausted the most famous of your internet icons – the people who made the internet. And now let us pause and review the list. Chances are, that your list doesn’t have any women in them. If there are women, they might be less than one third of your list.

Why does this discrepancy happen? When you look at the IT city of Bangalore, you realize that there are as many women as men employed in the IT sector. Indeed, if we expand the scope of IT to include mobile and networked economies like the BPO and the Outsourcing industry, we know for a fact that the number of women employed and involved by these new economies is significantly higher than the number of men employees. Why then, is the IT still treated as a.) an essentially male domain created and dominated by men b.) as the play ground of the alpha male nerd who controls technology c.) as dangerous or not conducive to women?

Let’s stay with those questions and see if we can tie them up with the next thing we need to do. Here is a small news-paper clipping from not so very long ago in Bangalore - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1098752.cms Let’s discuss what are the issues that the article is raising up. Can we see a certain kind of connection between gender and technology being created here, even if it is not clearly spelled out for us? While violence against working women who enter the public sphere, is indeed a concern, the specific nature of the call centre and its technologised economy and related lifestyle is actually more a concern than the women who are working and the violence that affects them. The article, and indeed, much of the discourse that followed this particular case of a call centre employee raped and murdered by the cab driver, very vocally suggested that technology creates conditions of terror for women. Perils and dangers seem to attach themselves to women in the IT industry. There is an underlined sense of danger and fear that is etched whenever it comes to talking about gender and technology and this is one such instance.

The third exercise we want to do is to do a bit of profiling. We will look at a list of words and try and imagine what kind of gendered images we produce out of our popular understanding of them:
1. Nerd
2. Geek
3. IT engineer
4. Call Centre employee
5. Systems Administrator

How are these terms gendered and how does our perception of these terms reflect the biases of technology and the material bodies that are made to bear the burden of technologies? How are we conditioned to think of our bodies in relation to technology? How, lastly, do economic factors determine what kind of bodies inhabit what kind of activities, and which, activities, indeed, become more visible, public and masculine.

The reading for this module deals especially with these questions. Light, shows us, in her history of computing, that there was a time when there was a reversal of roles and a reversal in recognizing the most important parts of computing. The system administrator, the Man who created the entire mainframe where the computing took place, was the obviously most important person(s) in the system. The system administrators were able to control the operating system, fix the bugs, and direct women, fresh mathematics graduates, who did the actually computing, to carry the data from one source to another so that results could be aggregated. In those times, when computers were so large that people were actually able to walk through the machines, the women, were actually called computers!

However, as mainframes started shrinking, and as we entered the era of personal computing, the system admin guy was a fast disappearing category. His job was taken over by a reliable assembly line and automated programme aggregators that ensured that assembled machines with pre-installed operating systems were being delivered to the individual users. The women, on the other hand, were the first programmers as we understand them. They had intricate knowledge of the ways in which computing worked and were the only people who actually knew how to write programmes in different languages and lead them to a fruitful execution.

With the change in the nature of programming, the systems admin men slowly took over the role of the programmers and through various figures, like the nerd, and the geek, and the maths wiz, reinforced an older idea that women were not good at numbers, that the new computers were technologised demons which needed to be mastered, and that it is a man’s job to work with the machines and so women should not be considered an integral part of it. So quick and invisible was this transition, that they literally re-wrote history, so that we never really understand the role women played in the history of computing and we don’t remember any mothers of computers or the female architects of the internets. How does such a shift happen? What are the kind of forces that allow for such a radical re-writing of the history? How do economic and market forces, feminize and masculinise technologies, so that the role and the contributions of women in those areas become obliterated and certain prototypical stereotypes get reinforced in a loop?

Light’s essay brings into question the gendered relationship between technology and human beings, but it also draws our attention to questions of livelihood, which we need to ask, following our earlier questions of access. Technologies get gendered, not only through questions of access or historical constructs, but often through figuring out its public reach and market worth. It would be a worthwhile experiment to see, for instance, how, if it is a feminine trait to keep in touch and network, the credit for inventing the first social networking systems, goes to men? What are the institutional processes that keep women’s contribution, labour and efforts within a technology domain as invisible?

And following these, are the concerns of how, even though we see women in the fields of technology, participating and evolving these new technologies, why do we buy so easily into the idea that the relationship between women and technology is always one of danger or terror? Why do we often reinforce the idea that digital technologies is necessarily a domain of the masculine, when it comes to the production of the spaces, but again, the domain more of the feminine, when it comes to consumption of these technologies? Light’s essay demonstrates to us that apart from the imaginary role of technology and its feminization/demonization, there are also material forces and processes by which these technologies get defined as not only available to male or female performers but also marked as feminine or masculine in the kind of roles that it demands from the participants. The material history of technology, from a gender perspective, makes us aware of the fact that the imaginary biases of technology have very real consequences in the lived practices around us and often are subject to the forces of market economies and emerging cultural practices.

i The list that Woolf makes in the second chapter and her immediate reflections after that: “Condition in Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain of,
Profounder sub–consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare’s opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,
Dean Inge’s opinion of,
La Bruyere’s opinion of,
Dr Johnson’s opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning’s opinion of, . . .

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.

And here is La Bruyère:

Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les
hommes——

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/gender-and-technology

Follow-up Letter in Support of WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled

sachia — 2011-08-25T08:43:42Z

CIS has sent another letter to the Department of Higher Education, Ministry for Human Resource Development, petitioning it to support the WIPO Treaty for the reading disabled.

In November last year, CIS launched a nation wide signature campaign to support the treaty for the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled proposed by the World Blind Union to the WIPO. Since then, the list of signatories was updated. In May 2009, WIPO's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) held another meeting, and in light of this, the endorsement of the treaty and appeal to the government to support it was resubmitted, by an increased number of signatories, including members of the DAISY Forum of India.

The letter and list of signatories is available below.

Mr. R. P. Aggarwal
Secretary

Department of Higher Education
Ministry of Human Resource Development
‘C’ Wing, Shastri Bhavan
New Delhi-110001

Dear Sir,

Re: Letter of support for the proposed Treaty for the blind and visually impaired submitted by the World Blind Union.

We were extremely gratified that the Government took note of our letter in November, 2008, containing endorsements of 16 organisations urging the government to support the Treaty for the Blind, which was proposed by the World Blind Union in the WIPO SCCR meeting from Nov 1^st-6^th,2008. In light of the fact that there is another SCCR meeting scheduled from May 25^th-29^th, where this issue is to be taken up, we are resubmitting our endorsement and urgent plea to the Government to actively support this treaty, since it will be extremely beneficial to all blind, visually challenged and print disabled persons in India. The list of endorsers has expanded to include about 50 more organizations. There are many more who have verbally expressed support. We look forward to an active response from the Government on this. Thanking you,

Yours Faithfully,

Nirmita Narasimhan
Programme Manager
(Centre for Internet and Society)

Sr. No	Name of Organization	Contact Person
1	Akhil Bharatiya Drishtiheen Kalyan Sangh,	Mr. Ajay M. Joshi
2	Amulya Sahara	Sh. Ashok Kumar Goyal
3	Andhjan Kalyan Trust,	Mr. Praful N. Vyas
4	Arushi	Sh. Anil Mudgal
5	Astha	Ms Radhika M. Alkazi,
6	Atmajyoti Vikas Samitee	Mrs. Priti Yadav
7	Blind People's Association (Ahmedabad)	Mr. R.P. Soni
8	Blind Person's Association (Kolkata)	Mr. Amiyo Biswas
9	Blind Welfare Council	Sh. Yusuf Kapadiya
10	Centre For Internet And Society	Sunil Abraham,
11	Devnar Foundation for the Blind	Dr. A. Saibaba Goud
12	Discipleship Centre	Mr. John A
13	Farook College	Prof. K. Kuttialikutty
14	Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya	Ms. Prabha Puran Sharma
15	Human Development Institute	Ms. R.C. Meena
16	Indian Association for the Blind	Mr. S.M.A. Jinnah,
17	Indira Mahila Mandal Hudco New Nandeds	Sh. Nagnath Ramji Kadam
18	Jamia Millia Islamia	Prof. Zubair Meenal,
19	Janta Adarsh Andh Vidyalaya	Mrs. Kalpana Sharma
20	Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya	Rajesh Gupta
21	Jyoti Sroat School	Bertha G. Dkhar
22	L.V. Prasad Eye Institute	Mr./Ms. Beula Christy
23	Lakshmi Bai College	Dr. Nalini Govind
24	Maulana AzadLibrary(AligarhMuslim Universit)	Mr. Shakeel Ahmad Khan Mr. Shakeel Ahmad Khan
25	Mitra Jyothi	Ms. Madhu Singhal
26	Montfort Centre For Education	Mr. Michael Mathew
27	National Association for the Blind, Delhi
28	NAB-Phiroze &NoshirMerwanjiRehabilitationCentre for the Blind (Mount Abu)	Sh. Vimal Kumar Dengla
29	National Association for the Blind (Uttarakhand)	Mr. Shyam Dhanak,
30	National Association for the Blind (Chandigarh)	Sh. Vinod Chadha
31	National Association for the Blind (H.)	Ms. Shalini Vats Kimta
32	National Association for the Blind (India)	Sh. Suhas V. Karnik
33	National Association for the Blind(Jharkhand)	Sh. Ar. Sahay
34	National Association for the Blind(Junagad)	Ms. Rinaben V. Jasani
35	National Association for the Blind (Karnataka),	(Mrs.) Saroja Ramachandra
36	National Association for the Blind (Kerala)	Sh. Manoj Kurian
37	National Association for the Blind (Sikkim Branch)	Mr. Rajesh Verma
38	National Association for the Blind(West Bengal)	Sh. Arup Chakroborty
39	National Federation of the Blind (Guwahati)	Mohd. Imran Ali
40	North Ex. Blind Welfare & Educational Society	Sh. Subhash Garg
41	Orissa Association for the Blind	Sh. Bihari Nayak
42	Rajasthan Netraheen Kalyan Sangh	Sh. Jitendra Bhargava
43	Ramakrishna Mission Blind Boys' Academy	Sh. Sunilbaran Pattanayak
44	Saksham	Ms. Deepika Sood,
45	Salwan Public School	Mrs. Vandana Puri
46	Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled	Sh. Ganesh
47	Samrita Trust	Sh. Seetarama Sastry Nori
48	School for the Deaf Mutes Society	Dr. Homiyar Mobedji
49	Score Foundation,	George Abraham
50	Shikshit Yuva Sewa Samiti Basti	Mr. Gopal Krishna Agarwal
51	Shree Andhjan Vividhlaxi Talim Kendra,	Sh. Prakash Mankodi
52	Shri Navchetan Andhjan Mandal,	Sh. Himanshu Sampura
53	Shri Venkateswara College	Ayesha Maliwal
54	Shri Vrajlal Durlabhji Parekh Andh Mahila Vikas Grah,	Sh. P.J. Mankodi
55	Shruti Information Centre of Yashoda Charitable Trust	Ms. Sonal Sena
56	Shubham	Dr. Sangeeta Agarwal
57	Springdales School	Ms. Sonali Bose
58	St. Mary's School
59	Tagore International School,	Ms. Aparna Sharma
60	The Blind Relief Association (Delhi)	Sh. Kailash Chandra Pande
61	University of Hyderabad	Dr. Madhireddy Anjaneyulu
62	Venu Eye Institute & Research Centre	Ms. Tanuja Joshi
63	Victoria Memorial School for the Blind	Mrs. Radha Subrahmanian
64	Welfare Centre For Visually Handicapped,	Mr. Profulla Kumar Rout
65	Welfare Society for the Blind,	Smt. Jharna Sur
66	Xavier's Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC)	Dr. Sam Taraporevala
67	Sense International (India)	Akhil Paul
68	N. Krishnaswamy Barrier Break Technologies (Mumbai)	Shilpi Kapoor
69	National Association for the Blind (NAB) Bangalore	Mr. Pruthviraj
70	National Federation for the Blind (Delhi)	S.K.Rungta
71	Mitrajyoti (Bangalore)	Madhu Singhal
72	Accessability (New Delhi)	Vikas Sharma
73	Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore)	Lawrence Liang
74	Acrodelon Technologies Pvt Ltd(Chennai)	Rahul Cherian
75	Enable India	Shanthi Raghavan
76	College Students and Graduates Association of the Blind(Chennai)	Ponmudi
77	Indian Association for the Blind(Chennai)	S.M.A. Jinnah
78	Prayatna(Chennai & Bangalore)	Aruna Sankaranarayanan
79	Worth Trust, Katpadi (TN)	Venki/Mike

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/follow-up-letter-in-support-of-wipo-treaty-for-reading-disabled

Fear and Gender in Public Space

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:41:10Z

A discussion of work on the body and the city and collaborative interventions on the theme of Fear and Gender in Public Space

Fear and Gender in Public Space is the theme of multiple, collaborative interventions being held during 14th to 28th January 2009 in Bangalore city. A confluence of artists, designers and practitioners will mobilize the workshop theme across select locations in various formats. The outcome of these interactions will be presented to local groups at intervals during the two weeks.

At one of these intervals, CIS-India researchers will discuss their works on the body and the city in conjunction with interim discussions on the ongoing interventions being carried out in the city.

Contact: zeenath.hasan@gmail.com

Venue:

The Centre for Internet and Society

No. D2, 3rd Floor,

Sheriff Chambers

14, Cunningham Road,

Bangalore 560052

Map: Google Maps

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/fear-and-gender-in-public-space

Experimental Economy Camp

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:36:50Z

Open Discussion

n.e.w.s. is a platform for participatory development of artistic and curatorial projects in contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Recently, n.e.w.s. won the ‘Competition of Ideas’ for authoring a book proposal entitled “Arbitrating Attention”, which would explore new economic and social contexts for art. This 100-page text will be published at the beginning of next year. One of things they hope to do in the book is tap the undercurrent of new economic experiments in the way artistic activities can be de-framed yet incorporate survival tactics for sustainability.

At the Experimental Economy Camp at CIS, n.e.w.s. contributors Renée Ridgway, Stephen Wright and Prayas Abhinav will present certain ideas, seeking counter-points, information and queries, which lend different perspectives to the questions at hand, in order to outline possible strategies and targets. The discussions thereafter will attempt to draw learnings from the dynamic media, academic and scientific community with which CIS interacts, imagining 'new social and economic contexts for art.' At this camp, n.e.w.s hopes to meet and interact with people and researchers with an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial and economic experiments.

Further interested individuals and institutions can take part in a symposium and brainstorming event that n.e.w.s will organize in July 2009 in Bangalore. n.e.w.s. will also run an online forum during the symposium in July (http://northeastwestsouth.net).

Speakers

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator and writer, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum) She has made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. From 2005-6 she served on the board of the former Gate Foundation, whose artists archive and library were given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum, and where in 2007 she organised a panel as part of the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, entitled 'Gate Foundation- Past, Present and Future'. For 2009 Ridgway is organising ‘Negotiating Equity’, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute) involving the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors that examines the artist and 'the curatorial'.

As an artist Ridgway is presently preparing the latest installment of her 10-year 'Manhattan Project': 'Beaver, Wampum, Hoes'- a series of installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands in 2009. This focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’ of Dutchness, in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname); the next presentation will be at De Lakenhal in Leiden, May 16th-August 31st 2009.

Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s. Her website is http://reneeridgway.net/.

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art theorist, writer, and Editorial Director of the Biennale de Paris. In 2004, he curated The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (Apexart, New York), in 2005 In Absentia (Passerelle, Brest), in 2006 Rumour as Media (Aksanat, Istanbul) and Dataesthetics (WHW, Zagreb), and is currently preparing, amongst other projects, Withdrawal: The Performative Document (New York) as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He has also written extensively on the theoretical dimensions of such practices, and, following a writing residency at Artexte (Montréal, 2006) a book-length essay on the subject, dealing with the challenges of performatively archiving and documenting disappearance, is forthcoming. Wright’s writing has also focused on the use-value of art, particularly in contexts of collaborative practices outside the performative framework of the artworld. A former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie (2000-2007), and corresponding editor of Parachute magazine (1999-2005), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text.

Born in 1963 in Vancouver, Canada, he lives and works in Paris.

Prayas Abhinav is a writer and artist working and living in Bangalore, India. He has an interest in re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces. Through his work he explores how public and semi-public spaces can be utilized for cultural and civic uses. He explores the potential of low-fi technologies to connect communities and resources.

He has been part of efforts to seed open content movements in India and in 2007 helped with launching the Creative Commons India licenses in India. In 2007, he also initiated a long-term engagement with urban food systems by using public-spaces to grow vegetables and make them openly accessible through recipe-based maps. In 2008, he spent a month at Khoj Workshops to work on modular toolkits for anarchic protests in cities. In 2006 he made a short film with the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in which he narratively mapped the spaces which the homeless in Mumbai use to sleep at night. In 2005, as a fellow at Sarai-CSDS, he responded to the way urban spaces were used for advertising through poetry and photographs. He edited the Crimson Feet magazine from 2003-2005 (after which it died).

Prayas' projects are documented at http://prayas.in and http://cityspinning.org.

Time and Date

Friday, 17 April 2009; 5.30-7.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

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

Event Blogs

sachia — 2011-08-20T22:27:02Z

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Draft Comments

sachia — 2011-08-22T12:52:14Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/Draft%20Comments.doc

Does India need its own Bayh-Dole?

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:58:46Z

Article by Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager at Centre for Internet and Society in the Indian Express, 24 April 2009

Across the world battlelines are being drawn in the normally quiet areas of academia and research. The opposing sides: those in favour of open and collaborative research and development as a means to promote innovation, and those in favour of perpetuating the profits of big pharma companies and academic publishers. Currently before a Select Parliamentary Committee is a controversial law that will deny basic healthcare to millions by making medicines much more expensive, lock up academic knowledge, and help privatise publicly-funded research. The law titled the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008 (“PUPFIP Bill”, http://bit.ly/pupfip-bill) was tabled last December in the Rajya Sabha by the Minister for Science and Technology. It was created in utmost secrecy by the Department of Science and Technology, without so much as a draft version having been shared with the public for comments.

The PUPFIP Bill is an Indian version of a 1980 US legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act, and as per its statement of objects and reasons, it seeks to promote creativity and innovation to enable India “to compete globally and for the public good”. It aims to do so by ensuring the protection of all intellectual property (meaning copyright, patent, trade mark, design, plant variety, etc.) that is the outcome of government-funded research. The IP rights will be held by the grant recipient, or by the government if the recipient does not choose to protect the IP. This might seem like a good way to enable technology transfer from research institutes to the industry, but that would be a very myopic view, disregarding all evidence related to the failure of the Bayh-Dole Act. Last year Prof. Anthony So of Duke University co-authored an extensive analysis of the Bayh-Dole Act, and warned of the consequences of such legislation in developing countries.

First, such a law will shift the focus of research. Researchers will be inclined to to concentrate their efforts on issues of interest to industry, and which can have immediate benefit. This would force vital fundamental research into neglect since it cannot be commercialised with ease. Research by Saul Lach and Mark Schankerman shows that scientists are influenced by royalty rates, and will thus tend to work on industrial research rather than fundamental research. This creates, or at least exacerbates, what is popularly known as the “90/10 gap”: the fact that ninety per cent of medical research money goes into problems affecting ten per cent of the world’s population, since that ten per cent is richer.

Secondly, this law will have chilling effects on scholarly communications and promote secrecy. The Bill has requirements of non-disclosure by the grantee and the researcher to enable the commercialisation of the research, and requires researchers and institutions to inform the government before all publication of research. Such bureaucratisation of research publications will stultify intellectual pursuits. Such secrecy and permission-raj culture is anathema to intellectual and academic pursuits, where knowledge is sought to be freely disseminated, to be criticised and further revised by others. In South Africa, academics affected by the recent passage of a PUPFIP-type legislation there are questioning its constitutionality as it restrains freedom of speech.

Thirdly, this will lead to our pillars of learning and research becoming like businesses. US universities like Columbia and Duke have found themselves at the receiving end of criticism for their brazen commercialism, encouraged by the Bayh-Dole Act. Instead of promoting greater access to health for the poor, and spending money on research, the universities were spending money on patent litigation in court. The outcome of one of these cases was the rejection of Duke University’s research exemption defence (universities are generally not bound to observe patents when they wished to conduct research). The court held that the university had “business interests” which the research unmistakably furthered. This points at a fundamental divide between universities as places of learning and as places of profiteering. The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSSD) project that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is currently pursuing is a good attempt at promoting a culture of openness and transparency and collaboration, and thus ensuring cheaper and more efficient drug discovery. Even the US government is currently seeking to clear the way for generic versions of biotech drugs. In such an environment, it is counter-intuitive to bring in a regressive law, and goes against innovative efforts such as the OSSD, and will harm the generics industry.

Fourthly, the Bill assumes — erroneously, as an ever-growing amount of research demonstrates (Boldrin & Levine, Bessen & Meurer, etc.) — that intellectual property is the best and only way to promote creativity and innovation. All forms of intellectual property are state-granted monopolistic rights. At a basic level, competition promotes innovations while monopoly retards it. Much of modern science developed without the privilege of patents. Surely, Darwin and Newton were not encouraged by patents. And even whole industries — like the software industry — flourish without patent protection in most of the world.

The commendable aim of ensuring knowledge transfer can be accomplished much better if we refrain from giving away to private corporations (whether pharmaceutical manufacturers or publishers) exclusive rights to the product of publicly-funded research. Scientists and researchers can be encouraged to be consultants to various industrial projects, thereby ensuring that their expertise is tapped. Importantly, open access publishing which helps to ensure wide distribution and dissemination of knowledge is surely more desirable. That is the trend being followed the world over currently. The US president recently signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Bill which makes permanent the National Institutes of Health’s open access policy. By doing so, he symbolically rejected calls (such as the much-criticised Conyers Bill) to privatise publicly funded research outputs. Thus, there are many ways by which the government can encourage innovation and creativity, and further public interest. The PUPFIP Bill, which will have deleterious unintended consequences if it is passed, is not one of them.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/does-india-need-its-own-bayh-dole