Centre for Internet and Society

NCIDEEE

radha — 2011-08-22T13:16:49Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/Consolidated%20Programme.pdf

Workshop on Web Accessibility - Thiruvananthapuram

radha — 2011-08-22T13:12:01Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/Report%20-%20Space.pdf

Print - Access

radha — 2011-08-22T13:13:07Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/Print%20Access.ppt

Print Access

radha — 2011-08-22T13:12:51Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/Print_Access.pdf

R2R-Chennai (Report)

radha — 2011-08-22T13:10:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/R2R%20Chennai%20-%20Report.pdf

National Workshop on Web Accessibility

radha — 2011-08-22T12:54:22Z

Registration form

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/registration_form-%20Workshop%20on%20Web%20Accessibility.pdf

Agenda for e-Access Meeting

sachia — 2011-08-22T12:53:56Z

Download the agenda for the 7 November 2008 meeting on e-Access.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/agenda%20for%20Nov%207th%20meeting.doc.htm

Neeta Verma Presentation File

praskrishna — 2011-08-22T12:51:21Z

presentation file

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/neeta-verma-presentation

Edict Conference Report

praskrishna — 2011-08-22T12:42:18Z

Pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/edict-conference-report

Glossary

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:45:45Z

pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/glossary.pdf

Case Studies

praskrishna — 2011-08-24T07:54:15Z

See the case studies

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/case-studies.pdf

Design! Public

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:44:24Z

pdf file

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/design-public.pdf

Internet at Liberty, 2010

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:40:31Z

Event in Budapest

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/internet-liberty

Science, Technology and Society International Conference – Some Afterthoughts

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:22:08Z

An international conference on Science, Technology and Society was held at the Indore Christian College on March 12 and 13. It was sponsored by the Madhya Pradesh Council of Science and Technology, Bhopal and organized by the Indore Christian College. Samuel Tettner, Digital Natives Coordinator from the Centre for Internet and Society attended this conference and is sharing his experience about the workshop.

This past weekend I attended the “Science, Technology and Society International Conference”. The experience was one of learning, more so on the idiosyncrasies and social particularities of academic research than on the subject matters presented at the conference.

I arrived in Indore late on Friday night; my plan was to just check into the hotel and watch some Tom and Jerry before falling asleep. Then I met the conference organizer, the head of the Department of Sociology at the Indore Christian College, who informed me that I would be one of the key-note speakers the next day and that I had around 40 minutes of speaking time. My presentation at that time was around 20 minutes, so there was less Tom and Jerry than expected. This was the first indication of the interesting cultural experience I was about to have.

As I navigated the rather austere streets of Indore, I realized that this was really a modest city. Not in population of course, because Indian cities are huge compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world, but in its aspirations. I quickly noticed I was the only white person on the streets. “I made the conference international”, I thought, but I was wrong: There was one more white person, a middle aged man from Hungary named Laszlo who had come to present his research on population. And so as the first day of the conference rolled on, Laszlo and I got a taste of some bizarre reverence that continued throughout the two days. I can’t say for sure if it’s the result of some colonial baggage, the Indian tradition of treating guests like gods, may be a combination of both, the truth is that we got treated with way too much respect and an uncanny humility that was at times a bit embarrassing. Laszlo and I got to sit on the stage, next to the former Indian ambassador to Fiji, the head of the college, and other conference organizers.

The influence of Hinduism in more rural areas is very visible, on the stage next to the podium was a huge representation of Saraswati (goddess of wisdom) and there was a constant puja being offered to her. I thought of the academia, the temple of rationality, the house of reason, surely cannot co-exist with the world of religion. It can, if anyone in the world can make it happen, it’s the Indians. There were floral offerings, and introductions, and dedications. It seemed the organizers were very concerned with decorum and pomp and circumstance, pleasing local government officials (I recognized them because they were fat and everyone smiled at them awkwardly) and maintaining a tradition I got the feeling they didn’t understand properly. This whole exercise was ironic to me, as the building was almost in ruins, there was no proper ventilation, and the restrooms were a complete mess with no proper running water, and so on.

Finally I got to speak. I only got 15 minutes because one local man (maybe a friend of one of the local politicians) took his sweet time delivering his speech. This was definitely not my crowd. I was presenting a small paper I wrote called “iCare: Emergent Forms of Technology-mediated Activism” which was basically a summary of two of the findings of “Digital Natives with a Cause?”: One was a concept of activism which moves away from one time campaigns and looks at the practice of activism as an every-day activity, which can be valued without the need of an issue nor a community. The other was an observation about the language of activism and how it relates to different communities, through the use of voice, terminology, literary devices, and context. These were not the topics most attendees were familiar with, for example at the beginning of the talk I asked how many people in the audience used Facebook, and about 15 of out 150 people raised their hands. Relating to the issues of people who use technology incessantly was difficult for this crowd, who were not familiar with terms like “Slacktivism” and “Digital Native”, and who generally held the view that modern society and its overuse of technology were chipping away at traditional Hindu family values.

I tried my best in those 15 minutes, to illuminate some of the basic conceptual bases of the kind of work we’re doing with “Digital Natives with a Cause?”. They enjoyed the presentation, or at least I gathered that from several people who came up to me afterwards and told me so. Many people came up to me and asked me where I was from, and I started saying “USA” after a while, because “Venezuela” does exist in their mind, and “South America” just means the south of the United States.

I got to learn a lot about academic life in more rural traditional social spaces. I am generally completely ignorant of rural life, as I was born in the capital of Venezuela, and have in general lived in very cosmopolitan and metropolitan cities all my life. However what little slices of rural life I had encountered while backpacking through India, were concentrated in the work around the house and the fields. I was under the impression that research, that academic pursuit, and that critical thinking, were activities reserved for the urban, the middle class, the English speaking. Attending this conference opened my view a bit in this respect. People in rural areas have their own academic culture, with their own research interests, views and perspectives, and in most cases, reliable data backing them. Granted, in many cases these cultures are reflections or copies of what comes out of the cities, (and the west to a certain extend) but many times they are not, and getting to experience the complexity of it was a great experience. For example, there were many papers presented which dealt with the politics of caste, which is a concept I have barely come in contact with while being in Bangalore. A lot of people also talked about sustainable development, the impact of technology on agriculture, how new chemical fertilizers are changing the lives of farmers, and one teacher talked about the exiting potential uses for the novel technology called the podcast.

It was then that it dawned on me: “Science, Technology and Society” meant a completely different thing to my audience than it did to me. My presentation about how people conversing on Facebook can be viewed as activism must have seemed so alien and disconnected to them. I left the place very pensive about the whole experience. After taking pictures with some children, I went to a mall, and stood in front of a McDonalds and wondered how globalization is allowing for encounters like this one: A Venezuelan young man speaking at a local college in Indore, in the cultural and geographical centre of India. I’d like to think I was breaking barriers, participating in inter-cultural dialogue, exemplifying the exchange of intellectual and cultural capital that I hope takes places in the following years after our markets have gone global. Then again, I might not have been, I might have confirmed their perception of the well-dressed Westerner, who gracefully does them the favour of speaking at their college, and then talks in an accent about some random and obscure topic no one has any idea about. I’m still trying to decipher what happened. Eventually I went back to my hotel and experienced possibly the one and only truly cross-cultural and global thing in today’s world: Tom and Jerry.

See the agenda here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/science-technology-and-society-conference-in-indore-march-12-13

The Future of Journalism: EJC @ Picnic 2010

nishant — 2010-10-13T07:13:29Z

Nishant Shah was a speaker at the PICNIC 2010, in Amsterdam, where he made a presentation titled "Citizens in the time of Database Democracies : Information ecology and role of participatory technologies in India"

The relationship between citizenship and government informatics have historically been shaped through a series of debates around questions of citizenship, security, State-market collaborations, and right based discourse in India. Even before the information explosion caused by the emergence of digital and internet technologies, there has been a strident discourse around participatory democracy and technology mediated governance as ways of empowering the citizen's access to rights and resources in the country. With the emergence of new technologies of storage, retrieval and dissemination, these expectations have become more visible. The Indian Government has officially accepted the transition to become a S.M.A.R.T. (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent) State, with the rise of 'Netizens' who, in their access to new digital and internet technologies will change the very shape and structure of governance.

However, as the digital infrastructure develops and new kinds of citizen services and consumption come to the fore, battle-lines are being drawn between stakeholders. On the one hand are those who believe that this might be the opening of a Pandora’s Box for a country like India where a stark digital divide might create great inequality in citizens' access to State services and resources, producing unjust and discriminatory structures based on access, bandwidth and education. . On the other hand are those who celebrate the need for transparency, participation and access to governmentality that these e-governance initiatives usher in, addressing long standing questions of plutocratic governance, bureaucratic systems of denial of rights and widespread corruption. Both the warring factions draw upon partial data – of failed attempts and projects by different government initiatives to pilot studies initiated by different government and civil society organisations respectively – to make their arguments for and against the emergence of a 'Database Democracy' .premised on participatory politics facilitated by new media practices in the country.

Especially with the current rolling out of a Unique Identity Project (named Aadhar – The Hindi word for ‘Support’) these discussions have become more severe and the arguments have become angrier. It is not only timely but also necessary to examine the ecology of participatory technologies and processes in the country in order to look at the different sides of the debates and explore the role that new media practitioners and stakeholders would play in efficiently and responsibly establishing a protocol of open and transparent governance structures without compromising either the privacy, rights or safety of the citizens. This presentation explores the project Aadhar as symptomatic of a changing relationship between the State and its Citizens mediated by ICT technologies and stakeholders, to look at the ways in which new Citizenships are being forged in emerging information societies like India.

More news about the panel on Future of Journalism, arranged by the European Journalism Commission, is available at

http://futureofjournalism.net/index.php/EJC_at_PICNIC2010

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