Centre for Internet and Society

The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System

sumandro — 2016-04-19T13:18:42Z

Boosting welfare is the message, which is how Aadhaar is being presented in India. The Aadhaar system as a medium, however, is one that enables tracking, surveillance, and data monetisation. This piece by Sumandro Chattapadhyay was published in The Wire on April 19, 2016.

Originally published in and cross-posted from The Wire.

Once upon a time, a king desired that his parrot should be taught all the ancient knowledge of the kingdom. The priests started feeding the pages of the great books to the parrot with much enthusiasm. One day, the king asked the priests if the parrot’s education has completed. The priests poked the belly of the parrot but it made no sound. Only the rustle of undigested pages inside the belly could be heard. The priests declared that the parrot is indeed a learned one now.

The fate of the welfare system in our country is quite similar to this parrot from Tagore’s parable. It has been forcefully fed identification cards and other official documents (often four copies of the same) for years, and always with the same justification of making it more effective and fixing the leaks. These identification regimes are in effect killing off the welfare system. And some may say that that has been the actual plan in any case.

The Aadhaar number has been recently offered as the ‘last chance’ for the ailing welfare system – a last identification regime that it needs to gulp down to survive. This argument wilfully overlooks the acute problems with the Aadhaar project.

Firstly, the ‘last chance’ for a welfare state in India is not provided by implementing a new and improved identification regime (Aadhaar numbers or otherwise), but by enabling citizens to effectively track, monitor, and ensure delivery of welfare, services, and benefits. This ‘opening up’ of the welfare bureaucracy has been most effectively initiated by the Right to Information Act. Instead of a centralised biometrics-linked identity verification platform, which gives the privilege of tracking and monitoring welfare flows only to a few expert groups, an effective welfare state requires the devolution of such privilege and responsibility.

We should harness the tracking capabilities of electronic financial systems to disclose how money belonging to the Consolidated Fund of India travel around state agencies and departmental levels. Instead, the Aadhaar system effectively stacks up a range of entry barriers to accessing welfare – from malfunctioning biometric scanners, to connectivity problems, to the burden of keeping one’s fingerprint digitally legible under all labouring and algorithmic circumstances.

Secondly, authentication of welfare recipients by Aadhaar number neither make the welfare delivery process free of techno-bureaucratic hurdles, nor does it exorcise away corruption. Anumeha Yadav has recently documented the emerging ‘unrest at the ration shop’ across Rajasthan, as authentication processes face technical and connectivity delays, people get ‘locked out’ of public services for not having or having Aadhaar number with incorrect demographic details, and no mechanisms exist to provide rapid and definitive recourse.

RTI activists at the Satark Nagrik Sangathan have highlighted that the Delhi ration shops, using Aadhaar-based authentication, maintain only two columns of data to describe people who have come to the shop – those who received their ration, and those who did not (without any indication of the reason). This leads to erasure-by-design of evidence of the number of welfare-seekers who are excluded from welfare services when the Aadhaar-based authentication process fails (for valid reasons, or otherwise).

Reetika Khera has made it very clear that using Aadhaar Payments Bridge to directly transfer cash to a beneficiary’s account, in the best case scenario, may only take care of one form of corruption: deception (a different person claiming to be the beneficiary). But it does not address the other two common forms of public corruption: collusion (government officials approving undue benefits and creating false beneficiaries) and extortion (forceful rent seeking after the cash has been transferred to the beneficiary’s account). Evidently, going after only deception does not make much sense in an environment where collusion and extortion are commonplace.

Thirdly, the ‘relevant privacy question’ for Aadhaar is not limited to how UIDAI protects the data collected by it, but expands to usage of Aadhaar numbers across the public and private sectors. The privacy problem created by the Aadhaar numbers does begin but surely not end with internal data management procedures and responsibilities of the UIDAI.

On one hand, the Aadhaar Bill 2016 has reduced the personal data sharing restrictions of the NIAI Bill 2010, and has allowed for sharing of all data except core biometrics (fingerprints and iris scan) with all agencies involved in authentication of a person through her/his Aadhaar number. These agencies have been asked to seek consent from the person who is being authenticated, and to inform her/him of the ways in which the provided data (by the person, and by UIDAI) will be used by the agency. In careful wording, the Bill only asks the agencies to inform the person about “alternatives to submission of identity information to the requesting entity” (Section 8.3) but not to provide any such alternatives. This facilitates and legalises a much wider collection of personal demographic data for offering of services by public agencies “or any body corporate or person” (Section 57), which is way beyond the scope of data management practices of UIDAI.

On the other hand, the Aadhaar number is being seeded to all government databases – from lists of HIV patients, of rural citizens being offered 100 days of work, of students getting scholarships meant for specific social groups, of people with a bank account. Now in some sectors, such as banking, inter-agency sharing of data about clients is strictly regulated. But we increasingly have non-financial agencies playing crucial roles in the financial sector – from mobile wallets to peer-to-peer transaction to innovative credit ratings. Seeding of Aadhaar into all government and private databases would allow for easy and direct joining up of these databases by anyone who has access to them, and not at all by security agencies only.

When it becomes publicly acceptable that the money bill route was a ‘remedial’ instrument to put the Rajya Sabha ‘back on track’, one cannot not wonder about what was being remedied by avoiding a public debate about the draft bill before it was presented in Lok Sabha. The answer is simple: welfare is the message, surveillance is the medium.

Acceptance and adoption of all medium requires a message, a content. The users are interested in the message. The message, however, is not the business. Think of Free Basics. Facebook wants people with none or limited access to internet to enjoy parts of the internet at zero data cost. Facebook does not provide the content that the users consume on such internet. The content is created by the users themselves, and also provided by other companies. Facebook own and control the medium, and makes money out of all content, including interactions, passing through it.

The UIDAI has set up a biometric data bank and related infrastructure to offer authentication-as-a-service. As the Bill clarifies, almost all agencies (public or private, national or global) can use this service to verify the identity of Indian residents. Unlike Facebook, the content of these services do not flow through the Aadhaar system. Nonetheless, Aadhaar keeps track of all ‘authentication records’, that is records of whose identity was authenticated by whom, when, and where. This database is gold (data) mine for security agencies in India, and elsewhere. Further, as more agencies use authentication based on Aadhaar numbers, it becomes easier for them to combine and compare databases with other agencies doing the same, by linking each line of transaction across databases using Aadhaar numbers.

Welfare is the message that the Aadhaar system is riding on. The message is only useful for the medium as far as it ensures that the majority of the user population are subscribing to it. Once the users are enrolled, or on-boarded, the medium enables flow of all kinds of messages, and tracking and monetisation (perhaps not so much in the case of UIDAI) of all those flows. It does not matter if the Aadhaar system is being introduced to remedy the broken parliamentary process, or the broken welfare distribution system. What matters is that the UIDAI is establishing the infrastructure for a universal surveillance system in India, and without a formal acknowledgement and legal framework for the same.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-last-chance-for-a-welfare-state-doesnt-rest-in-the-aadhaar-system

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

sumandro — 2015-12-02T07:54:26Z

For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Here is the podcast. We are grateful to Fields of View for producing and sharing this recording.

Podcast

If the audio player is not visible above, please download the MP3 file.

Source: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/2015/11/1126/.

Smart Cities podcast series: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/category/smartcitiespodcast/.

Fields of View

Issues in urban systems and public safety and security are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Such problems require a diverse set of actors to come together and collaborate. We need government, academia, industry, and civil society to question, debate, discuss, and ideate together. In short, we need a dialogue in diversity. Our goal at Fields of View is to design spaces to enable such dialogues using games and simulations – tools based on research at the intersection of social sciences, art, and technology.

Website: http://fieldsofview.in/.

Twitter: @fovlabs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/fov-podcast-data-people-and-smart-cities

Studying the Emerging Database State in India: Notes for Critical Data Studies (Accepted Abstract)

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:54:53Z

"Critical Data Studies (CDS) is a growing field of research that focuses on the unique theoretical, ethical, and epistemological challenges posed by 'Big Data.' Rather than treat Big Data as a scientifically empirical, and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages." The Big Data and Society journal has provisionally accepted a paper abstract of mine for its upcoming special issue on Critical Data Studies.

Introduction

Through the last decade, the Government of India has given shape to an digital identification infrastructure, developed and operated by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The infrastructure combines the task of assigning unique identification numbers, called Aadhaar numbers, to individuals submitting their biometric and demographic details, and the task of authenticating their identity when provided with an Aadhaar number and associated data (biometric data, One Time Pin sent to the pre-declared mobile number, etc.). The aim of UIDAI is to provide universal authentication-as-a-service for all residents of India who approach any public or private agencies for any kind of service or transaction. Simultaneously, the Aadhaar numbers will function as unique identifiers for joining up databases of different government agencies, and hence allow the Indian government to undertake big data analytics at a governmental scale, and not only at a departmental one.

In this paper, I am primarily motivated by the challenge of finding points and objects to enter into a critical study of such an in-progress data infrastructure. As I proceed with an understanding that data is produced within its specific social and material context, the question then is to read through the data to reflect on its possible social and material context. This is complicated when approaching a big data infrastructure that is meant to produce data for explicitly intra-governmental consumption and circulation. The problem then is not one of reading through available big data, but one of reading through the assemblage and imaginaries of big data to reflect on the kind of data it will give rise to, and thus on the politics of the data assemblage and the database state it enables.

Logic of the Database State

Application of data to inform governmental acts have taken place at least since government has been understood as responsible for the welfare of the population and the territory. The measurement of the population and the territory – the number of people, their demographic features, amounts and locations of natural resources, and so on – have always been integral to the functioning of the modern nation-state. Database state is used in this paper to identify a particular mode of mobilisation of data within governmental acts, which is fundamentally shaped by the possibilities of big data extraction, appropriation, and analytics pioneered by a range of companies since late 1990s. The reason for not using big data state but database dtate is that big data refers to a body of technologies emerging in response to a set of data management and analysis challenges situated in a certain moment of development of information technologies, whereas database refers to a symbolic form (Manovich 1999): a form in which not only the population is made visible to the government (as a collection of visual, textual, numeric, and other forms of records), but also how the acts of government are made visible to the population (as a collection of performance indicators, budget allocation and utilisation tables, and other data visualised through dashboards, analog and digital).

The data production and management logic of this database state is specifically inspired by the notion of platform introduced by the so-called Web 2.0 companies: providing a common service layer upon which various other applications may also run, but under specific arrangements (including distribution of generated user data) with the original common layer provider. Data assemblages of the database state are expected to enable the government to function as a platform, as an intensely data-driven layer that widely gathers data about population individuals and feeds it back selectively to various providers of public and private services. This transforms the data assemblage from one vertical of governmental activities to a horizontal critical infrastructure for modularisation of governmental activities.

Studying the Emerging Database State in India

Government of India is presently debating the legal and technical validity of the digital identity infrastructure programme in the Supreme Court, while simultaneously carrying out the enrollment drive for the same, linking up assignment of unique identity numbers with a national drive for population registration, and rolling out citizen-facing services and applications that implement the Aadhaar number as a necessary key to access them. With the enrollment process going on and the integration with various governmental processes (termed seeding by Aadhaar policy literature) just beginning, I enter this study through two key sets of objects reflecting the imaginaries and the technical specifications of the emerging database state in India. The first entry point is through the various official documents of vision, intentions, plans, and reconsiderations, and the second entry point is through the Application Programming Interface (API) documentations published by UIDAI to specify how its identity authentication platform will collaborate with various public and private services.

The first section of the paper provides a brief survey of pre-UIDAI attempts by the Government of India to deploy unique identification numbers and Smart Cards for specific population groups, so as to understand the initial conceptualisation of this data assemblage of a digital identification platform. The second section foregrounds how this platform undertakes a transformation of the components and relations of the pre-existing data assemblage of the Government of India, as articulated in various official documents of promised utility and proposed collaborations. The third section studies the API documentations to track how such imaginaries are materially interpreted and operationalised through the design of protocols of data interactions with various public and private agencies offering services utilising the identity authentication platform.

Notes for Critical Data Studies

Expanding the early agenda note on Critical Data Studies by Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher (2014), Rob Kitchin and Tracey P. Lauriault have taken steps towards emphasising the responsibility of this nebulous research strategy to chart and unpack the data assemblages (2014). This is exactly what I propose to do in this paper. While Kitchin and Lauriault provide a detailed list of the components of the apparatus of a data assemblage (2014: 7), I find the concepts of infrastructural components and infrastructural relations very useful in thinking through the emerging infrastructure of authentication. Thus, my approach to these tasks of charting and unpacking is focused on the infrastructural relations that the digital identity infrastructure re-configures, instead of the infrastructural components it mobilises (Bowker et al 2010). This tactical choice of focusing on the infrastructural relations is also necessitated by the practical difficulty in having comprehensive access to the individual components of the data assemblage concerned. Addressing questions of causality and quality becomes difficult when studying the assemblage sans the produced data, and rigorously analysing concerns of security and uncertainty pre-requires an actually existing data assemblage, with a public interface to investigating its leakages, breakages, and internal functioning. In the absence of such points of entry into the data assemblage, which I fear may not be an exceptional case, I attempt an inverted reading. Turning the data infrastructure inside out, in this paper I describe how the digital identity platform is critically reshaping the basis of governmental acts in India, through a specific model of production, extraction and application of big data.

Bibliography

Bowker, Geoffrey C., Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, & David Ribes. 2010. Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, & Matthew Allen (Eds.) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York. Pp. 97-117.

Dalton, Craig, & Jim Thatcher. 2014. What does a Critical Data Studies Look Like, and Why do We Care? Seven Points for a Critical Approach to ‘Big Data.’ Society and Space. May 19. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/craig-dalton-and-jim-thatcher-what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care-seven-points-for-a-critical-approach-to-big-data/.

Kitchin, Rob, & Tracey P. Lauriault. 2014. Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and their Work. The Programmable City Working Paper 2. July 29. National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2474112.

Manovich, Lev. 1999. Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence. Volume 5, Number 2. Pp. 80-99.

Note: Call for Papers for the special issue can found here: http://bigdatasoc.blogspot.in/2015/06/call-for-proposals-special-theme-on.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-the-emerging-database-state-in-india-accepted-abstract

Open Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries - A Synthesis Report

sumandro — 2015-06-16T09:40:58Z

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

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

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

Implications for Policy

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

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

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

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

Mathematisation of the Urban and not Urbanisation of Mathematics: Smart Cities and the Primitive Accumulation of Data - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:47:13Z

"Many accounts of smart cities recognise the historical coincidence of cybernetic control and neoliberal capital. Even where it is machines which process the vast amounts of data produced by the city so much so that the ruling and managerial classes disappear from view, it is usually the logic of capital that steers the flows of data, people and things. Yet what other futures of the city may be possible within the smart city, what collective intelligence may it bring forth?" The Fibreculture Journal has accepted an abstract of mine for its upcoming issue on 'Computing the City.'

Speaking to Geert Lovink, Wolfgang Ernst explains that '[t]he coupling of machine and mathematics that enables computers occurs as a mathematization of machine, not as machinization of mathematics' [1]. In this paper, I propose that the idea of smart cities be understood not as 'urbanisation of mathematics' – as often described by industry documents, design fictions, and academic analyses – but as 'mathematisation of the urban.' By the notion of 'urbanisation of mathematics,' I indicate at those reports that conceptualise smart cities as data analytics, or civic mathematics, at an urban scale. I explain how this notion is shared by design visions of actors from the networking industry, such as IBM and Cisco, emerging academic practices in urban science and informatics, and calls for urbanising the technologies of regulation and governance, in the sense of making these technologies directly and bi-directionally interact with the urban citizens [2]. Conversely, the 'mathematisation of the urban' perspective foregrounds a specific transformation at hand in the production of urban space itself, which I argue is what is captured in the idea of smart cities. This transformation is not a new thing, and has been heralded by the coming of coded infrastructures and the transduction of urban space through them [3]. The process of 'mathematisation of the urban' refers to a fundamental reorganisation of the urban itself so as to make aspects of it available to mathematical manipulation, most often undertaken by software systems. This mathematisation takes place through the rebuilding of urban infrastructures so as to facilitate sensing and recording of parts of urban lives and processes as mathematical data, and the embedding of coded assemblages that can communicate and act upon the analysis of such data, and also through re-building the relations of property around this newly-obtained and continuously-generated resource of data about the urban.

I propose in this paper that production, circulation, and ownership of data must be considered as a central problematique in the discussions of smart cities. As writings on smart cities have often focused on the dyadic relationships between code and space on one hand, and co-evolution (and splintering) of networked infrastructures and the urban form, the figure of data has remained implicit yet subdued as as an entry point to study the idea of smart cities. Even for commentators who do focus on the implications of data, the category is often treated as a feature or a capacity of new technological assemblages. Instead, I argue in this paper that it is the concerns of production, circulation, and ownership of data that drive the conceptualisation and actual material forms of the visions of smart cities. These technological assemblages, materialisation of which constitute such visions, are implementations of exclusive data collection operations targeting various portions of urban lives and processes. The imagination of 'city 2.0' takes a particularly insightful colour when thought of as an analogy to the 'web 2.0' model of capture and monetisation of user behaviour data. Further, I employ the Marxian theory of 'primitive accumulation' to describe how the material infrastructures of networked sensors and embedded data capture systems create enclosed spaces for conversion of collectively-held-information into data-as-exchangable-and-interoperable-value, through which disparate and distributed knowledge and experiences of the urban is transformed into urban data, which can be centralised and queried, and hence value can be extracted from it.

Footnotes

[1] Lovink, Geert. 2013. Interview with German Media Archeologist Wolfgang Ernst. Nettime-l. February 26. Accessed on April 20, 2015, from http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00132.html.

[2] Sassen, Saskia. 2012. Urbanising Technology. LSE Cities. December. Accessed on April 20, 2015, from http://lsecities.net/media/objects/articles/urbanising-technology/en-gb/.

[3] Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2005. Code and the Transduction of Space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 95: 01. Pp. 162-180.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/smart-cities-and-the-primitive-accumulation-of-data-abstract

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:41:15Z

My paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015. The final paper will be shared by second week of May. Here is the accepted abstract.

Where are the NGOs?

On February 04, 2013, several members of the DataMeet group <http://datameet.org/> were invited by the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Project Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU) – the nodal agency responsible for developing, implementing, and managing the Open Government Data Platform of India <https://data.gov.in/> – to share thoughts on the status of the implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), the open data policy of India, and discuss potentials for collaboration. A key proposal made by the NDSAPPMU team regarding how DataMeet can contribute to the implementation process, involved DataMeet mobilising the developer community connected to the group to build applications that use the opened up data and demonstrate the value of open government data to drive greater contribution by government agencies and greater utilisation by citizen groups. For DataMeet, a network of open data users and advocates, this invitation to collaborate sets up a slightly different problematic than that in most of the cases of free and open source software development project. The task here is to develop projects that use already available data, which may not offer significantly return to investment at present, but will accellerate the process of opening up of more valuable government data.

However, building an application that effectively utilise government data to foreground a compelling argument or story requires more than a team of developers – it also require domain experts with a deep sense of the context from which the data is emanating. With a vibrant scene of nongovernmental organisations involved in monitoring, analysis, and implementation of developmental projects, many of such domain experts in India are located within such organisations, with some being in the academic institutes too. Reporting from an open data community meeting organised by the World Bank at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on December 10, 2014, Isha Parihar asks: “Where are the NGOs?” She points out that “[t]he discussions around open data [in India] also highlight the absence of nonprofit organisations among the technologyfocused groups, entrepreneurs, and businesses [1].” This observation is especially critical as the meeting was organsied by World Bank not only to gather public responses to be presented to Government of India, but also to take stock of the open data community in India. The absence of NGOs, although, does not indicate at the lack of interest of the nongovernmental research and advocacy organisations in India to work with government data. Such organisations, on the contrary, have a long history of accessing, using, sharing, and communicating government data obtained through both proactive and reactive disclosure mechanism. While surveying such practices in a recent report, Sumandro Chattapadhyay argues [2] that the lack of a common understanding of the open data community in India emerges from both the lack of an established forum where commercial and non-commercial reusers of data discuss and articulate their requirements and demands, and the existence of an established range of actors accessing, using, and resharing government data for commercial and noncommercial purposes who are still uncertain regarding how open government data will exactly transform and augment their existing practices.

Whose Open Data Community is it?

In the context of the emerging open data ecosystem in India, thus, the notion of the open data community comes forward as both the problem – in terms of the community not yet being there to effectively take forward the open data agenda – and the solution – as the component of the ecosystem that can successfully bridge gaps between interests and capacities of various stakeholders. Given the gap and the stakeholder concerned, the open data community is expected to perform various critical functions. This paper tracks these conceptualisations of open data community in India. Based upon conversations with fourteen organisations working across four cities in India, the question of 'whose open data community is it' is explored in this paper following three pathways – (1) by documenting how the understanding of the open data community, and the location of the organisation concerned in reference to that, changes across these organisations, (2) by describing how the idea of who all are included in the open data community in India changes across these organisations, and (3) by identifying how different organisations formulate the intended audiences of the open data community in India. In doing so, I argue that a range of critical challenges being experienced by the open data ecosystem in India often gets articulated as things that can be resolved by a more active and effective open data community. This distorts the distribution of responsbilities across various kinds of stakeholders for contributing to the open data ecosystem. In conclusion, I note the need to stop using open data community as a solution-for-all-open-data-evils, and for a pragmatic approach to understand the kinds of open data challenges it can address, and those that it cannot.

Endnotes

[1] Parihar, Isha. 2015. On the Road to Open Data: Glimpses of the Discourse in India. Akvo. January 14. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://akvo.org/blog/on-the-road-to-open-data-glimpses-of-the-discourse-in-india/

[2] Chattapadhyay, Sumandro. 2014. Opening Government Data through Mediation: Exploring Roles, Practices and Strategies of (Potential) Data Intermediary Organisations in India. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/report/sumandro_oddc_project_report.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/whose-open-data-community-is-it-abstract