Centre for Internet and Society

Indian Women and Craft Edit-a-thon

Gopalakrishna A. — 2018-07-04T16:30:28Z

A two-day long edit-a-thon aimed to archive the Women achievers in the field of art and craft on Kannada Wikipedia was held with the help of Srishti Institute and Janastu on 8th March and 25th March 2018.

On 8th March 2018, The Access to Knowledge program in collaboration with the Srishti Institute of Art, design, and technology organised a Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Janastu, Bangalore. Srishti Institute is a Bangalore based non-residential institute which provides art and design education to various individuals, and Jantsu is a Non-profit organisation which provides FOSS support to NGOs and NPOs. The theme of the event was to create articles on Indian women and crafts, Padmini, the course leader for Digital Humanities at Srishti Institute helped the A2K program in preparing a list of articles which can be added into Wikipedia.

Near about 15 staffs of Janastu attended the workshop, as the majority of the participants had Kannada language background the event was conducted in the Kannada language. During the workshop, the participants were introduced to their user sandbox, and after the orientation program, they started creating articles on them. A total number of 7 articles were developed on the same day, we also introduced Wikimedia Commons to the participant, on how to upload images to Commons and how to add images from Commons to Wikipedia articles.

After the workshop at Janastu, a follow-up edit-a-thon was also conducted on 25th March 2018 at The CIS office. Five participants from the previous workshop joined us for the edit-a-thon and eight articles were created or improved as a part of that edit-a-thon, of which Daroji Eramma’s article was one among them. Daroji Eramma was a Kannada folk singer and performer of a South Indian folk art called Burrakatha. At the end of the event, a Wikidata training was given to the participants which helped them to translate a few labels on Wikidata.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-women-and-craft-edit-a-thon-1

Access to Knowledge Workshop @ NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka

praskrishna — 2012-12-19T07:20:31Z

The Centre for Internet & Society in collaboration with Metawing Technologies (P) Ltd. is organizing a Wikipedia workshop at NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka on December 21, 2012, from 9.30 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

Over 100 students are expected to participate in this workshop. The primary aim of the workshop is to educate them about Wikipedia in Indian languages and tell them how they can contribute to Wikipedia.

CIS is willing to bear the travelling expense for upto two wikipedians to and from Bangalore (or any other place in Karnataka that is close to Karkala).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/a2k-workshop-at-nmamit

Digital Natives Santiago Workshop Schedule

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T04:22:59Z

pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/workshop-schedule

Facebook Resistance Article

praskrishna — 2011-08-24T08:58:35Z

pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/facebook-resistance

Cyber fears

tettner — 2011-08-23T04:26:15Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/Cyber%20fears.pdf

Design! Public

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:44:24Z

pdf file

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

Glossary

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:45:45Z

pdf

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

Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Chennai

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T10:40:44Z

This conference was held on August 6, 2011 in Chennai. The report is now online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/privacy-chennai-report.pdf

Report of Wiki Workshop in Mangalore

praskrishna — 2013-04-16T06:14:42Z

A wikipedia workshop was organized in Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management, Mangalore on April 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the workshop. Prajavani's Mangalore edition published a report about the felicitation to K.P. Rao and about the wikipedia workshop.

Below is the report published in Prajavani on April 10, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prajavani-mangalore-edition-april-10-2013-report-of-wikipedia-workshop

Wikipedia workshop for Konkani students conducted in Mangaluru

tito — 2017-06-28T09:57:32Z

A two days Wikipedia workshop "introduction to Wikipedia" was conducted at Besant College, Mangaluru. 16 undergraduate and post-graduate students from 3 different colleges participated in the event. Here is a report.

A two day workshop was conducted for students who opted konkani at U.G.& P.G.courses of Mangalore University on 16 and 17 December at Besant Evening College, Mangaluru. This event was jointly organised by Mangalore University Konkani Adhyayana Peeta, and the Dept. of Konkani (M. A.). The Centre for Internet Society, India (CIS, India) and Besant Evening College, Mangaluru were the collaborators. Dr. Devadasa Pai of Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Academy was the primary co-ordinator. A representative from CIS, India participated in the workshop as a resource person. Harriet Vidyasagar, a Konkani Wikipedia enthusiast and supporter, and Sabrina Hougaard attended the event to groom the participant and share their expertise.

16 undergraduate and post-graduate colleges from 3 different colleges of Mangalore participated in this workshop. The table below shows participation from each college and gender ratio.

College	Participants	Female	Male
Mangalore University College	2	1	1
St. Aloysius College	9	4	5
Milagress Degree College	5	3	2
Total	16	8	8

The first day's (16 December) event was started with general introduction to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. The following topics were discussed:

Wikipedia and Wikimedia movement
Importance of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge and information in the World Wide Web (WWW)
Free knowledge movement
Indic language Wikipedias

This was followed by account creation where the participants were asked to create accounts on Wikipedia. After that they were taught about Wikipedia user page, and sandbox page. They were also taught about basic editing (general formatting) on sandbox using Visual Editor.

On the second day (17 December) the participants wrote articles on their Konkani Wikipedia user sandbox page in Kannada script. 16 students wrote more than 25 short articles on their sandbox.

They were also introduced to Wikipedia content translation tool and Wikidata. During the Wikidata session, following a general introduction to Wikidata, the participants were asked to add labels and descriptions in Indian languages such as Kannada, Konkani etc. More than 150 edits were made during this exercise.

This workshop should be followed up by another iteration where the participants will be taught about the next level of editing.

Image credit

Source: Wikimedia Commons, author: User:Outofindia, CC-BY-SA-4.0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikipedia-workshop-for-konkani-students-conducted-in-mangalore

Software Day Info

praskrishna — 2011-08-22T13:24:42Z

An information about the competition.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/publications/software-freedom-info

Consilience 2010 Report

praskrishna — 2011-08-22T13:25:25Z

A report of the proceedings

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/publications/consilience-2010

Ongoing Proof-reading Effort by ALC Student Wikimedians in Telugu Wikisource

Pavan Santosh & Ting-Yi Chang — 2016-12-30T11:00:09Z

Student Wikimedians at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada formatted and proof-read more than 1,900 folios in Telugu Wikisource during the last few weeks of November (2016). Each day, a group of twenty students uses the lab facility provided by the college after regular classes to make necessary formatting changes and fix spelling mistakes in the folios of books available in Telugu Wikisource. Till date, the student Wikipedians have proofread eight books.

The work was initiated and supported by CIS-A2K members who organized a proofreading workshop of the Bible Bhashya Samputavali Volume 06 on Telugu Wikisource in Andhra Loyola College during 18 to 20 November 2016. During the workshop, Telugu Wikimedian Gullapalli Nageswara Rao (User:Nrgullapalli), along with CIS-A2K community advocate Pavan Santhosh helped students to learn about the process of digitizing book in Telugu Wikisource and other formatting aspects involved. In this event, nearly twenty students picked up the skills required to proof-read a book as well as the formatting techniques in Telugu Wikisource. Some students had also started to proof-read three other books that are currently available in Telugu Wikisource.

This event also marked great effort and accomplishment of promoting gender balance and diversity in local community events — as the organizers and institution successfully assured a minimum 50% female participation rate throughout the three days. CIS-A2K member Ting-Yi Chang also gave a short introduction to the participants about the issue in Wikipedia (media) Gender Gap. Students who had previous Wikipedia editing experience at the ALC were also invited to the session, rendering around thirty female audience. The presentation included small brainstorm activities for students to discuss reasons behind the gender asymmetry online and on Wikipedia/media projects, as well as how we as community members can make a difference to help women feel more welcomed.

A follow-up Wikisource session was conducted on 25 and 26 November 2016 for students to learn about the remaining steps in digitization and the OCR tool. Thanks to encouragement and motivation given by Principal Rev. Fr., Dr. Peter Kishore, staff members Prof. Siva Kumari, and Dr. K. Sekhar, the student Wikipedians had started to contribute to Wikisource after class for at least a couple of hours every day. These events and accomplishments show remarkable efforts and dedication from both student Wikimedians and the institutional partner.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ongoing-proof-reading-effort-by-alc-student-wikimedians-in-telugu-wikisource

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T05:14:53Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Deepak Menon welcomes us into his world by asking a very common question: Why is water in India of such bad quality?

He begins by pointing out that different groups with different ideologies have varying views on water in India, and very few of these multitudes of groups actually interact with one another to share their knowledge or work together. What is clear, though, is that water is integral to Indian life, and that the major problems associated with water are those surrounding drinking water and sanitation. Most of the drinking water in India is surface water, and most of the surface water is contaminated, which has spurned an interest in using groundwater. Fifteen years ago in Bangalore, apartment buildings were built close to groundwater reserves — now, even some of the most expensive housing is built without proximity to a water resource, so water must be brought in from other areas in large quantities. Groundwater is a large issue as well, as the deeper you drill into groundwater aquifers, the more contaminants are in the water — and they are dangerous to health. Doctors are constantly treating the symptoms of contaminated water without even knowing that the cause is bad water, and this lack of knowledge is widespread across India, except for those that work in the water industry.

The Ministry of Health is not connected or in regular dialogue with the ministry of water management — so no one but the water ministry touches water issues. This lack of knowledge sharing and co-operation is pervasive throughout many Indian spheres, which is why, for Deepak, the process of network creation becomes an important comprehension point. How do we create a network, especially one with the purpose of disseminating knowledge to multiple spheres of society? How do we coordinate multiple actors to mobilize these networks? How do we create both online and offline networks that engage multiple groups? Many associations or appropriate groups are uninterested in talking to one another, so how do we get these groups talking? If we are unable to connect groups within one sector, how will we do it between sectors or even regions?

Deepak is interested in a model of network existence and creation. It's hard to create a network if many basic questions (How much time does it take? How long will it last) have no answers. Issues of structure also complicate the inclusion or participation of particular actors into a network framework — some individuals and groups are not used to working in non-hierarchal environments. How do we form long-lasting networks between different groups? Does the process differ between online and offline networks?

One participant reflected on the over-drawing of water and its relation with corruption — does corruption enable over-use of water resources? Deepak responded that this happens in both industrial and private use of water, as well as many other spheres in Indian society. The participant also put forth the idea of using mobile technology to collectively map water resources. Deepak pointed out that again, this is an issue of the creation of networks — if we were able to create the collective interest in creating this mapping activity, then it would be very useful, but so far, attempts to create the needed networks have not been successful. Crowd mapping was also suggested, and it was pointed out that thinking about crowd-mapping groups is a good exercise in envisioning the kinds specifics of the networks that need to be created.

Another participant pointed out that much of the dialogue about and interaction with water exists within traditional knowledge systems, so we must be aware of these systems of consumption and understanding when dealing with water in India.

Deepak finishes by asking us to consider the following three questions:

When have you felt most networked in your life? When do you experience a network?
List networks that you are part of online and offline.
What are the few defining characteristics that you felt that these networks possessed?

While I do believe that networks often become apparent when you are excluded for them, as Nishant discussed on our first day, in my own experience, the identification of a network structure in an environment, I originally thought was hierarchical was when I felt the most networked. However, I have experienced my own belonging to networks before this point, but I believe that I viewed those networks that are relevant in my own life as being predominately social. I tend to see membership to most networks as being involuntary, but I believe that this stems from quite a narrow comprehension of network theory.

As for Deepak’s discussion, I believe that the search for a methodology for the creation of networks could be problematic. If it is true that the moment we see a network in its entirety is the moment that the network falls into crisis, what does this say about the essence of a network that was actively created with a specific goal in mind? Is it sustainable if the nature that connects the nodes of the network is not inherent or invisible, but constructed and clearly understood by all members? And what does this say about the orchestrator or architect of the network? When a tangible entity constructs a network, is this a hierarchical process? Can it result in a network, or is the structure created inherently hierarchical?

If you're interested in being part of this dialogue, please tweet your answers to these questions to #hol12!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-water-in-india

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s)

alok — 2012-10-09T09:39:08Z

Saumya Pant from the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad begins the day with a controversial and important talk "For the Love of Child? The Economy of Desire in Cases of Transnational Surrogacy". Pant invites us into the taboo world of international couples travelling to India to receive a child from a surrogate mother. After Oprah featured a story on Indian commercial surrogacy mothers, India has seen a surfeit of foreign couples looking for a — comparatively inexpensive — surrogate mother. Surrogate mothers must be between 20 to 45 years old, married, and have at least one child. They stay in carefully regulated spaces and are provided with vitamins, extravagant meals, and access to a television. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Pant is interested in privileging the narratives of the Indian surrogates themselves. What motivates them to participate in this emotional journal of ten months?

Inspired by transnational feminist analyses, Pant concedes that one’s privilege in the world system is always linked to another women’s oppression and exploitation. However Pant wants to push and tease out this analysis — asking us to re-imagine the agency and affectual relations that mediate these surrogacy interactions. Pant shows how emotions actually do things in these interactions. Emotions circulate and create relationships of attachment between child, surrogate mother, commercial parents. This affect is not permanent, rather it is ephemeral. Pant traces these circulations of economies of hope and love and shows how Indian surrogate mothers position themselves as a 'giver' — in the most non-capitalist sense of the idea — to construct and experience surrogacy as a legitimate choice.

Pant’s project raised serious issues of methodology for the participants. One participant felt that in the turn to affect theory, we neglect the very real experiences of pain and exploitation that are apparent in these interactions. All in attendance re-iterated the importance of understanding how women perceive their own bodies, versus the various theories that govern how they should see their bodies. Others discussed how this project presents a useful opportunity to tease out the ‘body’ from the ‘bodily.’

Indeed, it seems as if Pant has stumbled on a very compelling research project — one which raises serious questions of (post)colonialism, citizenship, tourism, ethics, among others. I’m particularly intrigued by exploring the possibility of the Indian surrogate mother as a Global South queer figure. Much theorising in Western queer scholarship (especially explorations in queer temporality) has positioned ‘queerness’ as opposed to ‘reproduction.’ The surrogate mother calls this framing into question – how is reproduction mapped differently on bodies of women of color in the Global South? How can we imagine queer ways of actually participating in reproductive economies?

Gita Chadha from Mumbai ended the day by sharing her perspective on Thinkathon themes from her background in Feminist Science Studies. Chadha begin with raising her concerns with the metaphor of surrogacy — what does it mean to use a metaphor that is derived from such a potentially traumatic and embodied situation of women? Chadha outlines a brief history of the development of South Asian Feminist Science studies and then follows this summary by asserting that there are three major relational cognitive-affects of modernity that we continue to produce in postmodern times: the self system, the truth system, and the community system. For Chadha, the wholeness of these categories is contested in contemporary times with the digital turn: the self becomes hyphenated, the truth becomes destabilised, and the community fractured.

Coming at this digital moment from a feminist background Chadha reminds us how feminist positions on technology have shifted from viewing women as victims of technology to women as active claimants of technology. She then highlighted the particular challenge of Indian feminists who discuss issues of technology in negotiating their relationship to Western scholarship, including Dona Harraway. After reviewing this genealogy, Chadha argues that currently the real and the virtual in a sense serve as surrogates for each other and deliver a sense of self, a notion of truth(iness), and experience of community.

Chadha concludes by applying this feminist epistemology to the Pink Chaddi Campaign — a recent expression of ‘collective rage’ put forth by Indian women tired of the State’s regulation of the public space. Chadha draws our attention to the way that digital media was central to this campaign. While some critical feminist voices felt that the use of the chaddi in this campaign undermined the seriousness of the issue of violence against women, Chadha asks us to see how truth and community shift and are mediated by technology in these campaign spaces.

Chadha’s framework allowed participants to talk about how what gets lost in science is the technology of science itself – how science valorises one scholar at the cost of collaborative processes. Once again questions of the efficacy of the visual domain arise. What does it mean to prioritise the visual within the affective turn? What also emerges is the ability to assert a truth with limited knowledge.

I find Chadha’s commitment toward feminism as a particular epistemological/theoretical perspective (versus simply a mode of activism) very important. Discussions in media/digital theory often assume a de-gendered subject and Chadha does good work in bringing in the critical question of gender difference within our discussion of theory and networks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-technology-and-feminism