Centre for Internet and Society

Tech Anthropology Today: Collaborate, Rather than Fetishize from Afar

Geert Lovink and Ramesh Srinivasan — 2017-05-16T14:51:09Z

"That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two." In this interview, Geert Lovink discusses with Ramesh Srinivasan: “how can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

Cross-posted from nettime.org.

“How can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

In Whose Global Village? (NYUPress, 2017) UCLA scholar Ramesh Srinivasan travels the globe in order to find out much techno-autonomy there’s still left. Now that more than half of the world has moved to urban centres, the rural population is literary a minority and is kindly asked to adjust accordingly. This makes Srinivasan’s work even more urgent when he asks “what the internet, mobile phone or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspectives of diverse cultures.”

The communities Ramesh Srinivasan visits are on the defensive, in a process of fragmentation. “There is a disconnection not just from one another,” he writes, “but also from the common threads of their history and culture. The tribes and villages experience “placelessness, fragmentation of identity, and dissolution of social bonds.” Throughout the study, which took place between 2004-2013, Srinivasan reports from the rising gap between the proposed technologies (such as videos, websites, databases) and the ‘techno-solutionism’ (as described by Morozov) that he wants to prevent. Ramesh is so honest to present this dilemma as an inner struggle of today’s anthropologist with a technology background. Computers and smart phones are an integral part of the everyday life—no matter where we go—and can no longer be presented as liberating tools. This put the ‘ICT for development’ researcher is an awkward position. Post-colonial theories have widely been read and their influence (from Fanon, Said to Spivak) is having an inevitable impact. This in turn leads to a new attitude that I would describe as ‘radical modesty’ (if not ‘vital pessimism’).

While studying the impact of the Tribal Peace system that he and others installed to connect the different Navajo tribes in San Diego County, Srinivasan realises that he has to work with rather than ignore the networks that exist. “It was neither the technology nor institutions that connected the people I had met. Instead, the very few threads of kinship I noted were related to revered individuals, regarded by most with collective respect and as a source of inspiration.” It is with and through the elders that he starts to draw up information architectures (or ‘ontologies’), listing topics, themes, and values across the native reservations. How can ‘lateral networks’ be supported in a a process of what James Carey calls ‘ritual communication’?

Needless to say this approach takes us light years away from Facebook and other social media. This is only in part a question of translating interfaces to local indigenous languages. The proposed systems require the design of its own visual metaphors, reminding us of 1990s multi-media navigation screens, meant to represent digital storytelling. This is dealt with in closed, or semi-open networks, paying respect to the different experiences of time and space. These ideas are put to the test in the last part of the book that describes the encounter with the Zuni tribe (Arizona/New Mexico), where Ramesh Srinivasan worked together with Robin Boast. It is amongst the Zuni peoples that the researchers encounter the distrust against anthropologists. “Our Zuni friends voiced feelings of misrepresentation and anger at their objectification. They explained that social scientists would visit their community, exoticize their traditions and customs, and extract what they could to benefit their own agendas rather than those of the community.”

The gained detachment aims to put the researcher “at the service of our friends and partners.” Important is no longer the one-way transfer of knowledge but the art of listening. Towards the end of his study Ramesh asks: “What would it mean to step away from top-down understandings of the internet and instead ‘splinter’ the way we think about technologies and the communities they may support?” As an activist in Egypt explained: “We do not need another NGO or a new dialogue.com to solve our problems—we just need you to listen, support our voices, an pay attention to what we we do.” Whose Global Village? adequately describes the moral and methodological crisis in the ‘ICT for Development’ field. The wide condemnation of Facebook’s neo-colonial internet.org balloon campaign to bring access (to Facebook) to hundreds of millions of rural poor in India clearly marks a paradigm shift. Access is no longer a benevolent project. It’s clear that ICT for Development as such does not contribute to a redistribution of wealth and makes global inequality only worse. So much for internet charity.

Ramesh admits: “Trained as a designer and engineer, I recognize my innate tendency to valorize my power to come up with a set of solutions for any challenge at hand. Yet every project I have described illustrates the valuable insights gained when I put aside my own agenda and bias as much as possible to open myself to experiences that could not have been predicted from afar.” This modesty sounds like a new starting point. But is it also resulting into new concepts and narratives? This might be too much to ask of a single publication (in fact, the first book publication of this author). The ‘tactical distance’, created out of respect for the communities-in-defence, results into rather sparse information about the places we visit. There are no interview fragments included in the book, and the few local leaders that we encounter do not speak to the reader in a direct manner. The chosen way to report creates a vague cloud of secrecy around the research itself. What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Were more detailed research results published elsewhere or only accessible for donors (a common practice in NGO land)? What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Is it too risky to give them a voice? Might their opinions and desires be too ordinary, too radical, or simply not what we want to hear? What if they do not fit our Western expectations? The Others are humans, after all, and, like us, tend not to live up to expectations. These, and more, are some of the questions we encounter once we give up on the development rhetoric.

Geert Lovink: You’ve been in a lucky, privileged position to travel so often and witness events and encounter communities in diverse places such as Cairo during the 2011 uprising, with the Zapatistas Chiapas, doing research in the land of your ancestors, South India and on reservations in the South-West of the United States. The offline encounter in-real-life seems to be constitutional for your theory. In the past scholars travelled through the library and many these days do not leave their screens while processing their ‘big data’. Digital ethnography, on the other hand, seems to require direct exchanges with the Other. This assumption pops in all chapters. Is travelling the new luxury? Or should we say that it is rather dedicated time? Once you arrive elsewhere there is suddenly another time regime.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Indeed, I think all of us as researchers and teachers are nothing if not 'lucky' or 'privileged'. And you're certainly on point to recognize that the root of my scholarship and activism locates technologies within an assemblage of other factors - peoples, places, infrastructures, and environments. Yet it is essential that I do not collaborate with (rather than ‘study of’) any community unless I am invited to do so and where our efforts are focused on initiatives that live and are owned by that group itself.

That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two. If we want to be of service and understand the complex relationships between technologies, politics, and cultures—as I attempt to do via the multiple case studies discussed in the book, we need to put our bodies and hearts in places rather than our distant gaze. It's critical for me to not step foot anywhere where I am not invited first, and to critically think about my role and power as I enter different environments. Indeed, the book is full of ethnographies of attempting to listen more than make, and how I eschew the 'study of' any community and instead write about what we create and work on together. My goal is to collaborate rather than study, rather than fetishize from afar.

GL: Whose Global Village? has an unusual time span of 10-14 years. First research goes back to 2003-2004. Some case study closed in 2005 while most literature dates from 2012-2013. In between, the 2008 global financial crisis occurred, the smart phone was launched and apps became mainstream. How did you deal with these constant changes? Are you proposing a ‘longue durée’ in media studies and internet criticism’? What are the benefits of this approach? How do you see ‘grassroots storytelling’ dealing with the relentless changes of platforms, interfaces and protocols? Do remote communities have a different approach to the latest fashion and the famous ‘fear of missing out’?

RS: There are some dynamics that don't change no matter what app, gadget or platform has captured the popular imagination. That is—the realities of power over how technologies are designed, owned, and politically or economically appropriated. The book starts with the simple but surprisingly ignored sociotechnical truism - People and societies shape and are shaped by technologies. Yet such a small percentage of Internet users have any power over the design process let alone any sovereignty over what occurs with their data and identities as they are refracted onto digital networks. Those issues are timeless and all the more urgent today. I focus on the political and cultural flashpoints where by users and communities can reign in their blind trust of new digital platforms and instead take power over these in relation to their local concerns and agendas.

GL: As a media activist you have a background in engineering. However, at UCLA you work inside library science (called ‘information studies’). However, you seem to relate most to the role of anthropologist, in that you deeply desire not make past mistakes in encounters with ‘the Other’. In this context you work with Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the contact zones and apply this to the design of ‘multiple ontologies’. I never hear IT engineers talking about contact zones. How do you want to carry your insights into the tech world? After all, you live in California. Who else is going to do this? What could be a good strategy? How do you look at the Bay Area and the global geek class they still dominate in terms of its global imaginary?

RS: I see myself as a scholar who can contribute to fields that tend to remain mostly distinct in the academy—design, engineering, cultural studies, media studies are but a few. If I was ever an IT ‘geek’ that was decades ago!

To engage in the charge of the book, of locating our understandings of digital networks and systems in relation to diverse cultures and users worldwide, all of these fields are useful to invoke and bring into dialogue with one another. I'm fortunate to be in a department that supports this interdisciplinarity and indeed as you stated, coming from California and trained in engineering here, I believe it is all the more important to question the black boxes not just of Silicon Valley hardware and software platform design but to push these incredibly powerful technologies to open up to an engaged, conversational social contract with diverse publics.

GL: Over the past 10-15 years we’ve seen the closing down of the possibility space of the Web and the rise of the ‘easy to use’ template culture of social media. The technologies that you’ve proposed and built seem to move away from the consumer culture. In South India you’re spread video cameras, elsewhere you’ve developed a dedicated Tribal Peace system interface (as part of a stand-alone website) while for the Zuni communities you’ve utilized the FileMaker Pro Advanced database software. Not Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube (and no wikis either). Can you elaborate on this?

RS: It's important to not assume that naively putting content online is somehow empowering. Indeed, that which we ‘share’ (eg; sharing economy) asymmetrically builds power and value for the platform holder and all those that can monetize it. As a result, we increasingly know that corporate proprietary platforms such as Facebook or Google are hardly designed to directly support a user's sovereignty or agency. The interest, across each of the book's chapters, is to instead think about how the communities with which I collaborate can have their interests served via technologies either that we design together or appropriate/subvert in various ways. Far too often we see examples where such 'participation' actually does little to shape any cultural or political cause from the grassroots. So we think agnostically and critically about the systems, networks and infrastructures we use in relation to our collaborations.

GL: Can you tell us what you’ve been doing over the past few years? Did you continue to work in the same direction? The book indicates that your collaboration with Robin Boast and the work with the Zuni Native American Reservation seems to continue.

RS: My interests lie in that important space between understanding how technologies may aid and support grassroots political movements and diverse user communities. The Zuni collaboration, described in chapter 4, is interested in that cause in relation to the political and cultural sovereignty of a tribe that was not just historically colonized but still faces the objectification and misrepresentation of new forms of coloniality online.

The cases in the book look at both political movements as well as diverse cultures and communities. Currently, I am collaborating with activists and indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec communities in the Oaxaca Mexico region, one of the most biodiverse and culturally/linguistically diverse parts of our world. In this work, I am writing about the Rhizomatica project (invoking Deleuze/Guarttari's rhizome) where these communities are designing their own collectively-owned cell phone networks in cloud forests all around the region. This has massive political and economic effects. What we see here is a rhizome in the making, a set of networks, systems, and infrastructures shaped and produced from the grassroots, by communities and for communities, and not for the major corporations of our world that tend to on the surface exploit and monitor the activities of these people. More on this amazing project, including some videos at www.rhizomatica.org . I believe that as we start to think about this new effort, that Lisa Parks and I describe as 'network sovereignty', we can start to embark on a path I describe in detail in chapter 5 of the book, of getting back the social contract and communitarian potential of technology to serve democratic agendas located in people's politics and cultures.

I am hopeful we can start that conversation now. I attempt to continue it via my soon to be released second book, After the Internet (with Adam Fish, Polity, end 2017) which looks at examples ranging from Iceland’s Pirate Party, hacktivism, the Silk Road, the Arab Spring, and other activist movements that re-imagine new technologies in relation to grassroots power and voice.

Reference

Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World, New York University Press, New York, 2017.

Profiles

Ramesh Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in Design|Media Arts. Srinivasan, who holds M.S and Doctoral degrees, from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard's Design School respectively, has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities. He is interested in how an information system can function as a cultural artifact, as a repository of knowledge that is commensurable with the ontologies of a community. As a complement, he is also interested in how an information system can engage and re-question the notion of diaspora and how ethnicity and culture function across distance. This research allows one to uncover mechanisms by which indigenously-articulated forms of development can begin to occur, as relating to his current work in pastoral and tribal communities in Southern India. His research therefore involves engaging communities to serve as the designers, authors, and librarians/archivists of their own information systems. His research has spanned such bounds as Native Americans, Somali refugees, Indian villages, Aboriginal Australia, and Maori New Zealand.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2013 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (new media), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar

Japleen Pasricha - Gendered Spaces in Digital Rights (Delhi, June 02, 5 pm)

sumandro — 2017-05-31T03:49:26Z

It is our priviledge to annouce that Japleen Pasricha will be the speaker for the June #FirstFridayAtCIS event. Japleen smashes the patriarchy for a living, and is Founder & Editor-in-chief of Feminism in India. The talk will focus on her experience of working on gender and digital rights in India, the ways in which "gender" functions as a critical lens in digital rights discourse and practice in India (or not), and the gendered nature of digital rights spaces in India. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Japleen Pasricha

Founder & Editor-in-chief, Feminism in India

Japleen smashes the patriarchy for a living. Founder & Editor-in-chief of Feminism in India, she is a feminist activist based in New Delhi, India. She is a writer, educator, campaigner and researcher. She has vast experience in digital media and online publishing. Her interest lies in women’s studies, global feminism, gender, sexuality, VAW, SRHR, feminist praxis and internet as a space. Currently she is working on online violence against women and media representation of gender and gender-based violence. She’d like to use skills to intersect gender and sexuality with digital & social media and develop safe online spaces for women and marginalized communities.

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/firstfridayatcis-japleen-pasricha-gendered-spaces-in-digital-rights-delhi-june-02

Consultative Meeting for a Digital Archive Lab

praskrishna — 2017-06-08T13:07:57Z

A meeting for a digital archive lab was held at the Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University in New Delhi on May 20, 2017. P.P. Sneha participated in the meeting.

The proposed Digital Archive initiative at AUD will work as an interdisciplinary archive, working across schools and divisions. There is a need to create a specialized set of skills within AUD for archiving, cataloguing, digitization and conservation. This consultative meeting is envisaged for identifying skills and staff needs, timeframe, direction, outreach and a support network. Outcomes of this consultative meeting will help to finalise the resources required for setting up an online archival platform on the AUD server. Click to see the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/consultative-meeting-for-a-digital-archive-lab

Sameet Panda - Data Systems in Welfare: Impact of the JAM Trinity on Pension & PDS in Odisha during COVID-19

Sameet Panda — 2021-02-26T07:36:10Z

This study by Sameet Panda tries to understand the integration of data and digital systems in welfare delivery in Odisha. It brings out the impact of welfare digitalisation on beneficiaries through primary data collected in November 2020. The researcher is thankful to community members for sharing their lived experiences during course of the study. Fieldwork was undertaken in three panchayats of Bhawanipatna block of Kalahandi district, Odisha. Additional research support was provided by Apurv Vivek and Vipul Kumar, and editorial contributions were made by Ambika Tandon (Senior Researcher, CIS). This study was conducted as part of a project on gender, welfare, and surveillance, supported by Privacy International, UK.

Report: Download (PDF)

Extract from the Report

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated flaws in social institutions as never before - threatening food security, public health systems, and livelihood in the informal sector. At the time of writing this report, India is the second-worst affected country in the world with over 9.8 million confirmed cases and more than 1.4 hundred thousand deaths. Unemployment has been increasing at an alarming rate, from 6.67 to 7 percent in October...

Following the national lockdown, many families belonging to low-income groups and daily wage earners found themselves stranded without money, food or credit from their employers. During the strict lockdown of the economy between March to June 2020 lakhs of migrants faced starvation in cities and walked back home. The government responded with some urgent measures, although inadequate. To cope with the food and economic crisis the Government of India and state governments initiated several social protection schemes. In Odisha, The central government provided two kinds of support, cash transfer through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) MGNREGS, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUJ), advance release of pension in cash to existing beneficiaries and cash support of Rs. 1000. The Odisha government provided cash support of Rs. 1000 to ration card holding families. Beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System also received free-of-cost food grain under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana...

Over the last couple of years, along with making the Aadhaar mandatory, the government has also been working towards linking mobile numbers and bank accounts of beneficiaries. An increasing number of schemes are shifting to Direct Benefit Transfer from in-kind or cash benefits - 324 schemes under 51 ministries of the Government of India. Such schemes are relying on the linkage of Jan Dhan accounts, the Aadhaar, and mobile numbers (the “JAM trinity”) to facilitate access to Direct Benefit Transfers. The Economic Survey 2015-16 has pointed out that without improving mobile penetration and rural banking infrastructure making the JAM trinity mandatory would continue to lead to exclusions. The issues with each of the components of the JAM trinity worsened during the COVID-19 crisis with restrictions on physical movement, difficulties in topping up mobile phone accounts, and enrolling for the Aadhaar or addressing other technical issues.

This report assesses the role of the data system in welfare delivery. It focuses on the impact of the three components of the JAM trinity - Jan Dhan Account, mobile numbers and the Aadhaar on Direct Benefit Transfer, social security pension and the Public Distribution System. The objective of this study is to understand the challenges faced by beneficiaries in accessing PDS and pension as a result of digitisation processes. This includes failures in Direct Benefit Transfers and exclusions from databases, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on gender as a key component shaping the impact of digitisation on beneficiaries. The sample includes both men and women beneficiaries in order to identify such gendered differences. It will also identify infrastructural constraints in Odisha that impact the implementation of digital systems in welfare. Also, it will analyse policy frameworks at central and state levels, to compare their discourse with the impact on the ground.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sameet-panda-jam-trinity-pension-pds-odisha-covid-19

May 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-08-13T11:51:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the fifth issue of its newsletter for 2013. We bring you an overview of our research, report of events held by us and announcement of upcoming ones, events we participated in, and recent media coverage.

Celebrating 5 Years of CIS
CIS is now 5 years old and we just celebrated this by holding an open exhibition in our offices in Bangalore and Delhi from May 20 to 23, showcasing our work and accomplishments over the period. We had about 170 visitors from the general public coming in to our office. Renowned artists like Tara Kelton, Kiran Subbaiah, Navin Thomas, Abhishek Hazra and Sharath Chandra Ram exhibited their work. The four day event attracted press coverage: Bangalore Mirror (May 18, 2013), DNA (May 19, 2013), Hindu (May 22, 2013), Prajavani (May 23, 2013), Udayavani (May 25, 2013) and Bangalore Mirror (May 31, 2013). Download all posters that were part of the exhibition here.

Google Policy Fellowship
CIS is inviting applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India fellow who will be selected by July 1, 2013. The Fellowship focus areas include Access to Knowledge, Openness in India, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, and Telecom. Send in your applications for the position by June 15, 2013.

Jobs
CIS invites applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and other similar organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Sikkim and Odisha:

The Sikkim Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, May 30, 2013).
The Odisha Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, May 31, 2013).

Note: All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Banking Accessibility

Survey on Banking Accessibility (by Vrinda Maheshwari, May 30, 2013). G3ict is a survey on accessibility of financial services in banks for persons with disabilities around the world. The survey is available here.

Event Organised

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 9, 2013, TERI, Southern Regional Centre, Domlur, Bangalore).

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia)
Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of three members based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Subhashish Panigrahi and one team member Nitika Tandon who is working from Delhi office. Noopur Raval, Programme Officer has left the organisation. April 24, 2013 was her last working day.

Announcements

Access to Knowledge Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014): CIS has announced its detailed plan detailed plan with projection of outcomes and expected impact of the A2K programme activities. The document has been made in consultation with various stakeholders and keeping in mind the objectives, opportunities and challenges faced by each of the Indian language Wikimedia projects. Feel free to share any feedback.
WMF-A2K Revised Budget (draft) and Utilization (Sept 2012 - Feb 2013): In our effort to increase transparency with the working of CIS-A2K programme, we are sharing with you the A2K Programme Budget along with the Utilization for the period Sept. 2012 to February 2013. The proposed revisions to the budget along with some notes are here.
WMF-A2K Grant Budget and Utilization (Sept 2012 – February 2013): CIS has given an open disclosure of the Access to Knowledge budget to Wikimedia India and the global community.
CIS Signs MOU with TISS, Mumbai: has signed a MoU with TISS as part of which we will collaboratively work towards building Digital Knowledge Partnerships with select higher education institutions.
India Access to Knowledge IRC can be accessed here: May 13, 2013 (All Language Discussion) and May 26, 2013 (Odia Language Discussion).

Blog Entries

Odia Wikipedia: Needs Assessment (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 11, 2013).
Access to Knowledge Work Plan: Synopsis of Feedback by Wikipedians (by Nitika Tandon, May 20, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants (by Subhashish Panigrahi, May 30, 2013).

Event Organised

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (April 29, 2013, Govinda Pai Research Centre, MGM College Udupi). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia

Event Participated In

Kannada IRC Meet (organised by the Wikipedia Community, May 7, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in this.

Upcoming Event

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education (co-organised in collaboration with HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS (IISc), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, July 13, 2013).

Press Coverage

CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Prajavani (Prajavani, May 23, 2013). Prajavani published a report of Dr. U.B. Pavanja’s talk “From Palm Leaf to Tablet – Journey of Kannada”.
CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Udayavani (Udayavani, May 25, 2013). Udayavani published a report of the evening programme hosted as part of the Centre for Internet and Society's 5 year celebrations in its Bangalore edition.

Access to Knowledge (Previously IP Reforms)
Blog Entry

On the Unfortunate Rise of the Indian SLAPP Suit (by Ujwala Uppaluri, May 27, 2013).

Openness
Research Papers

Use of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers (by Subbiah Gunasekharan and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, May 27, 2013).
Use made of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers to Publish their Findings (by Madhan Muthu and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, May 28, 2013).

Comments

Draft ICAR Open Access Policy (by Nehaa Chaudhari, May 28, 2013). The comments were submitted to the Indian Council for Agricultural Research.

Event Hosted

RHoK Global Event (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, June 1 – 2, 2013). A report of the event would be published soon.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. We began two new projects earlier this year. The first one, with Privacy International, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression and the second one with Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto on mapping of cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia:

Cyber Stewards Project
Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project.

Video Interview

An Interview with Christopher Soghoian (May 28, 2013).

Upcoming Event

The Geopolitics of Information Controls: A Presentation by Masashi Crete-Nishihata (TERI, Bangalore, June 19, 2013).

Privacy

Comparative Analysis of DNA Profiling Legislations from Across the World (by Srinivas Atreya, May 23, 2013).

Events Co-organised

3rd Privacy Round Table meeting (co-organised with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Data Security Council of India, Chennai, May 18, 2013). Maria Xynou participated in this event and gives an overview of the discussions and recommendations.
Consilience – 2013 (co-organised with the Law and Technology Committee of National Law School of India University, Bangalore, May 25, 2013).

Events Participated In

ICT, Law and Innovation: Recent Developments, Challenges and Lessons Learned (organised by Bilgi University, Istanbul, May 2013). Chinmayi Arun was a speaker on the Internet Governance panel at Towards a Global Network of Internet and Society Centres.
India’s Politics of Free Expression (co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Centre, Free Speech Debate, the Oxford India Society and Ideas for India Oxbridge Exchange, May 31, 2013 at Nissan Lecture Theatre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford). Chinmayi Arun was a speaker at the Bapsybanoo Marchioness of Winchester Lectures on 'India's Politics of Free Expression'.

Upcoming Event

Privacy Round Table, Mumbai (Mayfair Banquets, Mumbai, June 15, 2013).

Blog Entry

The Surveillance Industry in India: At Least 76 Companies Aiding Our Watchers! (by Maria Xynou, May 2, 2013).

Media Coverage

Sex on-the-go (by Anand Holla, Mumbai Mirror, May 4, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
CIS anniversary (Hindu Business Line, May 5, 2013).
Central Monitoring System to make government privy to phone calls, text messages and social media conversations (by Indu Nandakumar, May 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Messaging apps find another foe in India’s market regulator (Quartz, May 8, 2013). Elonnai Hickok is quoted.
India's Rs 400-crore Central Monitoring System to snoop on all communication (Tech 2, May 9, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Is India's government becoming Big Brother? (by Talia Ralph and Jason Overdorf, May 9, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Worldwide Playground (Telegraph, May 15, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
NGO invites public to peruse its accounts (by Vandana Kamath, May 18, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Online privacy should not come at the cost of security: Sunil Abraham (by Anirban Sen, May 19, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
A lifetime of five years on the internet (by Subir Ghosh, DNA, May 19, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
CIS highlights changes ushered in by the Internet (Hindu, May 22, 2013).
Burma to host first Internet freedom forum (by Chan Myae Khine, Asian Correspondent, May 22, 2013).
INET Bangkok to Explore Internet’s Impact on Thailand’s Economy and Society (BusinessWire, May 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is participating in this conference.
Shooting cyber cafes before they die (by Bangalore Mirror, May 31, 2013). CIS’s film on Cyber Cafes is mentioned in this article.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: www.internet-institute.in.

Ongoing Event

Institute on Internet and Society (supported by Ford Foundation, Golden Palms Resort, Bangalore, June 8 – 14, 2013). The agenda for the event has been finalised.

The following unit was published recently:

Network Connections and Modes of Access (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, May 30, 2013).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility of telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

Configuring a 'Non-Toothless' Regulator (TRAI) (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, May 9, 2013 and Organizing India Blogspot, May 10, 2013).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.
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Visit us at http://cis-india.org

Support Us
Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2013-bulletin

Strategies to Organise Platform Workers

furtado — 2023-10-20T17:04:03Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/strategies-to-organise-platform-workers

Strategies to Organise Platform Workers

furtado — 2023-10-22T09:54:52Z

In 2022, the Centre for Internet and Society hosted a panel with Akkanut Wantanasombut, Ayoade Ibrahim, Rikta Krishnaswamy, and Sofía Scasserra at RightsCon, an annual summit on technology and human rights.

Click to download the full report

Event Report

This event report is based on proceedings from a panel hosted at the 2022 edition of RightsCon. Hosted by the labour and digitalisation team at CIS, the panel brought together seasoned labour organisers, activists, and researchers working across Thailand, Nigeria, India, and Argentina. The panellists represented a diverse group of worker organisations, including transnational federations, national unions, and informally organised movements.

Their experiences of organising in research and practice infused our discussion with insight into collective action struggles across varied sectors and platform economies in the global south. Collective resistance among platform workers has witnessed a sustained rise in these economies over the past three years, with demands for transparency and accountability from platforms, and for a guarantee of rights and protections from governments.

Through this panel, we sought to answer:

How have workers’ organisations overcome challenges in sustained collective action?
What have been unique aspects of organising in the global south?
Which strategies have been gaining traction for organising workers and mobilising other stakeholders?

Placing workers’ participation front and centre, the panellists incorporated common threads around campaigning, education, and mobilisation for increasing worker participation, as well as bargaining with the government for legal and social protections. The panellists highlighted that it’s the resilience and resistance led by workers that drive the way for sustained organising. This panel hoped to spotlight steps taken in that direction, where organising efforts strive to form, sustain, and champion worker-led movements.

Contributors

Panellists:
Akkanut Wantanasombut
Ayoade Ibrahim
Rikta Krishnawamy
Sofía Scasserra

Worker organisations in focus:
Tamsang-Tamsong
National Union of Professional App-based Transport Workers
International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers
All India Gig Workers’ Union
Federación Argentina de Empleados de Comercio y Servicios
Asociación de Personal de Plataformas

Conceptualisation and planning: Ambika Tandon, Chiara Furtado, Aayush Rathi, and Abhishek Sekharan

Author: Chiara Furtado
Reviewers: Ambika Tandon and Nishkala Sekhar
Designer: Annushka Jaliwala

This event report is part of research supported by the Internet Society Foundation under the ‘Labour futures’ grant.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/strategies-to-organise-platform-workers-rightscon

Labouring (on) the app: agency and organisation of work in the platform economy

Ambika Tandon and Abhishek Sekharan — 2023-07-04T06:28:57Z

Ambika Tandon and Abhishek Sekharan published an academic paper highlighting the importance of women’s networks of information sharing and care in navigating opaque platform design. The paper is part of an issue of Gender and Development on ‘Women, Work and the Digital Economy’. Gender and Development is one of the few academic journals that priorities practitioners' experiences over theoretical contributions.

Abstract

Women have a long history of organising in the informal economy, despite facing several challenges around geographical dispersion, time poverty, and lack of recognition. These challenges persist in the platform economy which pose similar concerns around precarious irregular work. Recent literature has documented the adoption of traditional and novel strategies to resist platform exploitation, through algorithmic manipulation, public demonstrations and logout strikes, and legal action. This paper explores the gendered realities that shape workers’ organising strategies and demands.

Using protests organised by women beauty workers in India as a case study, we discuss the factors underlying and leading to collectivisation. We find that women’s networks of information sharing and care are instrumental in navigating opaque and inefficient algorithms that fail to determine fully the organisation of work. We further examine the role of informal networks of information sharing in building workers’ identities which are instrumental in collective organising. Finally, we discuss the strategies and forms of organising adopted by women workers in this sector, which resonate with the rich history of organising in the informal economy.

Click to access Ambika Tandon & Abhishek Sekharan 2022 Labouring (on) the app: agency and organisation of work in the platform economy, Gender & Development, 30:3, 687-706, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2022.2130515. Full article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/taylor-and-francis-gender-and-development-volume-30-2022-ambika-tandon-and-abhishek-sekharan-labouring-on-the-app-agency-and-organisation-of-work-in-the-platform-economy

Online cab booking | Why finding a cab is a nightmare now

Haripriya Suresh — 2023-07-04T06:34:22Z

Many drivers said the rise in commissions payable to ride-hailing platforms and higher fuel costs, among other expenses, have made it impossible for them to survive in the once-lucrative profession.

Aayush Rathi was quoted in this news article on how corporate policy is leading to difficulties in hailing cabs online:

“Grassroots organisers have indicated a sizeable reduction in fleet sizes of Ola and Uber compared to pre-March 2020. There are numerous possible reasons for this,” said Aayush Rathi, a senior researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society. “One is the cost-of-living crisis in urban India that has solidified the reverse migration of the early Covid days. Then, the so-called moratoriums on loan repayments ended up increasing the total liability on drivers. Many drivers may have sold their cars or defaulted on loan payments.”

Click to read the full article published by Money Control on July 14, 2022

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/money-control-july-14-2022-why-finding-a-cab-is-now-a-nightmare

PDC 2022

Admin — 2023-07-04T07:05:09Z

Divyansha Sehgal and Yatharth presented their work - Designing Domestic Work Platforms - on critical design assessments of gig work platforms at the Participatory Design Conference.

For more detail on the conference held from 19 August to 1 September 2022, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/pdc-2022

Mapping Digital Humanities in India - Concluding Thoughts

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:36:10Z

This final blog post on the mapping exercise undertaken by CIS-RAW summarises some of the key concepts and terms that have emerged as significant in the discourse around Digital Humanities in India.

The present exercise in mapping Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) in India has brought to the fore several learnings, and challenges in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. Even as we wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the 'field' as such is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world and the term itself is yet to find a resonance in many quarters, other than a few institutions and a number of individuals. However, what it does do for us immediately, is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the 'digital', and what may be the new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large.

We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found name of sorts, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The ubiquitous history of the term in humanities computing in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or even cyber/digital culture studies, these 'epistemic shifts' have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the 'field' as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, areas of focus or object of enquiry, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains.

The question of methodology then comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. At present it looks like a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as now longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH. The practice itself is still evolving, and while DH in the Anglo-American context can trace a history in humanities computing, with now an active interest in other spaces where the digital is an inherent part of the discourse, in India there has been little work in mainstream academic spaces such as universities or research centres, and some interest from the information and technology sector. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. This mapping exercise largely relied on interviews as part of its methodology, without any engagement with the actual practice, mainly because of a lack of consensus on what constitutes DH practice. However, through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.

The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as 'text-based disciplines'. What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which the discourse around DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines.

While in the Anglo-American context the predominant narrative or raison d'etre of DH seems to be the so-called 'crisis' in the humanities, it may after all be just one of reasons, and not a primary cause, at least in the Indian context. Moreover, in a paradoxical sense the emergence of DH has been seen as endangering the future of the traditional humanities, in terms of a move away from certain conventional methods and forms of research and pedagogy. While this may be relevant to our understanding of the emergence of DH, understanding the emergence of the field as resolving a crisis also renders the discourse into a uni-dimensional, problem-solving approach, thus making invisible other factors, such as the technologised history of the humanities or several other factors that have contributed to these changes. The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of the internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what where earlier considered unifying notions for the university, namely that of reason and culture, which have now moved towards an idea of excellence based on a certain techno-bureaucratic impulse, as noted by Bill Readings in his work on the rise of the post-modern university[1].

If one may try to locate within this the debates around DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear. One could explore the notion of the digital humanist, or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity or the distance between the practice and the subject, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, with English Department at the University of Jadavpur says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser - DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference.

While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading - humanities scholars do not call themselves 'humanists'. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. As Patrik Svensson (2010) points out "The individual term digital humanist may be problematic because it may seem both too general in not relating to a specific discipline or competence (thus deemphasizing the discipline-specific or professional) and too specific in emphasizing the "digital" part of the scholarly identity (if you are scholar) or giving too much prominence to the humanities part of your professional identity (if you are a digital humanities programmer or a system architect). The more general and non-personal term digital humanities is more inclusive, but somewhat limited because of its lack of specificity and relatively weak disciplinary anchorage. For both variants, there is also a question of whether "the digital" needs to be specified at all, and it is not uncommon [9] to encounter the argument that technology and the digital are part or will be part of any academic area, and hence the denotation "digital" is not required" [2]. Svensson further points out that since the term, like digital humanities, has proliferated so much in academic spaces, through publishing and funding initiatives that it has become a term of self-identification, but it could be a reference to the digital as 'tool' rather that the object of study itself. However, he also speculates that given digital humanists work across several disciplines, their understanding of humanities as a construct is stronger as the identity is linked to it at large. [3]

This debate is importantly, symptomatic of a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, because of what seems to be a move away from the university to alternate spaces and modes of knowledge production. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1996) suggests, such a conflict of authority has already been documented earlier, in terms of the displacement of theology first and then Newtonian mechanics as dominant sources of knowledge, and the now in the manner in which the separation of disciplines is being challenged. The potential of technology in general and the internet in particular in democratising knowledge has been explored in several cases, with many such online spaces now becoming a suitable 'alternate' to the university mode of teaching and learning. What they have also given rise to are questions about the authenticity of knowledge produced and disseminated and who are the stakeholders in the process. The debates over MOOC's and the Wikipedia, and at some level the criticism that DH and certain methods like distant reading have attracted from traditional humanities scholars are a case in point. However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.

References

Patrik, Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly,4:1 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html 2010.
Readings, Bill, The University in Ruins Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.
Wallerstein, Immanuel, "The Structures of Knowledge, or How Many Ways May We Know?" Presentation at "Which Sciences for Tomorrow? Dialogue on the Gulbenkian Report: Open the Social Sciences," Stanford University, June 2-3, 1996 http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm

The author would like to thank the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore for support towards the fieldwork conducted as part of this mapping exercise, and colleagues at CIS and CSCS for their feedback and inputs.

Concepts/Glossary of terms

Ontology - A lot of the work being done to define DH is in fact to understand its ontological status, the nature of its being and existence. As pointed out in the part of this section, the difficulty in arriving at a consensus on a definition is largely due to a lack of clarity over the ontological basis of such a field, rather than its epistemological stake, which one may already be able to discern in a few years. There is a slippage due to a lack of connection between the history of the term and its practice, particularly in India, where DH is still a 'found term' of sorts. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
Humanities - The predominant discourse in the Anglo-American context on DH seems to have set it up in a conflict with or as a threat to the traditional humanities disciplines, the causal link here being the 'crisis' of the disciplines. While there is such a narrative of crisis in the Indian con text as well, anything 'digital' is understood in terms of a problem-solving approach, and at another level seeks to further existing concerns of the humanities themselves, such as around the text. The important shift that DH may open up here is in terms of thinking about the inherited separation of technology and the humanities, and if it indeed possible now to think of a technologised history of the humanities.See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
Digital - the debate around and interest in DH has reinforced the need for a larger and more elaborate exploration of the 'digital' itself, and as mentioned in an earlier post, deciphering the nuances of the current state of digitality we inhabit will be key to understanding the field of DH much better. This is challenging because India is a mutli-layered technological landscape, which is also quite dynamic, ever-changing and in a period of transition to the digital. Taking this back to more fundamental questions of technology and its relation to the subject would also provide more insights into DH.See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition
Subject - DH is a manifestation of the relationship between technology and the human subject, and provides different ways to negotiate the same. The 'digital humanist' as the likely subject of this discourse has remained largely undefined in this series of explorations, partly because of the lack of resonance with the term among humanities scholars and the fact that everybody at some level is already a digital subject, and therefore a digital humanist. An exploration of how the digital constitutes or constructs a subject position is likely to reveal better the nuances of this term and the reason for its relation to or distance from the practice.
Method - the methodology of a discipline is the connection between theory and field of practice, and the method of DH is still being developed. Whether it is data mining, distant reading, cultural informatics, sentiment analysis or creative visualisations of data sets drawing from aspects of media, art and design, the methodology and interests of DH are necessarily diverse and interdisciplinary. In many a case the distinction among methods, content and forms do blur as newer modes or approaches to DH come into being. This becomes a particular problem in understanding DH in the context of pedagogy and curricular resources, and would therefore require a rethinking of the understanding of a singular methodology itself.
Archive - A large part of the DH work in India seems to be focussed around the archive - both as a concept and practice. With the digital becoming in a sense the default mode of documentation across the humanities disciplines, and the opening up of the archive due to more public and digital archival efforts, the concept of the archive and archival practice have undergone several changes in terms of becoming now more networked and accessible. As mentioned earlier, we are living in an archival moment where there is a transition from analogue to digital, and it is in this moment of transition that a lot of new questions around data and knowledge will emerge. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment.
Text - the text has been one of significant aspects of the DH debate, given that the academic discourse on DH in the West and now in India is primarily located in English departments. The understanding of the text as object, method and practice as mediated through digital spaces and tools is an important part of the discourse around DH, and has implications for how we understand changes in the nature of the text, and reading and writing as technologised processes in the digital context. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance.
Process: An important point of emphasis in DH has been that of process, perhaps even more than content or outcomes. Given that the method of DH is collaborative and peer-to-peer, the processes of doing, making or teaching-learning etc become increasingly visible and important to understanding the nature of the field and knowledge production itself. More importantly, it also seeks to bring in the practitioner's experience into the realm of research and pedagogy.
Liminal : DH is a good example of a liminal space; which is a space that is on both sides of a threshold or boundary, and is therefore at some level undefined and transitional. The liminal space is often located at the margin of a body of knowledge or discipline, and it is at the margins of disciplines that new knowledge is produced. The discourse and even criticism around DH highlights the difficulties with defining the present nebulous nature of these liminal spaces and what they could transform into in the future. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.
Interdisciplinarity - Closely tied to the notion of liminal spaces is the notion of interdisciplinarity. DH by nature is interdisciplinary, given that it draws upon methods and concerns from the other disciplines, but instead of limiting the definition to just this, it also provides a space to understand the challenges of negotiating and using an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities and other disciplines and develop these questions further. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.

[1] See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.

[2] See Patrik Svensson. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly,4:1 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

[3] Ibid.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Paper

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:22:29Z

The Digital Natives with a Cause? research inquiry seeks to look at the potentials of social change and political participation through technology practices of people in emerging ICT contexts. In particular it aims to address knowledge gaps that exist in the scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital and Internet technologies in social transformation processes. A conference called Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon was jointly organised by CIS and Hivos in the Hague in December 2010. The Thinkathon aimed to reflect on these innovations in social transformation processes and its effects on development, and in particular to understand how new processes of social transformation can be supported and sustained, how they can inform our existing practices, and provide avenues of collaboration between Digital Natives and "Analogue Activists".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper

Digital Natives with a Cause? Report

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:04:51Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/dn-report

March 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-04-14T11:45:29Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the third issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.

Jobs
CIS invites applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project), Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge and Openness), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One of this is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:

The Lakshadweep Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, March 25, 2013): The union territory of Lakshadweep has not passed any legislation for persons with disabilities, but implements the provisions under the central laws. The benefits currently available to persons with disabilities in Lakshadweep include disability pension, unemployment allowance and grant for setting up kiosks.
The Meghalaya Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 25, 2013): Meghalaya is one of the few north-eastern states, which has appointed a Commissioner for Disabilities. Most of the schemes and benefits given to persons with disabilities in Meghalaya are under centrally sponsored schemes. Very few schemes are initiated by the state government.
The Uttar Pradesh Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 31, 2013): The Government of Uttar Pradesh has established shelter homes and vocational training centres in several parts of the states — most recently in Meerut, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. It has also undertaken to finance nearly 4340 corrective surgeries for polio across nine cities of Uttar Pradesh. It also intends to start several projects in 2013. These include the establishment of a Braille Press in order to produce Braille books, magazines and other study material.

Resources
We now have a new section on our website which contains all government notifications, RTI applications, and accessibility related resources: cases, statutes, etc. The following were published earlier this month:

Information about Schemes for Disabled Persons in Haryana We received this notification on schemes and policies for persons with disabilities from the Government of Haryana.
Haryana Government Notification (Hindi version): The notification that we received from the state government was in Hindi. We will put up the English translation soon.
West Bengal (Govt) Notifications: We received a series of notifications from the West Bengal Government from its various departments such as finance, higher education, transport, health and family welfare, labour, land and land reforms, panchayats and rural development, etc. OCR versions of the same have been published.
Lakshadweep (Govt) Notifications: Notifications received from the Lakshadweep Government including guidelines for functioning of KIOSKS, grant of unemployment allowance and special jobs to persons with disabilities, issuing identity card to persons with disabilities for availing government benefits, etc., are published. OCR versions have also been put up.

Event Participated In

A Discussion on Intercept between UNCRPD & CEDAW (organized by the Shanta Memorial Institute of Rehabilitation – Odisha, CBR Network and Mitra Jyoti, Bangalore, Karnataka, February 4, 2013): Anandhi Viswanathan participated in this event.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

Wikipedia

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of four members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval, and one team member Dr. U.B. Pavanaja who is working from Bangalore office.

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Visualising Basic Parameters (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): Sajjad and Sumandro bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. They look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits.

Events Organised

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit from BITS to organise a Wikipedia editing session. Nitika Tandon led the session on IP editing.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.

Events Co-organised

Wiki Women's Day in Goa (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop held on International Working Women's Day, and shares the developments in this report.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.

Upcoming Event

Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (co-organised with the Telegu Wikipedia community, Hyderabad, April 9 to 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan is participating in this event as a speaker. A public event will be held on April 11 from 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. at Golden Threshold (Sarojini Naidu's house) in Hyderabad.

Events Participated

Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013 (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia at Avenir (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported this event.

Event Report from Other Organisations
Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore to organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Other Openness Updates

Event Report

Iraqi Public Data Scenario Workshop: A Summary (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): A workshop on public data was conducted by Sunil Abraham and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the officials of the Government of Iraq. It was organized by UNDP Iraq in Amman, Jordan from October 18 to 23, 2012. Sumandro Chattapadhyay shares with us the developments from the workshop held over five days.

Event Participated

Open DataCamp - 2013 (organized by Open Data Camp, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle, Bangalore, March 2 and 3, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works from the CIS office in Bengaluru.

Upcoming Events

Pig Workshop (organized by HasGeek, Alchemy Solutions, Domlur, Bangalore, 9.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.): A workshop on how to use Pig for mining useful information from data. It is open to programmers who have a background in Java programming, some familiarity with Hadoop and MapReduce algorithms, and have worked with large chunks of data.
The Fifth Elephant 2013 (organized by HasGeek, July 11 to 13, 2013, NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with Privacy International, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.

Privacy

Policy

Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill (April 2012): High Level Concerns (by Elonnai Hickok, March 12, 2013). The post examines the high level concerns that CIS has with the April 2012 draft of the Bill.
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 Analysis (by Jeremy Gruber, Council for Responsible Genetics, US, March 19, 2013). Jeremy provides an analysis of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012. He says that India’s updated 2012 Human DNA Profiling Bill offers largely superficial changes from its predecessor, the Draft DNA Profiling Bill, 2007.

The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013: A Citizen's Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, March 26, 2013). Bhairav Acharya has drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013. It contains provisions that speak to data protection, interception, and surveillance and also establishes the powers and functions of the Privacy Commissioner, and lays out offenses and penalties for contravention of the Bill. The Bill represents a citizen's version of possible privacy legislation for India, and will be shared with key stakeholders including civil society, industry, and government.

Upcoming Events

A Privacy Round Table in Delhi (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013).
A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).

Event Organized

Analyzing the Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 (organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 1, 2013): Maria Xynou shares a summary of the workshop in this report.

Events Participated In

Global Partners Meeting @ London (organized by Privacy International, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 22 – 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Malavika Jayaram participated in the event.
India’s Civil Liberties Crisis: Of Bans, Blocks, Bullying and Biometrics (organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 28, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker.
Future of Privacy in India (organized by DSCI and ICOMP, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, April 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is a speaker at this event.

Blog Posts

Hacking without borders: The future of artificial intelligence and surveillance (by Maria Xynou, March 15, 2013). In this post, Maria looks at some of DARPA´s artificial intelligence surveillance technologies in regards to the right to privacy and their potential future use in India.
Driving in the Surveillance Society: Cameras, RFID tags and Black Boxes... (by Maria Xynou, March 26, 2013). Maria examines red light cameras, RFID tags and black boxes used to monitor vehicles in India.
Microsoft Releases its First Report on Data Requests by Law Enforcement Agencies around the World (by Maria Xynou, March 27, 2013). CIS presents Microsoft´s report on law enforcement requests, with a focus on data requested by Indian law enforcement agencies.
The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 — Penalising 'Peeping Toms' and Other Privacy Issues (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013). The pending amendments to the Indian Penal Code, if passed in their current format, would be a huge boost for individual physical privacy by criminalising stalking and sexually-tinted voyeurism and removing the ambiguities in Indian law which threaten the privacy and dignity of individuals.

IT Act

Featured Blog Post

CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules (by Pranesh Prakash, March 27, 2013). CIS welcomes the report by the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation, in which it has lambasted the government and has recommended that the government amend the Rules it passed in April 2011 under section 79 of the Information Technology Act. The post was quoted in: The Times of India (March 28, 2013), The Statesman (March 28, 2013), Economic Times (March 28, 2013), Data Quest (March 28, 2013), and The Hindu (April 1, 2013).

Submissions
Bhairav Acharya, on behalf of CIS submitted comments to the Committee on Subordinate Legislation of the 15^th Lok Sabha for the following rules:

Comments on the Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 316(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 313(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Cafe) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 315(E) on April 11, 2011.

Note: The above rules were submitted earlier but published on our website only recently.

Unique ID Project

Event Organized

Unique Identity Number (UID), National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (organized by CIS and Say No to UID Campaign, TERI, Bangalore, March 2, 2013): CIS interviewed Usha Ramanathan and Anant Maringanti. Watch the videos uploaded in this blog post by Maria Xynou. This was covered in newzfirst on March 3, 2013 and in the Hindu on March 3, 2013.

Interview

Unique Identification Scheme (UID) & National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (by Elonnai Hickok, March 14, 2013). The post examines the UID, NPR and Governance as it exists in India. A video on the UID interview Questions and Answers is published.

News and Media

Indian ID crisis unveils Aadhaar doubts (ZDNet, March 14, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
New $1 Billion RIC Project Casts Doubts on Aadhaar (AEG India, March 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Blog Entry

India's Biometric Identification Programs and Privacy Concerns (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013).

Free Speech and Expression

News and Media

Foreign Funding of NGOs (by Prashant Reddy, Open Magazine, March 2, 2013).
Iceland’s proposed porn ban ‘like repression in Iran, N. Korea’ – activists (RT, March 1, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Chidambaram to Talk Budget on Google+ Hangout (by Dhanya Ann Thoppil, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Responding to govt requests is a challenge for online firms: Colin Maclay (LiveMint, March 13, 2013). Colin M. Maclay, managing director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard mentioned CIS.
Indian police set up lab to monitor social media (originally published by AFP, March 18, 2013, and also carried in Global Post on the same day). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Namaste, Mr. Eric Schmidt (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Parliament panel blasts govt over ambiguous internet laws (by Ishan Srivastava, The Times of India, March 28, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
What if the Net shut down for a few days (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, March 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Press controls ‘send wrong message to rest of world’ (by Jerome Starkey from Johannesburg, Francis Elliott from Delhi and David Brown, The Times, UK).

Event Organized

Freedom Song: Film Screening and Discussion (IIHS Bangalore City Campus, March 21, 2013). Freedom Song, a documentary film produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi was screened.

Events Participated In

Is Social Media Incredible? (organized by Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore, March 2, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated in a panel discussion. The New Indian Express published a post-event report.
Rethinking the Internet: The Way Forward (organized by Telecom Italia and Financial iTimes, Telecom Italia Future Centre, Italy, March 21 – 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.

Others

Events Organised

DML 2013: Fourth Annual Conference (co-organised by CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central, Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2013). We had a special track that ran through the conference on "Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)". Noopur Raval was one of the 16 presenters that we had selected on the tracks. Nishant Shah was one of the members in the Conference Committee.

Blog Posts

WGIG+8: Stock-Taking, Mapping, and Going Forward (Fontenoy Building, conference room # 7, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, February 27, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was the moderator for the session. A summary of the discussion has been published.
What’s In a Name? — DNS Singularity of ICANN and the Gold Rush (by Sharath Chandra Ram, March 31, 2013). March 2013 being the 28th birthday of the first ever registered Internet domain as well as the exigent launch of the Trademark Clearing House disguised as a milestone in rights protection by ICANN for its new gTLD program, Sharath Chandra Ram, dissects the transitory role of ICANN from being a technical outfit to the Boardroom Big Brother of Internet Governance.
An Introduction to Bitfilm & Bitcoin in Bangalore, India (by Benson Samuel, March 12, 2013). Video of the event organized by CIS on January 23, 2013 is published in this blog post.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: www.internet-institute.in.

Upcoming Event
We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” in collaboration with the Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details will be announced soon on our website.

The following units have been published:

Internet Protocols (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 18, 2013).
How email works, how do you get your email? Email Protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP), SPAM/Phishing (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 19, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 19, 2013).
ITU sectors — ITU-R, ITU-T, ITU-D, etc. (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 27, 2013).
World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 29, 2013).

Telecom

Newspaper Column

Are India's Glory Days Over? (by Shyam Ponappa, Organizing India Blogspot, March 8, 2013, originally published in the Business Standard, March 6, 2013).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Events Participated In

Video Vortex # 9 Re:assemblies of Video (organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, Post Media Lab, Moving Image Lab, Leuphana, et.al, February 28 – March 2, 2013). Nishant Shah gave the key note. Videos of the event are published.

Digital Humanities

From 2012 to 2015, the Researchers @ Work series is focusing on building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. We organised the first Habits of Living workshops in Bangalore last year. The next workshop is being held in Brown University

Event Co-organised

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects (co-organised with Brown University, March 21 – 23, 2013, Brown University, Rhode Island). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He made a presentation on network ontologies.

Event Participated

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World (organized by Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Seoul, March 27 – 29, 2013). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He spoke on "The Asian Intercourse: Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ in networks".

About CIS

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Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin

Future of the Commons: A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages, and Archives Conference Report

Soni Wadhwa, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Garima Agrawal and Nishant Shankar — 2024-08-06T03:24:53Z

We are pleased to share our report on the ‘Future of the Commons: A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages, and Archives’ conference, held in July 2024 at the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) in Pune.

Organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and MKCL, the conference explored the development of localized or Indic generative AI models, state of digital commons, and the role of public institutions such as archives and digitization movements. It featured a mix of panel discussions, roundtables, and workshops, providing a platform for policymakers, civil society organizations, academia, researchers, technologists, archivists, and creative practitioners to exchange views and collaborate. The keynote address by P. Sainath, founder of the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), dwelled on the importance of digitization and archives in India. He emphasized the role of human translators in maintaining the authenticity of stories and the socio-political implications of digitalization on low-resource languages.

The themes discussed at the conference included:

Ongoing Efforts and Innovations in AI:

Current state of research and development of localized generative AI systems.
Use-cases of generative AI products in Indian languages.
Challenges with the availability of training datasets and dependency on big tech.
Open-source development of generative AI models.

Development and Use of Digital Commons:

Digitizing, preserving, and using knowledge and cultural heritage for training AI models.
Practices and challenges in archives and digitization movements, especially in Indian languages.
Role of open knowledge movements and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions.

Future of AI, including LLMs, in Indian Languages:

Designing AI systems that contribute to the digital commons.
Incentivizing expansion, foregrounding diversity, and safeguarding digital commons.
Role of law, policy, ethics, and algorithmic justice.

The conference concluded with participants emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary collaboration, fostering trust in AI applications, and importance of democratization of technology and data.

We invite you to read the full report for a comprehensive view of the discussions and recommendations that emerged.

If you would like to participate in further discussions on this topic, please write to us at anubha@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/report-on-the-future-of-the-commons