Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Natives with a Cause? —Workshop in Santiago — an Afterthought

tettner — 2012-01-03T10:16:18Z

The Digital Natives had their third and final workshop in Santiago, Chile from 8 to 10 February 2011. Once again CIS and Hivos joined hands to organise the event. Samuel Tettner, Digital Natives Coordinator from CIS narrates his experiences from the workshop in this blog post.

For three days, from 8 to 10 February, I spent most of the days and almost one full night at the Digital Natives with a Cause? Workshop. The day before the workshop, I met the facilitators: Kara, Pedro and Juan-Manuel. All three of them were quite enthusiastic with each one specializing on an aspect of the research objectives. That night, I had my first formal meeting with the participants in the conference room of Hotel Windsor in Santiago. It is always fascinating to meet a large group of people, especially since you have been corresponding with them for a couple of weeks, have read about them and their projects, made images in your head of how they look, how they act, how they will get along with each other and so on.

I was particularly excited about the workshop in Santiago since it presented itself to me an opportunity to re-connect with a side of Latin America that I had not experienced. I moved from Venezuela to the United States at the age of 15. I don’t know about everyone else, but when I was 15, I was mostly interested in music, movies, my friends, fast cars, video games, and a whole lot of the nonsense stuff. Meeting these highly motivated young men and women from all over the American continent and the Caribbean islands allowed me to connect with the more nuanced and matured side of my identity— a side that had only heard English spoken to it.

The actual workshop took place at the Biblioteca de Santiago, a library in Santiago, a beautiful modern building, with an architecture that rivalled the best libraries I ever saw in the world. Our local partner Rising Voices, had done an incredible job of organizing the logistics. The workshop opened with an ice-breaking exercise that unlike most ice-breaking exercises required some neural movement. Participants were asked to come up with a word that described their practice, politics or ideology. You see the workshop participants were young people who engage with digital technologies to create social and political change. I chose my word ‘innovation’ mainly because it’s an idea that’s been hunting my day-dreams lately, but also because I knew it would elicit interesting responses. I briefly sat down with Luis Carlos from Peru and Joan from the Dominican Republic, whose words were ‘stories’ and also ‘creative’. A blog post about that experience can be found here.

Afterwards we had the pleasure of hearing from Juan-Manuel, the facilitator from Mexico. Juan-Manuel talked about issues of participation, motivation to do social change, impact of our engagements and other social change related processes. He left us with three big questions that stayed with us for the rest of the afternoon:

What is our motivation to do social work? Where does it come from? Where does it end? How did it start? Can it be replicated?
What is incidence / impact? How can one measure impact?
What does one need to know to create social impact?

I got in a group with Adolfo from Nicaragua, Maria Del Mar from Paraguay, Karl from Haiti and Julio from Chile. Kara was our facilitator for the discussion. A blog post about that experience by Maria Del Mar can be found here. After discussing for about one hour, we made a white paper that visually illustrated` our discussion. We decided to make a word / concept cloud and mix it with a collage. That was it. With a lot of anticipation and nervousness the first day of our workshop ended.

Oh wait! I forgot to add a small detail, that day Nishant also taught us how to do a Bollywood dance. I didn’t take any pictures, but I hope someone did!

On the second day, Pedro Markun from Brazil opened the floor with a thought-provoking presentation. Unfortunately, I missed most of the presentation, but if one is to judge by the tweets, it was very inspiring. After the presentation, we participated in a bar camp. During this activity participants proposed the topics for discussion, out of which we selected five to focus on. I decided to join the conversation about ‘digital rights’, a topic proposed by Andres from Venezuela. Brendon from Trinidad and Tobago, Luis Carlos and Roberto from Peru, and Joan from the DR also participated in this discussion. I wrote a small blog about my opinion on this conversation here.

During the second half of the day, the process was reversed and instead of us participants writing down concepts we wanted to talk about, five words were written on the board: mobilization, network building, awareness, campaigns, and representation. This activity, called HOW DO YOU SPELL PROCESS? asked us to choose the word with which we identify the most; it could be the word we know the most about, or the least about, or the word we’re most interested in implementing in our practice. I joined the mobilization group, because part of the job as the community manager for the Digital Natives project involved motivating the members, involving them in other’s ideas, helping them connect with greater initiatives – all ideas that I think connect with mobilization issues. I sat down with Maria Carmelita from Argentina, Brendon from T&B and Francisco from Chile.

After we were all settled in the group plenary after this activity, Fieke had a dictatorial proclamation to make: we then had around 12 hours to make a visual presentation (a video, a play, a sketch and others) about our discussions during HOW DO YOU SPELL PROCESS?

I met Brendon, Francisco, and Carmelita shortly after for dinner and the planning of our video. We decided to have an Indian night, which is ironic since I now live in India, yet the experience was very interesting: I tried ‘curry’ for the first time in my life! For our video, we decided to make a cheesy, 1984-esque “how to” video to change the world through mobilization. The video can be found here. Check out the other videos as well, they all are quite interesting and thought-provoking.

Finally, on the third day after a showing of the videos and plays, the last facilitator, Kara from Guatemala, shared with us her personal journey into her social commitment. From growing up in a banana plantation in Guatemala, to her use of digital technologies to raise funds to build a house for her uncle, Kara’s story inspired all in attendance. Kara told her story through a specific framework, which was named the Matrix. The Matrix consisted of re-framing one’s story through four lenses: dream, discovery, design and destiny. We then broke into groups and reflected into our own journeys with technology using the same framework.

In the end, we all went to a nice restaurant and had a common dinner. I love those tables of over 20+people; you can switch seats and change conversations instantly. Overall, the workshop was a huge learning experience. I was able to meet some similar people from Latin America, and better understand the cultural context of the intersection of technology and the social and the political spheres. With the last workshop now over, we have collected a plethora of research materials which we will analyze during the second phase of the Digital Natives with a Cause? project. The journey still continues.

Thanks to all of you who made the experience Possible!.

For info on schedule of events, organisers and participants, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/santiago-workshop-an-after-thought

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues

praskrishna — 2012-12-09T00:50:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is coorganizing this workshop along with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., at the seventh Internet Governance Forum 2012 in Azerbaijan. The workshop will be held in Conference Room 4, from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m. Pranesh Prakash is a panelist for this workshop.

Workshop Theme:
Other
Theme Question:
It is a workshop on national level IG mechanisms, and does not directly address any main theme questions

Concise Description of Workshop:

Such is the unique nature of the Internet that its governance often calls for institutional innovations. The proposed workshop will look at a range of national level IG mechanisms across the world. While the discussion will refer to good models and practices in different countries, it will not be organized around simple show-casing of different national IG mechanisms. The discussion will centre around key contexts, requirements, challenges and possibilities. It will be directed towards examining key institutional design issues, functions and outcomes with regard to national level IG mechanisms with the purpose to help countries make appropriate decisions in their specific contexts. Some of these are; - How should the national commons of Internet resources be managed?- What kinds of mechanisms are appropriate for technical matters, what for those that are partly technical and partly social, and what for larger public policy matters, requiring more political responses? - Should there be a common single mechanism to address all the above kinds of issues, or different ones? How to coordinate different mechanisms, and different parts of the national governance machinery dealing with different aspects or kinds of IG issues? - How to ensure meaningful participation of all stakeholders in a manner that focuses on public interest?- How can the surplus from domain name registration fees etc collected by national IG agencies be employed for public interest purposes, especially, for taking up Internet related research.

Organiser(s) Name:

Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore - Civil SocietyBrazilian Internet Steering Committee - National level governance bodyInstitute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences - Academic InsitutionCentre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (CCIRDT), Vancouver, BC CANADA - Civil Society Instituto NUPEF , Rio de Janeiro - Civil SocietyIT for Change, Bangalore - Civil Society.

Previous Workshop(s):

See in the workshops section in IGF 2011IG4D Workshop 183: A Possible Framework for Global Net Neutrality.

Submitted Workshop Panelists:

Carlos Afonso, Insituto NUPEF, Board Member, Brazilian Steering CommiteeEmily Taylor, Independent Consultant, Formerly with NOMINETAlice Munya, Chairperson, Kenya Internet Steering CommiteeVictor Tishchenko, Institute of Advanced Systems, Russian Academy of Sciences,Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society,Moderator, Micheal Gurstein, Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training, Canada.

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Ginger Paque

Read the original published on the IGF website here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/national-ig-mechanisms

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T04:38:04Z

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

The Habits of Living Thinkathon took off today with an introduction by Wendy Chun, who led us through a critical review of the relevant academic theory on networks and network analysis to help us understand how ubiquitous networks have become as a method of conceptualizing and understanding the world around us.

But why networks? What is the explanatory power of networks?

Networks enable us to map the unmappable, to trace the complex, unimaginably big structures that post-modernism left us with, and to be able to define our own unique existence. However, what becomes apparent is that we seem to be forever mapping, but we are no more able to realize our place within the capitalist society we live in, much less escape it. Rather than resolving them, mapping leads to the generation of more networks, and as we become more proficient at identifying and mapping networks, the more static they become. As Wendy Chun says, "We seem to be forever moving and never changing."

Continuing on, Chun asks: why has the network become the end rather than the beginning of the answer? What drives the impetus to see un-seeable networks everywhere? Chun presents the Thinkathon's theme of Habits of Living as an epistemological framework to grapple with these questions. For Chun, the 'habit' works as a particularly useful heuristic to unpack and deconstruct some of the central components of the network. A habit is something that is acquired through time and then forgotten about as it moves from voluntary to involuntary. In fact, a habit can start as something we do and become something we are. With this in mind, we are asked to think: how has the network become habitualised and what are the implications of this? What is the importance of time in the mapping and lived experiences of networks? In looking at networks from this meta-level, we can ask: why do we think networks make us forever moving but never changing?

Chun's presentation is received well, but one concern gets noted early on. This discourse of the 'network' privileges a very particular Western subjectivity, one which may not be applicable to collectivist cultures where communities have always existed with network structures. What becomes apparent is that we need to start collecting alternate discussions and input from a non-Western understanding of a network in order to truly understand what it is to live in a network society.

Following Wendy's talk, Nishant Shah continues the discussion on networks by contributing several other crucial epistemological interventions to begin our consideration of the Habits of Living. Nishant begins by asserting that we — perhaps naively — want to believe that networks have the innate ability to generate change. The way we commonly view networks, especially in a post-Arab Spring world, is with the understanding that the network is the panacea for all of our social ills. However, the body of the network is the only problem that the network can solve. That is to say, the network can only produce an account of itself; it cannot be used to create understandings of things outside of its own boundaries.

Nishant briefly reviews the recent "Northeast Exodus" from the global tech city of Bengaluru, in which the dissemination of SMS messages within various networks caused a panic. The knowledge that moved through the networks terrified people before real information on the events could be consumed. Nishant shows how events like these cause people to claim that something has gone wrong with the network, which is particularly worrying for the state, as how can they fix an issue in a network that they cannot see? Further unpacking this scenario, Nishant shows how the minute the network becomes visible, it is a crisis.

Participants expressed concern about the use of 'network' in this discourse. What actually does the 'network' describe — can it stand as a heuristic for so many different relations? Additionally, what is the truth that the network seeks to expose or reveal? Is there an actual truth that can be unearthed through the network?

Nishant responded that many of these questions will hopefully be answered over the next four days of the Thinkathon — and we are definitely looking forwards to it!

Continue to follow our live blog coverage of the Habits of Living Thinkathon for more thought-provoking discussion!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:18:59Z

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

Wendy Chun talked to us today about what it means to be a friend. She began with a brief overview of network theory, with a focus on the dilemmas of the constant mapping. Moving on, she asked us to think about how networks are related to habits, as habits focus us on the duration of events. This is important for the understanding of networks, as networks require the constant generation of associated events that seem stable. Wendy then asked us to think about the difference between communities and networks, and helped us to think about the extent that networks are imagined (in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the imagined). Throughout this discussion, she continues to come back to the theme of “you,” the idea that networks enable us not only to see ourselves and our place in relation to other nodes in the network, but that simultaneous access of a network, a moment of “we,” will actually cause the network to fall into crisis,

Using this “you” framework, Wendy moves onto a discussion of the internet and how it has moved from being seen as a anonymous free space to a semi-private space where freedom stems from private authentication by others in your network. It is at this point that she asks us how we understand the idea of “friend”; are friendships mutual bonds created for support in times of crisis, or are they sometimes one-way affections where the act of requesting friendship creates the connection? How much has friendship become about broadcasting our connections—our place in the network?

Cyber friendship, especially in the Facebook understanding of “friend,” becomes a method that we can use to understand our strange relationship with safety on online spaces—we desire security, and want to trust and authenticate our relationships with friends, but by pursuing this we can often put our friends into danger, or at least into realms that may not always be seen as “safe”, which now is often interpreted as “private.” For example, by “liking” a friend’s link on Facebook, we create tangible information for Facebook to collect and use about both our friends and ourselves. This method of capturing data only works when you are enmeshed in a network of friends. If our need for safety/privacy is what places in danger on the Internet, it is not security that tames networks by personalizing them that will help us; instead, we need to understand and accept that intimacy and danger in online spaces go hand-in-hand.

As a finishing note, Wendy describes to us a phishing attack that she suffered. After clicking a link sent to her by a friend on Facebook, she sent phishing spam to all of her friends—all of the members of her network. This event created a moment of understanding for her, as she realized that her spam messages reminded her friends that they were part of her network, and that she liked them enough to put them at risk.

Participant discussion began with a focus on how theory becomes implicated into networks, and how networks can be used to give oversights of theory. Participants asked: what does theorizing networks do to the networks, and the members in the networks? Can Facebook be seen as theory, particularly in the ideas of the existence of events without witnesses and how friendships are created and understood?

Participants also pointed out that it is wrong to be suspicious of organizations like Facebook, because it is not Facebook that betrays you but your friends. This is the implicit agreement of Facebook friendship—the agreement to be friends implicates the transmission of secrecy/vulnerability. Machines cannot betray, but humans, friends, can and often do, even in ways that may be involuntary.

Further discussion focused on both how friendships and application suggestions give us the ability to understand how we are building and presenting ourselves. This two-way communication with technologies that implicate networks puts us into a state of permanent crisis where we must continue to be active to connect, as connecting becomes the main activity of becoming and staying networked. This moved into a discussion on the creation of traces of networks that are constantly in motion, and constantly on the verge of disappearing.

Wendy’s discussion of friendship as an often one-way activity, particularly on Facebook where one member must request friendship with another, was a completely new way of thinking about the essence of friendship for me. How much does this cyber, “Facebook” method of creating friendship through the declaration of association cut into the real world? Are nonhuman agreements of friendship (i.e.: Facebook friends) reflections of significant real-world events, in the sense that they are often a nonhuman promise to pursue future friendship in the physical world that is made real through its broadcast on the network? What does this mean for real-world meetings that don’t cumulate in “friending”? What happens to the structure of real-world friendship if the promise of friendship that was broadcasted is never followed through? What does “defriending” mean? What does defriending do to networks?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-wendy-chun-on-friends

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Namita A Malhotra on Amateur Pornography

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:23:05Z

We found Namita Malhotra’s presentation on amateur video porn to be particularly stimulating. However, she begins her discussion not with porn but with the Sumeet Mixie, the first mixie made for Indian food. At the time that the Sumeet Mixie had its heyday, it was largely inaccessible to most Indians, even those in the mid-level middle class. The mixie, Namita claimed, was a representation of a crisis of the middle class in India in the 1980s, a representation of the progress that was promised to them through Nehru’s development programs that was still largely out of reach for the average Indian. Namita draws parallels between a picture of her father, a young engineer, with Nehru and the famous picture of Nehru with the Santhali tribal girl, who, at some point after the famous shot of her inaugurating a dam, placed a garland around Nehru and was subsequently ostracized from her village on the grounds that she had become married to him. Namita’s father’s life was also heavily influenced by Nehru and his call for engineers, as he was pressured to become an engineer when he had little interest in doing so.

Both the lives of her father and the Santhali girl were changed by the actions that they were asked to perform for the good of the country. Indians across the country were pushed to change their life, their dreams, and their habits in return for progress, for development, especially that of the Western kind. The reward was liberalization and a move towards consumerism, a duty that was placed upon the middle class as an activity of their earned progression but remained largely impossible. This struggle between the expectation to consume as a function of their hard-earned middle class status and their inability to do so was just one of many crises of the 1980s Indian middle class. Namita describes this period using two iconic phrases: “Life was hard and slow” and “a long afternoon of underdevelopment.”

Moving on from discussions of Nehru and the middle class, Namita presents to us her work, jointly titled: Nehru’s Technologically Enabled Future or It Could Be Me. She enters into the discussion of amateur porn in India by showing us a 2-3 minutes video clip of the women’s section of a bus. The women are standing or sitting, and their activity barely changes over the period of the video. The eroticism, she suggests, could be in the suggestion of activities that could take place. It is the seemingly non-erotic images in India that have become some of the most defining features of amateur porn in India, both currently and in the past.

In past decades, the consumption of porn largely took place in communal male spaces. However, the event of a somewhat non-erotic clip of a teenage couple negotiating the terms of oral sex being auctioned on a website led to what Namita calls a “moment of sexual eureka”: the realization that amateur clips could be shared online. This led to a flood of amateur porn being circulated and shared through online networks. This eventually prompted a response from the state, though the response was largely one of confusion towards who or what was really responsible—the individual, the network or the technology? The state, of course, is not afraid of the content of the clips but the networks and connections that they cannot see nor trace.

Namita then moves on to a discussion of content of much amateur Indian porn. Much of the media that is created and consumed on mobile phones is grainy and low resolution, and even higher-resolution image clips tend to be highly un-staged with little to no focus on performance. There is a creation of anonymity through the way many clips are filmed, with one participant holding the camera and focuses being placed on body parts instead of faces. Where, then, does the eroticism come from? Namita argues that the familiarity and ability to relate and be present as a viewer in these amateur videos creates its own eroticism. The same can be said about the realness of videos whose purpose is not performance of sexual acts by ideal bodies.

This creation of eroticism indicates possible discussion of surrogacy. Erotica stands in for sex, masturbation stands in for sex, etc. Surrogacy may be useful in completing this conversation about eroticism and Indian amateur porn.

Participants were unsure about the connection between Nehru’s paradigms and amateur porn, and felt that it needed a bit more fleshing out. Discussion then moved towards ideas of transgressive epistemologies, and whether or not the culture and networks situated around amateur porn where sites of transgressive practices. There was debate around what the purpose of the transgression is—recovering ground in visual culture? Gaining control over one’s corporeality? Ultimately, Namita was wary of invoking a transgressive framework around these cultures, and put forth pleasure as a more interesting and useful frame, as there is always a sexual layer involved. She felt that a transfessive framework may be limiting in the exploration of these cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-amateur-photography

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Rijuta Mehta on Militant Hindu Nationalist Networks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:34:59Z

Rijuta Mehta talked to us today about networks of Hindu militant nationalism, which she has termed “Hindutva” networks. Through her back in cultural media studies, she has become interested in the creation and existence of non-citizens as well as the interaction between the state and the stateless person. Using the larger framework of non-citizenship and the media, Rijuta has been trying to make sense of the militant Hindutva movements that are abound in India.

Rijuta argues that a good way of understanding these movements is by using a network framework, particularly one that recognizes the integral part that is played by interaction between the various networks and that these networks are characterized by the politics of non-citizenship—that is, those that are excluded from the Hindutva networks are non-citizens. Mehta asks us: What is the form of these networks, and what do they have to do with the persecution of non-citizens in India? To what extent does Hindutva make the form of the network visible in political society and political violence? How do networks of dispossession and externalism give and take form? What is the form of the Hindutva network(s)?

To help answer some of these questions, Mehta walks us through a brief history of the growth of Hindutva groups in India, and describes to us how their characterization has changed over time. Hindutva has moved from being a collection of networks of those who identify as Hindu to a multilevel movement known for its violence against Muslims and those it views as non-citizens. The Hindutva organization is characterized by many branches of networks, which has allowed for the expression of many different beliefs and ideologies within the overarching framework of Hindutva. However, though the networks may appear to be decentralized, the groups are still dependent on a hierarchal stratification of central nodes of power. This complex structure of authority allows for niches for petty/local sovereigns.

Mehta points out at this point that the public often sees networks as being emancipatory, but in the example of the Hindutva, this has to be questioned. We should expect to see networks being created in instances of mediated rule and patron-clientalism, both of which lead to the structure of civil society being characterized by the creation of multiple networks centralized around middlemen. Networked associations such as these tend to enable higher incidences of violence, and can even lead to long-term entrenched violence. Consequently, networks should not be seen as being ultimately emancipatory, as they can be the cause of more established structures of oppression.

Participants were quick to discuss the use of the word “Hindutva” when describing these networks. It was pointed out that in a Supreme Court of India ruling, Hindutva was defined as “the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos,” and that Hindutva could encompass any type of Hinduism. Discussion arose over whether or not there are non-problematic Hindutva networks. Many participants argued that though Hindutva is now associated with the militant right-wing, it may still be incorrect to called the violent or aggressive Hindu nationalist movement Hindutva because the borders between the militant Hindutva networks and various other non-militant or even non-nationalistic Hindu networks are not clear.

Bringing it back to habits and living, discussions were brought up about the similarities between Hinduism as a lifestyle, as being part or a guiding structure to habits and living, and Christianity as a lifestyle. In many places in the USA, many people who are not orthodoxly religious still perform religious activities simply because it is part of their habit and lifestyles, and those practices are so deeply engrained into the culture and everyday life of those Americans. This is where the term Hindutva becomes problematic as simply a term to describe militant nationalist networks, as Hindutva can also be seen as a structure of everyday life for many Indians.

I thought the discussion about the use of the term Hindutva was very important, as the use of an all-encompassing term with unclear boundaries can vilify groups or individuals who do not identify with the popular understanding of Hindutva as a militant nationalist group. I also thought that the point about mediated rule and patron-clientalism is a highly interesting avenue for the research of networks and how network structures interact with the state and the political sphere, as they can influence both the development of a legitimate political regime as well as the creation of citizen and non-citizen identities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-militant-hindu-nationalist-networks

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Eivind Rossaak on Archives in Motion

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:39:46Z

Eivind Rossaak talks to us today about Archives in Motion, and how networks, especially those created though interaction with technology and social media, have consequences for the way we conceptualize the idea of the archive. He runs us through a brief introduction to archival theory to helps us understand how the purpose, structure, and function of archives and their artifacts have changed over time, and leads us into an exploration of contemporary developments and discourses on archives. Currently, Rossaak is interested in themes of counter-memory practices, software vs. memory, and whether or not social media is a form of archives in motion.

When approaching social media as forms of archives in motion, Rossaak calls on us to think differently about how we understand archival activities. Using the example of Youtube, Rossaak reminds us that we can’t just think of Youtube as a video archive or a repository of confessionary personal information, but instead we should begin to see Youtube as a platform of networked documents, and a site of network creation. Youtube videos are essentially linked; they are not just video logs, but emerge as the expressions of nodes in a complex network database.

Eivind calls upon the example of the Boxxybabe meme to help us understand this new way of being networked. The Boxxybabe video did not just go viral, it cut across many spheres of human interaction and activity, to the point where the identities and activities created by the Boxxybabe meme were experienced in both the online and offline worlds. The Boxxybabe video becomes a technological article in itself, as it testifies to multiple networks. Further, it represents new forms of associations created between objects that are both human and non-human, and motions towards a cyborg turn in the way we become human through the extension of human lives in cybernetic networks. The networks created by this plasticity between the human and nonhuman leads to new methods of social memory creation, and therefore new understandings of archives in motion.

Rossaak’s presentation prompts an ardent response from the participants. Participants discussed issues of anxiety associated with memory failure and how this leads to the desire to preserve. This leads into an exploration of what an archive really is and whether archives require institutionality or can be understood as personal. In this understanding, there is no need for counter-archives because archives are being built everywhere, all the time, and this facilitates the understanding of social media as archives. Participants agree that further study should be pursued around this concept.

Other issues are brought up around subjects that were not addressed in the summary of archival theory, mainly around ideas of locationality and objectivity in the collection of information for archives, selectivity of information that goes into archives, the labor of the archive, and the implication of locationality in the understanding and function of archives.

A large amount of further discussion is centered on the human and non-human elements of archive and network creation, and the activity of becoming human through the creation of non-human networks. Nishant Shah, our facilitator, sums up the main theme of this discussion with the following tweet: “If our idea of the human is mitigated through the non-human, then all attempts at being human will always be about being networked.”

Personally, I thought the concept of archives in motion was incredibly interesting, and I would like to push the ideas of the motion and a recreation of what it is to be human a bit further. I wonder if these structures of social memory and complex offline/online networks that are created through interaction with social media actually represent a movement not only towards our abandonment of the concept of an event or object of being rooted in time, only able to be understood and documented once it has ended (therefore allowing us, using a linear structure of time, to understand it by viewing its beginning point and end point), but also towards viewing ourselves as being in motion, as well. What does it mean to be a human in motion? Does it mean the abandonment of linear temporality? Am I able to see myself, my identity, as not rooted in time but as a node in a network of my self? Can personal conceptualizations of “self” be networked? Is this what it means to be a human in motion?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-archives-in-motion

Edit-a-thon organised to grow content on medicinal plants in Kannada Wikipedia

Ananth Subray — 2016-05-19T10:34:42Z

Two two-day long edit-a-thons were organised in St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College, both in Mangalore, during March 10-11 and March 12-13 respectively. The edit-a-thons were aimed at creating and enhancing Wikipedia articles related to medicinal plants.

It is always a challenge to find much information about the medicinal plants grown locally, especially in Indian languages and on the Internet. The Kannada Wikipedia also does not have many quality articles in this topic. The Kannada Wikimedia community felt the need for documenting more about the medicinal plants and their use when they gathered for the Kannada Wikipedia’s 13th anniversary. So right after the anniversary a two day edit-a-thon was organised in St. Aloysius College Mangalore during March 10-11, and another one at St. Agnes College Mangalore during March 12-13. This event being a follow up of an earlier edit-a-thon, had 17 participants who already edited Wikipedia and there were three new editors. They, together, created 66 articles during the event. Three active Wikimedians participated in the event and helped in mentoring the new editors. 20 images were uploaded by these participants on Wikimedia Commons and they all had contributed 1412612 bytes of data.

Introducing Odia Wikipedia to students of Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

Sailesh Patnaik — 2016-05-20T10:52:41Z

A four-hour-long workshop was organised at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha on February 25, 2016 for the students of Master of Computer Applications (MCA) and Master in Arts, Department of Odia-language.

70 participants consisting of 35 male and 25 female students from the two departments joined in this workshop. Three active Wikimedians; Mrutyunjaya Kar, Subas Chandra Rout and Jnanaranjan Sahu supported in mentoring the new editors. Two other Wikimedians; Chinmayee Mishra and Rajalaxmi Mishra, who are students in the university, organized the event.

During the introductory session, we introduced the students about Odia Wikipedia, the Wikimedia community, and the Bhubaneswar WikiTungi, a local user collaborative in the city of Bhubaneswar. Mrutyunjaya Kar, administrator of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource presented about the Odia Wikimedia projects, how the students enhance their skills while contributing to these projects and introduced the Wikipedia policies to the new editors. “Even though we announced that students can leave by 2 pm, most students stayed back over an hour. Even in a conservative expectation, there will at least be 3-4 students who will be actively contributing in the future. As Chinmayee is associated with us from before, she could lead the local activities in the university”, he adds. Jnanaranjan Sahu who has been active in building several tools and software for Odia Wikimedia projects introduced about Mediawiki and the Optical Character Recognition and its application in growing Odia Wikisource. He also suggests for regular follow-up outreach in the university so that the new editors get constant support and this enthusiasm does not stop here.

Out of the 70 participants, more than 50 participants managed to create their accounts and even made more than 200 edits during the workshop. They selected articles of their own interest and edited. Four faculty members from the MCA department participated in the workshop and were eager to learn how Wikipedia editing works. Rajalaxmi Mishra, who always wanted to edit but never edited Odia Wikipedia made her debut edit this day. She elaborates, “Chinmayee being a batchmate and a good friend always talked about Odia Wikipedia but I personally never did much beyond reading the English Wikipedia article. This workshop was more of a real starting point for me and I started writing about many renowned women like Annie Besant, Kalpana Chawla and Sudha Chandran. Being a student of Computer Science, I am also planning to write more articles in my own subject area. I have just finished writing about a popular bird of Odisha Chinmayee is my batchmate, was helping her”.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/introducing-odia-wikipedia-to-students-of-utkal-university-bhubaneswar

Cartonama Workshop

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T10:21:16Z

HasGeek presents an intensive, hands-on training for managing and building location based services at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Bangalore on 2nd and 3rd March, 2012. CIS is a partner for this event.

About the Workshop

Around 95% smartphone users around the world - which translates to about 468 million people - are using Location Based Services to look for points of interests, ATMs, restaurants, hotels and many other services. They are checking traffic status, and sharing locations and check-ins with friends on various social networks. In the last four years, this industry has grown six times, to a whooping $6 billion.

Cartonama Workshop will provide developers, neo-geographers and entrepreneurs working on location based services with hands-on training on advanced tools to manage and represent their geographic data.

The trainers will help participants to learn use of tools such as databases, tile servers, tile studios, Geocoding APIs, search APIs and JavaScript libraries through an application building exercise. The learning process is interspersed with lectures and discussion sessions on issues such as quality of geographic data, commercialization, licensing and privacy. For more details about the workshop sessions, visit the HasGeek funnel.

Speakers

Schuyler Erle
Free Software developer and evangelist for over fifteen years. He was a co-author of 'Mapping Hacks' and 'Google Maps Hacks'. He was also a co-founder of the OpenLayers and TileCache projects, and is a charter member of the OSGeo Foundation. He also works in the fields of wireless networking, intelligent search engines and the Semantic Web and was the lead developer of NoCatAuth which is an open source wireless captive portal. He built geocoder.us, which is an open source United States. address geocoder. More recently, Schuyler helped found the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and serves on its Board of Directors. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Mikel Maron
Programmer and geographer working for impactful community and humanitarian uses of open source and open data. He is co-founder of Ground Truth Initiative, and of the Map Kibera project. He’s on the Board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and President of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, having helped to facilitate the OSM response to the Haiti earthquake. He’s travelled widely, organizing projects in India, Palestine, Egypt, Swaziland, and elsewhere. Previously, he co-founded Mapufacture and worked on collaborative platforms, and geoweb standards, with a wide spectrum of organizations from UN and government agencies to anarchist hacker collectives.

In 2008, Mikel Maron and Schuyler Erle conducted a series of workshops in India. From Delhi to Ludhiana, Pune, Mumbai, Kerala and Bangalore. The workshop series poked people like Arun Ganesh and inspired them to map and build applications. Arun and his friends mapped Chennai extensively and created beautiful maps. They also put the data together into busroutes.in

. BusRoutes.in remains as one of the best examples of using crowdsourced geographic information to create applications that are useful.

Sessions


Introduction to OpenStreetMap	GPS Surveying for OpenStreetMap	Downloading from GPS	Editing Data for OpenStreetMap

Tagging and Map Features	Geographic File Formats	Geo-enabled Databases	Processing OpenStreetMap Data

Data Swiss Army Knives	Creating Shapefiles	Tiles	Tilemill

Java Script Mapping APIs	Serving Tiles	Geocoding and Location queries	Putting it all together

Why You Should Attend the Workshop?

The workshop is only open to 30 participants. This is to ensure that the trainers can pay individual attention to each participant.

The workshop will train you with both back-end as well as front-end tools necessary for developing functional location based services and will enable you to build maps which can be used on devices ranging from phones to tablets to computers. It is aimed at teaching you the entire technology stack, right from managing the data to deploying the data on the server, and finally presenting it to your end user. During the hands-on sessions, you will develop web-based location services and learn how to manage your geographic data by creating interactive maps.

Mikel and Schuyler have extensive experience working with interactive maps, open data, Open Street Maps (OSM) and diverse communities on the ground. Participants will benefit immensely from the knowledge, experience and expertise of the trainers.

Registration

Tickets are priced at Rs. 10,000. Participants can register through the DoAttend portal. Or, you can pay offline through cheques and DD. Your ticket price covers workshop facilities and the facilitators' travel to India. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has sponsored part of the workshop expenses.

Participants are expected to bring their own GPS devices / mobile phones and computers for the application building exercises.

If you have any queries, write to Sajjad Anwar.

Buy Tickets Now

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore. The congenial atmosphere at CIS facilitates both formal and informal interactions, and peer-to-peer learning.

No. 194, 2nd C Cross, 4th Main
Opposite Domlur Club
Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 560 071

The Centre for Internet & Society

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore-based independent, non-profit research organisation. CIS is primarily involved in research on the Internet and its relationship to society. Through its academic and research programmes, campaigns, and advocacy, CIS brings together scholars, academics, students, programmers and scientists to engage in a large variety of issues concerning the Internet: from histories of the Internet to enhancing accessibility for persons with disabilities, openness, telecom and Internet governance, among others.

CIS is supporting the Cartonama Workshop by providing the venue and hosting the workshop facilitators in Bangalore.

HasGeek

HasGeek was initiated in September 2010 to create discussion spaces for developers around emerging technologies. Our events are developer-focused. We began by organizing five editions of the DocType HTML5 conference in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

In 2011, we organized a series of events in Bangalore starting with the Android Camp in April, PHP and Cloud Computing in June, JSFoo in October, and Droidcon India in November. Each of these events had an open talks submission and voting system, which made every event more participant-focused.

In 2012, we are attempting to reach out to a wider audience of developers, entrepreneurs and students, across large and small Indian cities, by addressing interesting technology problems such as UI Engineering, Data Science, SMS and email notifications, among others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cartonama