Centre for Internet and Society

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #STSDebates (Science, Technology, and State Debates)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:08:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.

Session

The proposed workshop session is motivated by an interest in historicising contemporary debates on the state's role in development of science and technology in India, and the adoption of both into the processes of government and statecraft. From the DNA Bill to the Digital India initiative, we are experiencing a state that takes science and technology seriously, perhaps a little too seriously.

The debate on state-led organisation of science and technology began in earnest in late-imperial India. The National Institute of Sciences of India met in Calcutta during WWII (1943) to discuss the following questions: “what should be the organisational model for science and technology adopted for post-war and independent India; and how should India benefit from the Commonwealth structure?” In his report at the end of the visit the following year, Archibald Vivian Hill, British physiologist and Secretary of the Royal Society, suggested centralised state-led organisation of science and engineering research as the way forward in India. The debate continues to date.

More recently, especially since 1991, the Indian state has entered into multiple forms of relationships with the science and technology establishments in the country, both public and private. Centralised support for science, technology, and innovation is distributed through various channels that range from regulated oligopolistic markets, to public-private partnerships in fundamental and applied research, to strict governmental control over primary means of communication.

This session is interested in situating present day controversies around the state and internet in India within a historiography of science, technology, and state in India.

Sources on these debates are not readily available in a structured format for direct analysis or visualisation. The session, therefore, plans to make use of the diverse group of participants at the Internet Researchers' Conference to start developing an open data set to understand the key topics, positions taken by the Indian state, institutions, persons, policy directives and statements, and objects involved across the science and technology debates in twentieth century India.

We hope to achieve two goals with this session: 1) to begin to address the challenge of conceptualising contemporary discussions about the internet in a historical frame, and equally, 2) to rethink methods of representing and mapping debates and its components, when the sources are not found readily in digital form.

Plan

The key methodological difficulty faced by this session is that lack of structured data and sources on the topic of science, technology, and state debates in India. Most, if not all, tools and methods of issue, debate, or controversy mapping have dealt with forms of discussions and materials that is either taking place over digital media (for example, social media platforms), or is already made available in a digital format (for example, digitised books). These tools have often developed to address the unique issue mapping challenges and opportunities emerging with the distributed, and often real-time, discussions taking place over the internet (See: http://www.issuemapping.net/Main/WebHome).

In this session, however, we are interested in debates both after and before internet became a commonplace technology in India. Our energies are focused on generating a data set on debates on topics of science, technology, and the state in twentieth century India, which is 1) structured, so that it can utilised for various kinds of analysis and visualisation, 2) expandable, so that we can continue to add information, and 3) open, so that it can be modified and used by other researchers.

The workshop will begin with a quick overview of science and technology projects by the Indian state in the last century. We will be attentive to the vocabulary of the imaginaries within which these projects were proposed.

The participants will be divided into groups, each focusing on one thematic area of science and technology debates (for example agriculture, space, and biotechnology)). Each group will use a spreadsheet software (say, Libre Calc or Microsoft Excel) to document the key aspects of the debates concerned along the following categories: 1) fundamental question of the debate, 2) position taken by the state, 3) institutions involved, 4) persons involved, and 5) objects involved.

This documentation will be done using a pre-designed schema so that the resultant data can be combined and visualised to test the robustness and feasibility of the project.

The final 30 minutes of the session will be kept for combining all collected data, visualising it, and doing some initial exploration of the linkages foregrounded by the gathered data.

We will use RAW, developed by Density Design, and possibly Google Charts library to create the preliminary visualisations.

All collected data, along with documentation of the data creation process, will be published under open standard and license with appropriate credit attribution.

Readings

Caroll, Patrick. 2006. “Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation: Theory and Analysis.” In Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11-27. http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10533.ch01.pdf.

Density Design. RAW. http://raw.densitydesign.org/.

Marres, Noortje. 2015. “Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40(5). 655-686. http://sth.sagepub.com/content/40/5/655.full.pdf+html.

Phalkey, Jahnavi. 2013. “Introduction: Science, History and Modern India.” Isis. 104. June. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #FutureBazaars

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:08:30Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.

Session

Up till now digital technologies have mostly served to create new markets opportunities for the large capitalist monopolies like Facebook, Apple and Google that dominate the global information economy. But what happens when the potential for disintermediation and market making that comes with digital technologies hit the bazaars for of the worlds 'other economy,' what Ravi Sundaram has called 'pirate modernity.' Indeed this is already happening in two inter-related ways.

First, the availability of cheap, copied or pirated digital goods like Shanzhai cell phones or pirated video games support a reinvigorated bazaar economy made up of small traders who eek out a living while providing informational goods to the broad popular market segments that large brands do not cater to. This is already an emerging phenomenon in India, Africa and large parts of South America, but similar forms of what Gordon Mathews and his colleagues call 'globalisation from below' are gaining an influence in Europe as well.

Second, the potential for disintermediation on the part of digital technologies like WhatsApp today and blockchain technologies in the near future provide a technical infrastructure for strengthening the organizational basis of such bottom-up markets and enable them to strengthen their standing vis-a-vis capitalist monopolies. Can the 'pirate economy' launch its own institution, its own capital markets and its own brands?

In this session we want to explore the future of bottom-up markets. What happens when traders on Delhi’s electronic bazaars can bypass middlemen connecting directly to their Chinese suppliers via WhatsApp; what happens when informal financial circuits like Hawala networks start operating blockchain technologies? Extrapolating from research on what is going on know we want to collectively imagine what the future might bring. What sort of economic social and, importantly political consequences might these changes bring about? How can we theorise this emergence and how does it challenge and force us to rethink basic categories like capitalism, markets and agency?

Plan

The sessions will start with presentations on traders in Delhi's pirate bazaars, blockchain and the democratization of financial markets, impact of mobile connectivity on business and family interaction, and relationship between peer-to-peer, pirate economies, and large media corporations within cultures of circulation. The presentation will be brief (about 20 mins.) and will serve to open up discussions and constitutions form workshop participants.

Discussions will be centred on:

What are interesting areas of study in understanding how digital technologies are changing the balance of power in the digital economy in India?
What is the potential of digital technologies in relation to the mediation and transformation of bottom up economic processes in contemporary India?
What are the new forms of injustices and/or imbalances are arising form these transformations?
What is the political potential in digital disintermediation in relation to markets, beyond the ‘official paradigm of ecommerce and Uber-like platforms?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #EducationAndInternet (Culture and Politics of Digital Online Space as Teaching Pedagogy)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:06:27Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Shruti Nagpal and Ravi Chaturvedi.

Session

The proposed Discussion Session involves two sections, the first concerning the media education in India and the use of online digital space as the teaching learning pedagogy and the second exploring the pros and cons of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in India. Looking at the objectives defining the pedagogy by the media professors using them, the session will explore the ways the online space has provided voice to everyone irrespective of their designation and position. Studying the ever changing patterns of content production and consumption because of the digital literacy and technologies of governance, the session will explore the internet as a space for academic intervention. The session seeks to encourage discussion on the patterns of consumption and creation that facilitate interactivity, looking at the pedagogy on methods and materials needed to document cultures of interaction created by a digitally networked world, technologies and best practices for creating and sustaining interactivity, locating interactivity as a means for including populations marginalized by the digital divide and implications of invoking this construct for teaching as well as practice.

Plan

Section I

With 'Schools in a Cloud' (where students can explore online resources to answer questions) and SOLES (Self Organised Learning Environments) coming up, the researcher will try to integrate digital media into the classroom teaching/learning, and focus on the need to carefully review existing teaching strategies and understandings of digital media and its usage in addressing the curriculum/syllabus. Discussing the research results of a study conducted in Delhi, the paper will also analyse the current and potential use of virtual learning environment, understand if these e-modules are necessary by identifying the challenges faced in the development of e-learning modules in the university set ups and the role of Social networks, increased connectivity and its effect on the teaching learning practice and virtual regions and spaces. Being a media scholar and teacher, pursuing Phd on pedagogies of media education from MCRC, Jamia; the researcher expands 'micro' experience to 'macro' and talks of the ways the digital online space can be included in the media teaching pedagogy discussing the issues related to curriculum, learner and teacher profiles, evaluation and economics of running a digital media pedagogy/ course.

Section II

This sub section will explore the advantages and challenges of Massive open online courses (MOOCs) in emerging economies and developing societies like India. MOOCs are a relatively new phenomenon sweeping higher education. Less than five years ago, MOOC was just an idea , but currently there seems to be a robust market for these courses and India is turning into one of the biggest market for many massive open online course (MOOC) providers like Coursera. Given India’s need for reaching out to the largest possible numbers of learners, MOOCs are seen by some as the hi-tech engine of a transformative revolution that will remake education as a highly engaging, open and low cost activity, whereas the sceptics decries the hype surrounding MOOCs and claims that their benefits are illusory. The paper tries to understand the MOOC trend in India and its difference with the other online and open education programs. By conducting surveys and analysing data of institutions and universities running MOOC program in Delhi, the research study will ponder on how transformative the MOOC phenomenon can or will be, and what are the learners perspective about different tools and approaches adopted in the courses? Being a media scholar and practitioner, the researcher will also explore whether MOOC can become the interface and bridge the gap between the needs and aspirations of media education and media organizations?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-educationandinternet

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WebOfGenealogies

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:07:18Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.

Sessions

The Internet today, as we know, is one of the most challenging socio-technical systems to understand and theorise. As a hybrid medium that perpetually, reinvents, redesigns and re-markets itself and its publics it defies all forms of historical, social, legal and technological determinisms and/or generalisations. The complex nature of the medium and the social and cultural lives of the information packets which flow through it can perhaps be better understood by heeding critical attention towards longer histories of media circulation, technology-society relationships and legal regulations.

The panel attempts to understand the way digital technologies (the Internet/the current digital moment) mediate aspects of our contemporary being through the history of media circulation, legal regulation and data infrastructure. The papers in the panel focus on three crucial periods - the 1940s early history of statistical mediation, the 1980s video moment and the early 2000s advent of legal regulation of the Internet. Each of these moments is marked by socio-technical, cultural and legal disruption as seen through both moral anxieties and utopian claims that circulate at the time. The panel attempts to understand media technologies through their technological affordances (unpacking current debates around data analytics through a history of statistical mediation) and the social and legal disruptions that follow their advent (video in the 80s and the Internet in late 90s).

The papers in the panel approach the Internet and networked digital media as an assemblage of media infrastructures, bringing together both conceptual and material layers of their experience. The papers in this panel use a media archaeology approach (Elsaesser, 2004) to engage with the longer history of electronic communication in India by looking at both its material nature (how law produces the representation of digital media and the Internet), and the history of non narrative framework of databases (the Internet as a massive data infrastructure) which have become increasingly diverse and distributed through a network of institutions, practices and technological platforms.

Plan

Abstract I: 'What is Video?' Video and the Moment of Legal Disruption

The advent of YouTube changed the way users interact with media content as now they are making videos, watching videos, editing them, sharing them and discussing them at a frantic speed, creating new communities as they go along (Manovich, 2008).

The YouTube phenomenon and its implications cannot be understood without contextualizing it within the broader history of video. In India, the Asiad Games heralded the arrival of analog video technology, although there was no legal producer of video content in the country. In a sense video was an illegal object that spawned a vibrant economy of video films, video magazines and pornography.

Video cassettes were primarily in the pirate economy and circulated all across the country through video libraries and parlours. New Bollywood and Hollywood releases as well as pornographic films were available on video cassettes which initially did not have any film certification regulation. The new mode of circulation made these video exhibition spaces a lynchpin of moral paranoia and economic anxiety for those in authority-video was like a plague that needed to be monitored and regulated. This led to a string of legal regulations to keep the ‘video menace’ in check. Associations, organizations and forums protested the new wave of regulations as it pitched the medium of video against that of cinema, demanding new medium specific laws instead of amendments to previous laws on cinema.

In this paper, I will examine how the wave of regulations and contesting bodies creates a charged force field of the period that gives one a sense of a social, cultural and legal disruption caused by the arrival of a new technology. Particularly, I want to focus on how video as an illegal object circulates through informal circuits at a rapid pace and how the law deals with this new technological development. By looking at the example of video, it would be productive to think about the resonances the extended genealogies of how the law is interacting with the current digital moment through the prism of analog video.

Abstract II: Big Data 2.0 -- A History of Statistical Remediation

One of the fast emerging themes in the understanding of the Internet is centred on its various technological affordances to generate, collect, measure, analyse, mine andvisualise data. With the recent (circa 2010) advent of the hype cycles of Big Data and data revolution, the socio-technical imaginaries which reveal the Internet as a massive data infrastructure have been gaining momentum. ‘Data’ which in many ways is an ontological byproduct of the Internet, is now increasingly becoming the object of thought and computation for understanding and analysing the Internet. This moment of flux invites us to reflect upon the genealogies of the concepts, techniques and practices which are consciously or otherwise informing the incredible epistemic investment in data-driven systems. With an aim to unpack some of the long histories of the contemporary data analytics movement and moment, this paper tries to trace some of the inflection points in the genealogies of analytics and statistical remediation in colonial and post-colonial India, with an emphasis on the works of P C Mahalanobis and the statistical framing of planning and governance in the pre- and post-independence era.

The author will utilise ethnographic and archival material from his on-going fieldwork on emerging data-driven systems in the social sector in India, to reflect upon the shifts in materiality of data, classificatory affordances of paper and software based systems, and their epistemic implications across two different epochs. In addition, as a methodological reflection, the paper will argue that – developing lateral, conceptual connections between pre-digital circulations and meaning making of numbers and their contemporary algorithmic ecologies, is crucial for moving beyond causalities and the Big Data hubris, towards a thicker anthropology of data-driven knowledge production across times, infrastructures and networks.

Abstract III: The History of Internet Law in India

The relationship between law and media technology in India has been broadly characterized as the law catching up with technological change. To unpack this statement, one needs to take into account how the law both shapes and is shaped by media technologies. As the law ‘catches up’ with new technology, it also characterizes this technology, brackets it, and helps reinforce popular perception of technology. This paper will examine the early history of Internet law in India, the debates that arose in the pre web 2.0 era, and the ways in which a wide variety of factors, over a period of 15 years, has gradually shaped the scope and extent of the law that governs the Internet, the Information Technology Act (IT), 2000.

The IT Act, being relatively recent legislation is an ideal illustration to study the manner in which government policy, public perception, judicial pronouncements, parliamentary committee proceedings, legislative debates, and rapidly changing technology have influenced the shaping of this specific media infrastructure. By examining these documents I would like to open up a series questions around law and media technology How is the relationship between law and media technology staged through public discourse? What are the ways in which both the extremes – utopian hope and moral panic play out, and how are these then related to the more functional aspects of technology? Who were the major actors, individuals and institutions, who drove Internet law and regulation at this time?

By addressing these questions, this paper seeks to examine a small slice of the longer history of electronic communication in India.

Readings

Lovink, Geert and Nadiere, Sabine ed. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.

Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, Introduction, Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Edited by Lisa Gitelman. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2013.

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Full text of judgement available at http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:20:26Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.

Session

The session intends to initiate a discussion on digital literacies in the wake of ‘Digital India’ programme drawing on the empirical insights from three different field situations. The discussion will be anchored in the social and material context of Digital India but will not be limited to it. The questions we raise in this specific context may be extended to understand the current conceptual as well as practical deployment of many ICT4D programmes as envisioned by both government and non-government actors. The idea of digital literacy is central to both the conceptualization and the execution of such programmes, and the actors in charge work with their own understanding of the context and needs of the people they aim to empower. There have been very few attempts to systematically understand the concept of digital literacy which leave much scope for either lenient contextual interpretations or context insensitive one-size-fits-all approach towards technological interventions. This session is an effort to begin one such discussion which we hope will refine the prevalent understanding of digital literacy/literacies in India.

From a glance at the structure of Digital India programme, it is apparent that the programme is designed to achieve digital inclusion and is primarily directed towards the digitally marginalized in spite of having a more comprehensive agenda. The schemes such as National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) and the way they are conceived are indexical of the kind of target groups which the programme plans to address. A key concern for us is to think through the mismatches between the frameworks of the digital literacy initiatives and the local socio-technical contexts which we observed in our field sites. The objective of the session is not as much to arrive at the definitional fixity of the concept of digital literacy as it is to complicate and problematize the prevalent definitions of digital literacy implicit in both visualization and execution of such initiatives. We plan to meet this objective through empirical insights we have on three different field sites.

The session will also focus on certain methodological questions that might help us better understand digital literacy. This part of the session addresses questions such as: how can we conceptually define digital literacy/literacies? What parameters should go into the measuring of digital literacy? How should we theoretically understand it – as technical skills or knowledge or some higher cognitive ability? How can we best pedagogically achieve it given the complexity of ground reality? The questions will be directed towards encouraging thought in this area rather than providing answers. The session will also try and discuss various kinds of policy and pedagogical documentation available on digital literacy and critically debate their conceptualization and execution by juxtaposing them against various uses of ICTs on the ground by specific groups of users. This part of the discussion will draw upon scholarly and other kinds of documentation available on the topic and use them to evaluate various government and corporate initiatives to achieve digital literacy in India.

Plan

In keeping with the spirit of the conference, the three discussants’ will try to put forth empirical insights from their respective field situations and frame nuanced research and discussion questions on digital literacies at the margins of techno-cultural capital and/or access. Further the discussion will be aided by specific readings and the insights drawn from them. The idea is to have a symmetrical, reciprocatory and anthropologically comparative conversation on questions of technology, materiality, access, meaning making, development and literacy, by moving back and forth between different fieldsites and interpretive frameworks.

Field Note I

The first discussant's work on social media use in rural Rajasthan discusses socio-technical changes instituted by the introduction of ICTs despite their developmental failures. He claims that these changes have been often viewed from technologically or socially deterministic positions and that there are significant empirical gaps between such technocratic discourses and the grassroots experiences of technology. There is a growing usage of social and digital media in rural areas where ICT4D and e-Governance pilot projects have failed to meet their goals. Based on an ethnographic study of ICTs in two villages of Rajasthan, his work aims to situate social and digital media in a complex rural society and media ecology using co-constructivist approach. Focusing on context sensitive meaning making of ICTs, it will seek to contribute to an empirically sound discourse on media, technology and rural society in India.

Field Note II

The second discussant's work on mobile phones and multimedia consumption among the digitally marginalized users in Bangalore brings into focus the popular usage of ICTs, specifically mobile phones, among the subaltern users. While such popular usage indicates a certain level of literacy already achieved by the digitally marginal groups by mere exposure and peer learning, it is not sufficient to do away with all kinds of guided training required to make such users participate in informationalized environments. Her observations on the mobile phone usage among the subaltern users in Bangalore problematize the notion of digital literacy and invite us to think about it as a more layered and stratified concept. They raise questions such as ‘what constitutes digital literacy?’ – some complex use of gadgets learnt by mere exposure and peer knowledge or an awareness about the social relevance of the technologies and knowledge about their appropriate deployment in different social contexts? While mere access and some nominal training might be helpful in equipping people with some knowledge about gadget-use, her study points out that such initiatives are far from achieving the right degree of digital literacy needed to make these people participate in new media ecologies. Thus it contends the claims of 1. Organic literacy attained by mere exposure and peer sharing of technological knowledge and 2. Literacy attained by current training programmes which might equip the digitally marginalized with knowledge of technological use but not necessarily inform them about the context relevant knowledge needed for their appropriate deployment.

Field Note III

The third discussant's work on e-governance initiatives in an Indian state plans to return the gaze on to the bureaucracy itself and takes the conversation from the margins back to the centre. His work moves away from the target groups generally alluded to in programs such as the NDLM. It takes into accounts the struggles, anxieties, hopes and promises of/for a bureaucracy in coming to terms with a gradual but seemingly eventual shift from paper work to digital paper work. The users in this case are staff members tasked by the higher-level bureaucracy-who have little or no clue about it themselves- to learn a new tool and migrate all paper work to the digital domain. Many of e-governance projects are spearheaded by corporate organizations, which in turn dictate the terms of the conversation on Digital Literacy even within the government. What impact does this have on how Digital Literacy is understood, articulated and executed in ICT4D programs within and without the government.

Readings

Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Chapter 5: Communication Biopower, 131-157. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2010. Beautiful Balloon: the Digital Divide and the Charisma of New Media in India. American Ethnologist, 37(4), 783-804.

Smith, Richard Saumarez. 1985. Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law. Contributions to Indian Sociology 19(1): 153–176.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:56:36Z

This book marks the beginning of an interdisciplinary artistic project, Silicon Plateau, the scope of which is to observe how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Silicon Plateau is a collaboration between T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Volume 1 has been developed in collaboration with or-bits.com.

For us this series has a two-fold core. One the one side, there is the city of Bangalore, the trigger for various reflections about the way in which technology (old or emerging, as a service or as infrastructure) informs the socio-cultural and political environment; a city that is fascinating to us not just because we are located here but also for its characteristic fast-paced development shaped by the IT-boom and related industries. On the other side, there are the arts and creative thinking, for us the languages, lenses and methods to be used for interpreting technological developments and discussing their role and impact in the present time.

Our hope is that of building a series based on tangible accounts revolving around the unresolved complexities inherent to the intermingling of the arts, technology and society, and in the context of local histories and occurrences rather than of global narratives and mass media constructs. Stories that for our audience, we hope, will be those of the encounters—fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient—that a wide variety of contributors will have had with this fascinating city.

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptiveTransport (Aggregators, Ownership, Tracking, Space, Internet Models)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:00:57Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Srinivas Kodali and William F. Stafford Jr.

Session

Transportation has been seeing disruptions through Internet aggregators using complex models which nobody understands in detail. This is primarily being seen in the space of urban transport, but is not limited to them alone. 1960`s saw disruptions in airline industry when each airline was fighting for it's own space in flight reservations and aggregations. This disruptive trend is now being observed globally in other transport modes. Aggregators are playing an important role in transporting people and disrupting markets globally. Internet Models are varying within aggregators who are not limiting themselves to ticket reservation, but are also providing information about the availability of transportation options. With increasing demand and surge pricing taking up the market, what is the role of the state. What are the ownership rights of an aggregator? What are licensing/lease models of a provider? What about un-fair practices and consumer rights? What forms of labour and regulation are imagined? What is the role of state run aggregators like IRCTC in this changing landscape?

Many of the platforms that have been created, primarily in the beginning concerning tracking or making complaints, were accessed through websites and have since been migrated either to a combined website/ app structure, or wholly to smartphone apps. This raises interesting and important questions concerning the imagination of an increased reliability and accesibility of services, as well as a power to hold public institutions accountable, as they relate to the question of access to these technologies and the habits of their use, especially demographically and linked to class.

Furthermore, both the near and far future promise an reworking of the internet as a system with which commuters and others interface to consume or deliver a service, to transport as one part of a mobility ecosystem, which is currently being tooled (both in regulatory frameworks and industrial planning) as a microcosm of the internet of things. With internet being connected to personal transport at every intersection of the road, what is the scope of privacy and accountability, the role of encryption layer and also the importance of governance in the fragile/disrupting space. How will the internet impact personal transport of citizens and the economy? Cashless payments, driver-less cars, surge-congestion pricing with disruptive internet models need regulation before they over-run and create chaos with the system.

Plan

The session will focus on Delhi as a case study.

Discussants will present their current work around these questions, and then open a discussion among those present on the issues raised therein.

The first discussant will present on the changing architecture of the auto-rickshaw meter as a regulatory platform, from the recent introduction of GPS to the creation of various surveillance and business models which either exploit its native GPS or duplicate and substitute it through the use of smartphones, and the folding of autos into the emerging e-hailing environment and the possible implications of changes being sought in the regulatory framework for connected vehicles. These include technological treatments of questions of class, trust and accountability, as well as significant policy and material changes in the classification of what is owned, by whom, and its conditions of transfer.

Srinivas will continue the presentation on transport data by showing use cases and potential harms about the data. How big data is changing the landscape of transportation systems and privacy concerns with the future of autonomous vehicles and intelligent traffic management systems. Data driven decisions are a big concern when data can also be used to lie at a scale. Data ownership and rights are a challenge the state and the citizen need to think about before forcibly submitting data.

The discussion will be primarily around:

Digital Ownership and Physical Ownership
Scope of Internet Governance on Aggregators
Pricing Models and Service Availability
Future of On-Demand Transportation Services vs Public Transportation

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-disruptivetransport

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #LiterarySpaces (Online Literary Spaces in India)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:25Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.

Session

The last decade has seen a slow but steady emergence of online literary spaces in India, marked by the ubiquitous nature of the internet and digital technologies, growing mobile phone penetration and increased access to devices such as tablets and e-readers. By literary spaces we refer to online journals, magazines and blogs, as well as reading groups and discussion spaces focused on writing in English and Indian languages. These range from those exclusively focusing on contemporary literature to others that feature writing on news, culture and arts. These spaces raise some intriguing questions about the growth a new online or digital literary culture, which may be mapped through the evolution of reading and writing practices as very explicitly technologized practices, and the changes in the notion of text and textuality, scholarship and pedagogy, among other things.

Some examples of such spaces that have come up in the recent years are The Little Magazine [1], Muse India [2], Kritya [3], Coldnoon: Travel Poetics [4], Kindle [5], Almost Island [6], The Indian Quarterly [7] and among several others. Many of these journals have both an online and print presence, while some are purely online and seek to reach a diverse audience featuring different genres of writing. While many carry an eclectic mix of creative and critical writing, perceptions about readership on the internet often dictate the form and manner of writing that is featured. The much anticipated and debated ‘disappearance’ of long form writing is one of the questions that may be asked of the emergence of these literary journals, which have in some way re-imagined this form in the digital sphere and have been instrumental in its growth. So even as there are books on twitterature [8], there are interesting ways in which online literary journals have tried to define the space of contemporary writing on the internet in India.

Plan

This panel discussion proposes to examine this phenomenon of the growth of online literary journals to understand the imagination of the ‘digital’ in their practices of writing and publication, whether as medium, content or context, as a way to explore how writing and reading practices today have been shaped by these changes. This also includes questions on methods of literary analysis that may have changed with the advent of the digital, and from a broader perspective, the production of literary scholarship and pedagogy in India. Some questions that could be points of discussion are as follows:

What is the pedagogical role, if any of digital/online journals? Are they simply cost-effective modes of production of knowledge or are they indicative of some other form discrimination? Perhaps a discrimination between what gets read and what does not? Is a voluminous archive of nineteenth century writings of the same pedagogical merit as a list of 100 Hollywood romantic comedies? If the former is arguably much more educational, why then is the latter the source of the greatest traffic? Is pedagogy then a misnomer, and a non-entity in the world of online magazines?
Can the rise of online magazines be related with the rise of print culture and the subsequent rise of the novel? The novel was educational and, while English was still a very evolving language in the 17th and 18th centuries, the form helped both shape the language and educate the masses, bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy about the nuances of the still-nascent English language. Can a similar function be said to have been fulfilled by online journals? Or have they failed in playing this radical role of disseminating new language and new vocabulary, which is required to articulate new modes and conflicts within modernity--sexualities, queerness, televised elections, middle-eastern (Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi) mayhem in times of democracy, globalization, urbanization, travel, genocide, partition, terrorism, and so on? Are there any exceptions among the journals in being able to somehow fulfil the criteria of engendering a new language? What are the examples, if any? How popular are they?
Is online literature less literary than print? Is it more amenable to news, while print continues to be literary? Or is this only a misconception? Is online literature prone to non-serious, or populist sources of pedagogy, which serve more to titillate through trolling, humour, half-baked information, gossip, or is it playing a serious role too in portions? Apart from those newspapers and journals/magazines which also have print components, which are possibly the portals that create viable, meritorious, and universal categories of knowledge? Or, invocation of 'merit' and 'universal' essentially a flawed mechanism to judge online literatures?

Addressing some of above questions through a study of two or more online journals, this session will attempt to open them up to a broader discussion on the nature and growth of an online literary culture in India, and the need for and significance of research in this area.

Readings

None.

Notes

[1] See: http://www.littlemag.com/.

[2] See: http://www.museindia.com/.

[3] See: http://www.kritya.in/.

[4] See: http://coldnoon.com/.

[5] See: http://kindlemag.in/.

[6] See: http://almostisland.com/.

[7] See: http://indianquarterly.com/.

[8] See: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexander-aciman/9780143117322/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

sumandro — 2015-12-02T07:54:26Z

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

Podcast

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

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

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

Fields of View

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

Website: http://fieldsofview.in/.

Twitter: @fovlabs.

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

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #MinimalComputing

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:20Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.

Session

The triumphal mythic narrative of India’s relatively high and rapid rates of Internet penetration is underpinned by the country’s access to data via mobile devices. The black box proprietary technology of the iPhone, or the less explicitly restrictive nexus (pun unintended) between the Android OS with device manufacturers, has meant we have large swathes of technology users whose only encounter with online content has been via these closed ecosystems. Minimal computing is both an intellectual intention and pragmatic response that seeks to disrupt these systems by subverting existing frameworks and creating new infrastructures, acknowledging the ground realities that exist in India, such as lack of resources and access. This position essentially privileges “ease of use, ease of creation, increased access and reductions in computing—and by extension, electricity” (Gil). The intention of this workshop is to explore, discover, discuss and build resources that observe these tenets, under different heads, such as physical computing, archives, interface, database.

One of the obvious outcomes of the growth of digital technology in the region is the increasing intersection with the scholarly record – be that a theorizing of these new contexts, as is the case at this conference, or in the building of dissemination tools for memory institutions or academic scholarship. As such scholarship (which would be considered under the rubric of the digital humanities) is still in its early stages, it is incumbent upon us to set an example for other scholars when we build these resources; fast to load, easy to build and administer, which can function in low-bandwidth areas – especially as we embark on larger scale projects that are now possible through advances in digitization of different forms of content, as well as of Indic language character sets. Uses of technology in India are often anarchic, and the digital is constantly imbricated with the analogue and these grassroots, informal practices could usefully inform scholarship in this area, and possibly be transposed to other similar environments, such as those found in the global south.

The other crucial exploration that will be undertaken in this workshop will be how to use guerilla computing and other methods to safeguard our fundamental human rights both online and offline, strategies increasingly essential in a country where censorship against individuals and misuse of personal data is rapidly on the rise. The online citizen must be encouraged to think about the virtual space in which s/he works and plays, and learn how to navigate it responsibly, by being alert to the dangers of the networked world being overly regulated, and this workshop will also discuss surveillance and collection of personal data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers, and how to circumvent it using relatively simple methods.

Plan

At the outset of the workshop, participants will be introduced by the co-leaders to some examples and concepts in #minimalcomputing, and then to a range of tools and resources such as Markdown, Jekyll, Pan.do/ra, Pandoc etc., as well as simple encrypting methods. Participants will also be encouraged to share examples of good practice that they might have encountered in their own contexts.

Participants will then be asked to consider a digital project that they might be in the process of building, or envisioning, or to reflect on their personal digital footprint and be facilitated by the co-leaders on how to rebuild and reimagine these using a minimal computing perspective, and to document these ideas so they might be shared with the rest of the group, and promote more discussion.

The aim of the workshop is to draw upon collective expertise to create a handbook of sustainable, scalable resources that can be created without over reliance on third party infrastructures, in order to retain agency over projects initiatives and digital identities; and provide a roadmap for an alternative Internet that meets the needs of users in both personal and professional contexts.

Readings

Budish, Ryan and West, Sarah Myers and Gasser, Urs. Designing Successful Governance Groups: Lessons for Leaders from Real-World Examples (August 2015). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2015-11. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2638006.

This reading sets out how an effective multistakeholder governance group might be structured, convened and operate and its stated values of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and effectiveness might serve as a useful guide to how we might envision a #minimalcomputing community.

Gil, Alex. The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make. Minimal Computing website. (May 2015). Available at: https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.

This reading sets out some of the underlying concepts of #minimalcomputing and raises important questions that might be flagged up for discussion during the workshop.

https://github.com/xpmethod/dhnotes/

A growing resource for relevant material and information on #minimalcomputing – start here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WikiShadows (Techno-Political Contours of Knowledge Production on Wikipedia)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:02Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.

Session

Wikipedia is a group project, and people in the group need to have separate pages to discuss changes and improvements to Wikipedia's content, be that an article, a policy, a help page, or something anything else. Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience. Sometimes reading Wikipedia can ruffle feathers.

E.g. 1:

The song, Jana-gana-mana, composed originally in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem of India on January 24, 1950. It was first sung on December 27, 1911 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. [1]

Whereas Wikipedia entry of National anthem mentions thus:

"Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Written in highly Sanskritised (Tatsama) Bengali." [2]

E.g. 2:

Are these beautiful waterfalls on the Kaveri River located in Tamil Nadu – or on the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka – or in Tamil Nadu on its border with Karnataka? Or is it really the Cauvery river, and Hogenakal Falls? [3]

Whatever you believe, be sure to bring a (Google) map to the debate, and point out that your opponent's sources are not RS or NPOV!

E.g. 3:

Born of Serbian parents in a part of the Austrian Empire, which a short time later became a part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary and is now in Croatia. He eventually became a naturalized citizen of the US. [4]

So was he Serbian? Croatian? Austrian? Austro-Hungarian? Istro-Romanian? Jewish? American? Martian? You decide! But don't forget to leave an edit summary saying how pathetic it is to choose any other version. (Guess who are we talking about?) Clue: He is inventor par excellence.

In this day and age where information is often a touch and go process, a forgotten mode, a solitary quest towards creating knowledge sounds romantic (almost). Networked collaborations (such as Wikipedia) which have created Knowledge sites have led to democratic interpretation and assimilation of such knowledge. They also as a basic necessity have sprung up various modes of annotation, verifiability of the Knowledge thus produced and utility quotient of the same. After all, why create and hold on to information that no body really cares about.

Plan

In this discussion session, the co-leaders of the session shall attempt to peel out the benign face of the visible Wikipedia page(there is a hidden world out there) and discuss the political, technological and social contours of information available on Wikipedia. We shall take the participants through the various stages of discussion about a Wikipedia page and how discussions tend to alter the course of an article. How false consensus is proposed, consent is manufactured and how these efforts are usually defeated by 'Answer People' and 'Vandal Fighters'. It is no less of a war than the one between information and mis-information. The discussion on, calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

This discussion session brings to the table questions of legitimisation of knowledge and the inherent hierarchies that operate even within open networks of collaboration and offers a critique on consumption oriented knowledge production. The session also aims to ask questions around knowledge as an agent that has levelled some of the earlier existing contours but has introduced some of its own and how that has changed our usages and shapes our experiences.

The session will involve an edit-a-thon on a topic that will be selected by the co-leaders of the session and live commentary on the discussion pages will be tracked for further analysis. The session intends to build a dialogue towards attempting to problematise the questions of the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences that have played a significant role in production of knowledge in the era of new knowledge practices. The session also will question the 'best practices' in building consent in the present global techno-economic contours of the internet, and its effect on academic spaces, creative practice and intervention.

Readings

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ManyPublicsOfInternet

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:06:54Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.

Session

The discussion in this session will focus on the cultures of practices around digital / information networks. The objective would be to open up the understanding around notions of identity and rights in the context of governance on one hand, and the proliferation of various subcultures on the other. The objective is to try and understand the political and cultural imaginations 'of and as the public' enabled by internet and digital technologies. In this, we are trying to connect the whole discussion to the first two questions the conference focuses on:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?

Plan

Each discussant will present for 20 minutes after which the session will be thrown open for discussion amongst all the participants of the session.

Abstract I

Internet in India has led to the proliferation of practices and notions of governance and citizenship simulated by information networks and data. On one hand, the internet has captured the imagination of citizens and the reassertion of user agency; on the other, the experiences with the internet reflects the new ways of how the state imagines itself and the citizens. Hence, not only a critical mass replete with the possibilities of user agency, but also one aggregated by the state as part of a political project. Initiatives such as Digital India, the Aadhar project, rural internet and increased emphasis on mobile internet services are some of ways through which the logic of access and participation now operates. The paper will draw perspectives from four case studies in Assam - the Mahanagar Project (internet and mobile services), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) update, the Aadhaar Project and rural internet kiosks (Common Service Centers). With these, it focuses on the larger context of the cultures of digital practices; and techno-politics through the various sites and projects through which the internet operates in India.

Abstract II

Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city. By doing so it tries to ask and answer the question - what kinds of publics does the consumption of the internet in spaces such as cybercafes create?

Readings

Escobar, Arturo, et al. 1994. Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology. 35(3): 211-231.

Nayar, Pramod K. 2008. New Media, Digitextuality and Public Space: Reading "Cybermohalla". Postcolonial Text. 4(1):1-12.

Kurian, Renee and Isha Ray. 2009. Outsourcing the State? Public–Private Partnerships and Information Technologies in India. World Development. 37(10): 1163-1173.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet

Open Water Data

sumandro — 2017-11-02T09:13:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-water-data

Steps towards Integrated Open Water Data

sumandro — 2017-11-02T09:58:13Z

Multiplicity of data collection agencies, formats, and disclosure practices and conditionalities make it very difficult to access interoperable and open data about water resources and systems in India. Barriers to accessing water data impede not only academic and applied research on related topics but also public consumption of information and critical decision making. DataMeet and CIS are proud to collaborate on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector. Supported by a generous grant from Arghyam, we are undertaking an initial study of open water data resources in India and taking first steps towards developing a Free and Open Source data portal for water resources information in India. Here is an initial note about the project. The key leaders and contributors of this project are Craig Dsouza, Namita Bhatawdekar, Riddhi Munde, and Jinda Sandbhor, all of whom are members of the Pune Chapter of DataMeet.

Project website: https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/

Contact: pune@datameet.org

The problem statement

Following devastating precipitation of more than 300mm in 24 hours in early December 2015 the city of Chennai was flooded unlike anything it had seen in recent history. A combination of bad urban planning along with heavy precipitation events had made such eventualities all the more likely. But in the case of such storms what parts of the city are likely to flood? What parts will remain unaffected by the deluge. Specific answers to these questions would help city planners plan better for such emergencies.

Only two months after Chennai was waist deep in water, the city of Latur in 2016 ran dry. The Manjara reservoir, on the river of the same name, the city's source of municipal water supply had not a drop left. With more than 4 months left until the rains would replenish the waters of the dam, the city was now reliant on water being transported in bulk via train tankers from more than 300 kms away, news that made daily headlines. The scale of sugarcane cultivation in the region was being called into question.. Was it possible that lowering the allocation of water to irrigation could have preserved enough water for the city's domestic water needs?

Each of these questions call for answers relating to the exact stock of water resources, and how fast the water flows from one part of the water cycle to another. For example, knowing current soil moisture levels and daily precipitation can we estimate groundwater recharge with a high degree of accuracy? If seasonal groundwater fluctuations and river flows in a watershed or sub-basin is known can we estimate actual quantum groundwater footprint of the crop irrigated with groundwater in that river basin? If new industries are being set up in close proximity to each other what might be the effect of these industries on groundwater stocks in the vicinity.

Towards an (integrated and open) data solution

Deriving cause-effect links between the scale of use of water in a particular region and its possible effect on the status of water resources in the vicinity is an extremely difficult exercise because water stocks and flows are affected by so many causal links which need to be studied and quantified in an integrated manner. An integral part of any water resource study is developing a water balance model to estimate water availability and water demand.

Water availability

Precipitation in the form of rainfall and snowfall,
Live storage capacity in reservoirs,
Soil moisture,
Groundwater levels (and fluctuation), and
Surface water flows in rivers.

Water use/demand

Domestic water use: Human Population x estimated per capita consumption (or prescribed norm for domestic water consumption),
Livestock water use: Livestock population x estimated per capita requirement,
Agriculture and Forests: Evapotranspiration data (derived from temperatures (daily/monthly), wind speeds, humidity (daily/monthly), soil moisture & type, type of Agricultural land use, stage of plant growth, and
Industry: Nature of industry and annual production x water required per unit of production.

Overcoming the data challenge

Unknown to many, reasonably high resolution data does exist of these variables both across space and time, as described in detail below. Much of this data though hasn't been made inter-operable. We need tools to model water data, putting together real-time data for water availability and demand onto one platform that can facilitate discussions around it. However what we have are either proprietary river basin modeling software (expensive) OR free open source tools (programming/skill intensive).

They demand:

knowledge of programming or know-how of technical tools and unavoidably
knowledge of the various data sources (to piece together the puzzle)

What if instead, we had access to a tool, open, free, accessible to everyone through a browser (hence no need to download software) and most importantly intuitive to use and understand to someone with little technical or programming knowledge.

What we propose and who is it for?

To understand and take the first steps towards developing a completely free and open source data portal for water resources information in India.

Different groups would have different kinds of needs for water data. Researchers for instance tend to think of larger scales (river basins, sub-basins) whereas Gram Panchayat members may not think beyond the village or watershed scale. Hence this proposal aims at macro and micro scales, trying to determine needs at each level and enhancing our platform to meet these different needs.

The project will generate:

A web app prototype that will collate secondary data,
A paper that outlines sources of data, type of data, level to which available (GP, village, etc.) and nature of the source (Paid/ unpaid/ format available etc.), and
A model WSP format, along with indications for what data already exists in secondary sources.

The users of this work will be:

Researchers/Journalists in the water sector, and
Gram Panchayat Members (to effectively develop water security plans, monitor and govern their local water resources).

Project Team

The project team is supported by Nisha Thompson (Director, DataMeet) and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Craig Dsouza

Craig is an independent researcher in the development sector with a keen interest in water resources and agriculture. He has a Master’s degree in Energy and Environmental Policy (2013) and has worked as a researcher with the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Mgmt, undertaking river basin studies in central and eastern India. Craig believes that the democratization of data and tools to derive insights from it holds tremendous potential for addressing issues of inequity and environmental sustainability in India. He contributes to these efforts as co-ordinator of Datameet-Pune, a city chapter of datameet.org.

GitHub: https://github.com/craigdsouza
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dsouza_craig
Website: http://unravellingindia.in/

Namita Bhatawdekar

Namita is a web developer with 10 years of experience developing web applications and web-based data visualizations. She has worked on developing data Visuaizations for corporate businesses as well as in the research sector. She worked with Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Development (MIT's research lab in Singapore) as a Data Visualization expert where she visualized simulation outputs of autonomous vehicles to evaluate urban transport policies. Her work was showcased in many national and international conferences. She has a keen interest in solving social problems using data and is part of Datameet Pune, city chapter of datameet.org.

GitHub: https://github.com/bnamita
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/namitabhatawdekar/
Website: https://bnamita.github.io/Portfolio/

Riddhi Munde

Riddhi is a GIS and Remote Sensing professional with 2.5 yrs of experience. She has a Master's degree in Geoinformatics and Earth Observation from ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Her project experience includes implementing GIS and remote sensing solutions across a number of industries. She is interested in location and remote sensing analytics, ML, Image processing, web based visualizations and is proficient in ArcGIS, QGIS, PostGIS, Web mapping, algorithm development in Python and R and cloud computing. At Datameet she contributes with her know how of remote sensing to further improve data access in water and agriculture.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riddhimunde/

Jinda Sandbhor

Jinda Sandbhor is an action researcher associated with Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, Pune, where he works to document and analyze issues related to the water and energy sectors in India. He actively supports socio-political movements in Maharashtra, Odisha and North Karnataka. In the past he has conducted research studies on water conflicts around rivers and major dams, socio-economic impacts of droughts, impacts of coal based thermal power on water and the local environment. He has been associated with the Datameet-Pune chapter since its beginning in 2015 and here seeks to improve access to data on social and environmental subjects.

Website: http://jinda.manthan-india.org/author/jinda/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/steps-towards-integrated-open-water-data

Web Cultures

sumandro — 2016-05-05T09:56:57Z

This cluster focuses on questions arising from the social, political, and material dimensions of the web-based interactions, communities, and cultures. Our interests range across the topics of digital activism and practices and discourses of social change, forms and norms of online communities, experiences of body and intimacy, structures of violence and affect, and device cultures and materiality of interfaces.

Projects

Publications

Digital Activism in Asia Reader edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay
Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator by Nishant Shah
Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report by Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham
Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers edited by Nishant Shah, Josine Stremmelaar, and Fieke Jansen
Digital Natives without a Cause?, a book series edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen

Centre for Internet and Society

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #STSDebates (Science, Technology, and State Debates)

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #FutureBazaars

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #EducationAndInternet (Culture and Politics of Digital Online Space as Teaching Pedagogy)

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WebOfGenealogies

Sessions

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins

Session

Plan

Readings

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptiveTransport (Aggregators, Ownership, Tracking, Space, Internet Models)

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #LiterarySpaces (Online Literary Spaces in India)

Session

Plan

Readings

Notes

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

Podcast

Fields of View

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #MinimalComputing

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WikiShadows (Techno-Political Contours of Knowledge Production on Wikipedia)

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ManyPublicsOfInternet

Session

Plan

Readings

Open Water Data

Steps towards Integrated Open Water Data

Project website: https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/

Contact: pune@datameet.org

The problem statement

Towards an (integrated and open) data solution

What we propose and who is it for?

Project Team

Craig Dsouza

Namita Bhatawdekar

Riddhi Munde

Jinda Sandbhor

Web Cultures

Projects

Publications

Recent Posts